07-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Baltimore's Brandon Woody Channels His Hometown on ‘For the Love of It All'
'To get here, it hasn't been a yellow brick road. Even now, it's not no damn yellow brick road,' the trumpeter and composer Brandon Woody said on a video call from a Fort Myers, Fla., hotel room. It was mid-March and Woody, 26, was in between tour stops supporting Luther S. Allison. In the weeks leading up to the release of his first album as a bandleader, his eyes glimmered with vigor.
The road he spoke of was both metaphorical and literal. Woody has earned a fortunate position among 20-something peers like Allison and the Toronto electro-jazz group BadBadNotGood (with whom he toured this spring). To get there he traveled a serpentine, sometimes-rocky path through institutionalized jazz education that has, for others, been a prerequisite for obtaining a record deal with a grande dame of jazz labels. It took him from Boston to Stockton, Calif. to New York, in search of a breakthrough that he eventually got — in his hometown, Baltimore.
'I'm always going to be a little bit jagged around the edges,' he said of his music. 'You're going to hear my struggles, but you're also going to hear my celebrations and my successes. This is a homegrown thing, and it's going to stay that.'
