jaimie branch

(June 17 1983 – August 22 2022)

First and foremost, jaimie “Breezy” branch (intentionally punctuated as all-lower-case) was a trumpet player. Whether it was the blast of her horn’s long steady full-bodied tone, or the expressiveness she’d add with plunger mutes and harmonizing looped effects, branch played the trumpet like she was born to, reasserting her love for and fascination with the instrument each and every time she brought it to her lips. If you need one reason to know why jaimie branch was a special musical force, start there.

Yet that was, of course, not the only reason. branch was also an incredibly gifted improviser and bandleader, composer and singer-songwriter, musicker and DIY activist. And it was the thoughtfulness and hell-or-high-water energy that she applied in combining all these missions which defined jaimie branch as an artist, the endeavor she put into both her creative and community work, and the unbendable stand she made at the intersection of the two. Truly powerful shit, if you saw it in the right light.

branch has long been associated with Chicago, repping the Windy City’s influence on her to the fullest. She credited it with helping give birth to her sound (see: the blues, freedom, open-ness, Black music), and for some of her punk and experimental attitude (see: creative and fiscal independence, community-building, Black music). She recorded for International Anthem, unmistakably a Chicago community label. Yet both of the bands which fostered her reputation — the creative music quartet Fly or Die, and the electronic free-jazz duo Anteloper — were based in Brooklyn, where jaimie lived since 2015. Her collaborators were colleagues from her earliest days in Chi, but also musicians she studied with at the New England Conservatory, shared gigs with in Philly, Baltimore and D.C., and those she met when landing in New York, or visiting London. jaimie branch may have been a creature primarily of Chicago and Brooklyn, but you can find her people everywhere.

branch was, in fact, born on Long Island, only moving to the Chicago suburbs when she was nine. jaimie was something of a prodigy, playing, reading and writing music from an early age, and picking up the trumpet from her decade-older half-brother, who also studied the instrument professionally. She played her first improvised solo in front of her middle-school jazz-band at the age of 11, transcribed her first Miles Davis solo (“On Green Dolphin Street”) when she was 12, and at 14 was the youngest member of the ska-punk band in her high-school, where she also played in the classical and jazz orchestras. Some variation of this musical mix — tradition and modernity, the classics and new hardcore shit, devotion to instrumental craft but also experimentation with gear, electronics and noise — would remain a hallmark for her entire career.

At NEC, branch studied with great improvisers like Joe Morris and Steve Lacy, but also with Charles Schlueter, first trumpet of the Boston Symphony, and arranged a Mr. Bungle song for one of her senior recitals. One of her classmates there was Jason Nazary, later a drumming partner in Anteloper. Back home in Chicago she worked at the legendary Jazz Record Mart (also home to the equally legendary blues/jazz label Delmark), began presenting punk shows and free-jazz nights; and most importantly spent a lot of time soaking in the energy of Fred Anderson’s Velvet Lounge, where multiple generations of players were reaffirming the city’s creative music pathways, and developing new breeds. (It was at the Velvet Lounge where branch first began playing with bassist Jason Ajemian, drummer Chad Taylor and cellist Tomeka Reid, all of whom would feature on the recording, Fly or Die.) Later, during an assistantship at University of Towson, she helped run the school’s studio, improving her recording acumen, while gigging in Charm City and in Washington D.C., which is where she first crossed paths with bassist Luke Stewart, one of her dearest Brooklyn comrades.

Landing in Brooklyn in 2015, branch hit the ground running. She installed herself as the sound-person and then booker at Greenpoint’s Manhattan Inn, where she initiated a creative-music series that first premiered Fly or Die, and developed a new performing space for a small group of young Brooklyn-based improvisors, many of whom remain driving engines in the scene. (It was where she first met Lester St. Louis, who replaced Reid as the Fly or Die cellist.) branch lodged herself into the great creative neighborhood of Red Hook, booking shows and playing at the bar Bait & Tackle and at the 360 Record Shop, becoming central to the music residency program at the art-space Pioneer Works, and helping produce the community-music series Brackish. Breezy was one of Red Hook’s mayors, her cocktail of chops, chutzpah and dynamism rubbing off on everyone she ran across.

Though she’d been recording since 2007, and playing alongside great musicians even longer, it was in Brooklyn where her musical career began to coalesce. 2017’s Fly or Die and 2019’s FLY or DIE II: bird dogs of paradise were critical successes in both U.S. and Europe, free-jazz suites full of noisy blues blasts, tinges of her Colombian roots, and comedic turns both musical and lyrical, performed with punk gusto. You can hear it coalesce on her 2021 double LP, FLY or DIE LIVE, recorded in Zurich just before the pandemic in January of 2020. Her albums with drummer/synth player Nazary as Anteloper — 2018’s Kudu and 2022’s Pink Dolphins, plus 2020’s Tour Beats Vol.1 EP — demonstrated a big love of electronic rhythm and soundsystem culture, records for the jazz-meets-techno club of her dreams. She was letting her singular style shine too, exchanging her on-stage signature Adidas track suits for kimonos. In 2020, even the traditionalists at DownBeat began to acknowledge her influence by naming branch “Rising Star Trumpet Player” as part of its year-end poll.

And jaimie’s musical appetite only kept growing. She played and recorded in every context she could find — with jazz elders William Parker and David Murray, noise merchants Wolf Eyes, samba royalty Elza Soares, Rob Mazurek’s electronic big-band Exploding Star Orchestra, rapper Myka 9, the English poet/saxophonist Alabaster dePlume, the First Nations rock collective Medicine Singers, British dub producer The Bug, her fellow Brooklyn rhythm-section monsters Stewart and Tcheser Holmes (as C’est Trois), not to mention all the other folks in both the Kings and Cook County area codes who thought of her as family. And on and on… She was taking singing lessons with the mighty Fay Victor, saying that the next thing she wanted to develop was a stronger singing style; and branch even made a post-mortem appearance on Talib Kweli & Madlib’s album Liberation 2 released in Spring 2023, playing trumpet in a stunning duet with Madlib on keys.

In April of 2022, jaimie branch and her Fly or Die bandmates reconvened at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art in Omaha, where she had received an arts residency. An accomplished painter, jaimie had been making the artwork for all of her records — and at BEMIS she and the group built a stage installation while recording their third album together. When jaimie came back to Brooklyn, she was beyond excited with how it turned out — and even more so when she returned in July from Chicago, where the mix was being completed.