Depending on how he looks at it, Kenny Garrett’s latest album, Sounds from the Ancestors, has been out for an eternity or an instant. Recorded in November 2019, before the pandemic, the alto saxophonist’s 17th album as a leader was finally issued last summer during a brief window between COVID variants, allowing Garrett to tour with his band and the new music for a few weeks before Omicron forced live music off the rails again.
“When the album was released, I felt like, ‘This thing has been around a long time,’” he says on a sunny late-winter afternoon, sitting outside a coffee shop near his home in a northern New Jersey suburb. “Even now, things are moving but they’re not moving—not full force like it once was.”
Actually, Garrett is fresh off a plane from Los Angeles. where he was a special guest the night before at a concert celebrating Wayne Shorter. “We have plans to keep moving,” he insists. “But I want to keep focused on Sounds from the Ancestors because I feel it’s a snippet of what the music can do. Once we open it up in performance, it can be more than that.”
Combining a core band—pianist Vernell Brown, Jr., bassist Corcoran Holt, drummer Ronald Bruner, and percussionist Rudy Bird—with a cast of guests including trumpeter Maurice Brown and legendary fusion drummer Lenny White, is a wide-ranging, richly textured account of Garrett’s life in roots and lessons, from his earliest memories of music in Detroit, his hometown, to key friendships and schooling with the late trumpeter Roy Hargrove (“Hargrove”) and drumming magus Art Blakey (“For Art’s Sake”). “It’s Time to Come Home” opens the record with an Afro-Cuban flourish steeped in Garrett’s stage encounters with the Cuban pianist Chucho Valdés. “When the Days Were Different” evokes the sensual crossroads of church and street corner
