Brandon Woody strides into the jazz world without leaving Baltimore

Washington Post

06-05-2025

BALTIMORE
Yes, Brandon Woody is interested in playing all the stuff of his 'wildest dreams' — so long as it begins and ends in Baltimore. The vivid cityscape on the cover of 'For the Love of it All,' the 26-year-old jazz trumpeter-composer's splashy debut for the legendary Blue Note record label, suggests as much. There are rowhouses in various states of habitability, unambiguously painted in the colors of Maryland's state flag. Out in the street, plant life bursts from fissures in the pavement. Woody sits behind a table draped with a checkered tablecloth, an orange-and-black nod to the Orioles.
'In my mind, this is what the album sounds like,' Woody says on a recent afternoon at Mama Koko's cafe inside the city's historic James E. Hooper House. 'It sounds like my city, it sounds like me growing up. … The beauty in the struggle. I think a lot of people are bent up on our struggles. People talk about 'The Wire' and Freddie Gray. People don't talk about perseverance.'
That can be a difficult quality to hear in any musician tasked with introducing themselves to the world, but perseverance might also be the very thing that makes Woody's clear, inviting tone feel so steady on the ear. Flanked by his long-running group Upendo — pianist Troy Long, drummer Quincy Phillips, bassist Michael Saunders — Woody plays with a bighearted lucidity forged in Baltimore's classrooms, recital halls, jam sessions and nightclubs. If conventional thinking still requires ambitious young jazz players to reside in New York, Woody rejects it. He's eager to take on the jazz world from the city he loves.
You can hear it throughout the album's sparkling opening cut, 'Never Gonna Run Away,' as guest vocalist Imani-Grace traces the contours of Woody's central melody line, cycling through the song's titular refrain until she's refined it into a mantra. Woody describes it as an echo inside his conscience. ''Never Gonna Run Away' is a reminder to myself: 'Brandon, do not leave your hometown. Stay here.' I got responsibilities here, man, for the rest of my life,' Woody says. 'I need to go on tour for twelve weeks? I'm straight back here. I'm not moving out of Baltimore.'
As a child, he moved all around Baltimore, with annual rent hikes forcing Woody, his mother and his older brother to migrate from building to building nearly every year. 'Sometimes, the neighbors in these apartment buildings didn't like me playing trumpet,' Woody says. He bangs his fist on a cafe table to evoke an angry knock at the door. ''I'm trying to sleep!' Or whatever. My mom didn't take any of that. She protected some of the most important hours of my practice.'
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She also made sure Woody had good teachers. At age 8, Woody began studying trumpet at Baltimore's Eubie Blake National Jazz Institute and Cultural Center. He eventually attended high school at Baltimore School for the Arts and studied at the Peabody Institute at Johns Hopkins University on weekends. After class, he'd hit jam sessions at bars (Sign of the Times) and pizza shops (HomeSlyce) to see how his classical training might shake out on the bandstand. 'The cool thing about classical music is like, 'These are the notes. Lock in.' But jazz is telling me, 'We might have to jump off a cliff together right now. Are you ready to jump with your friends? Are you ready?'' Woody says. 'I love that I came up through both.'
After high school, Woody studied for a year with trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire at the University of the Pacific's Brubeck Institute in Stockton, California, then transferred to the Manhattan School of Music in New York, then dropped out. 'When I came back to Baltimore, I thought I'd hit rock bottom. But I had people here. I had community,' Woody says. 'You know those park benches that say, 'Baltimore: The Greatest City in America'? I don't give a f--- if that's true to anyone else or not. Those benches tell us how great we are.'
Ask about his influences on 'For the Love of It All' and Woody is quick to point to those nearest to him — his instructor at Eubie Blake, saxophonist Craig Alston; trumpeter-saxophonist Clarence Ward III; bass clarinetist Todd Marcus; and especially the Baltimore trumpeter Theljon Allen. 'He's my favorite trumpet player in the world,' Woody says. 'When people ask me, 'Hey man, who's your favorite? You like Lee [Morgan]? You like Miles [Davis]?' Yeah, I love all them dudes. But my favorite trumpet player is from my damn city. Because of his perspective. Because he taught me I can be myself.'
Woody's bandmates in Upendo — including Long, a lithe pianist whom Woody has known and jammed with since middle school — share that same sense of place and purpose. 'There's just an undeniable rawness to Baltimore musicians,' Long says. 'As kids, we just tend to be wild and want to get into everything. … We grow over time, but the rawness stays.'
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When people talk about music, the word rawness often translates to ruggedness, roughness. Woody's music is markedly not that. Instead, Upendo's rawness is more like a shared exposure, a collective vulnerability — the kind that allows for close listening and seamless cooperation. 'When I'm soloing, we're moving as a band,' Woody says. 'I don't want to overshadow Troy's voice. I don't want to put anyone in the shadows. It's all together at the same time. That group sound is so, so important to me.'
He said 'moving.' What about the narrative motion of his compositions? Woody says they're inspired, in part, by his years taking the bus across Baltimore to get to school each morning. 'The morning starts so simple,' he says, his voice shifting from zealous to dreamy. 'Mom's already on her way to work. Walk to the bus stop with my big brother. We wait for the MTA. Sometimes it just goes by you. It's cold. Then, we get on the bus, and you don't know what you're going to see. Traveling from home to school might be the most dangerous part of your day. But you'll get there.'