My long winter’s nap was blessedly interrupted by the new release from The Fury, Live in Brooklyn. This quartet, comprising heavyweights Mark Turner (tenor sax), Lage Lund (guitar), Matt Brewer (bass), and Tyshawn Sorey (drums), offers up next-level jazz that produces continual astonishment.

The Fury
Live in Brooklyn (Giant Step Arts)
A review
Challenging compositions, stellar musicianship, elastic improvisations, and most of all, extraordinary interplay grace every track of Live in Brooklyn from the supergroup quartet The Fury—Mark Turner (tenor sax), Lage Lund (guitar), Matt Brewer (bass), and Tyshawn Sorey (drums), each of whom left his ego at the door of the borough’s prized listening room Ornithology. The four have all played with one another in a variety of groups, but this is the first time all four are together. You wouldn’t know it from the way they read one another’s minds. Six original compositions—three from Lund, two from Turner, one from Brewer—are joined by Myron Walden’s opener “Like a Flower Seeking the Sun,” which finds Brewer and Sorey burbling away as a single unit. They remain interlocked in complementary propulsion through the entire album.

The adventurous improvisations float all over the musical landscape but remain faithful to the geography, with the ever-changing and -expanding vista revealing formations as welcome as they are unexpected. Like the unpredictably bouncing, spinning ball that rides atop a jetted column of air, the quartet maintains a dynamic balance, turning this way and that but always centered in the song. In the words of the late trumpeter Ron Miles, they know how to keep the song going.

Highlights abound. Check out Turner’s flight on the opener, with Lund splashing color around Turner’s long, unspooling lines, and Brewer/Sorey motoring urgently toward the sun. Brewer contributes quite a bass line on his “Of Our Time, and his long solo intro on Turner’s beautiful “Sonnet for Stevie,” authoritatively shapes the space for the bluesy composition, which includes an artful interplay between Lund and Turner. Lund demostrates his melodic gift on his midtempo anthem “Couch” and his pastoral “Vignette,” and the conversation between Turner and Brewer on Lund’s jumpy “Jimbo” speaks to their musical camaraderie. Turner turns up the heat on his “Ender’s Game,” which demands an almost acrobatic performance from one and all.

As magnificently creative and accomplished as these gentlemen clearly are, there is something completely unpretentious about this music. It is a group effort, free of showboating and alive with shared intensity.

Check out the limited-edition T-shirts and
fridge magnets at the Musically Speaking store.
Your support is much appreciated.

© 2025 Mel Minter