In-demand and promising jazz drummer Brandon Sanders has announced the release of his sophomore album The Tables Will Turn on Savant Records on October 4, 2024.
Featuring vibraphonist Warren Wolf, pianist Keith Brown, bassist David Wong, and reedist Chris Lewis the album features iconic classics from Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk alongside compositions by McCoy Tyner and Tony Williams.
“I’m an against-all-odds type of person,” Brandon Sanders says, conversing from his Brooklyn home. The 53-year-old drummer took a roundabout route to The Tables Will Turn — the follow-up to his debut, Compton’s Finest.
Sanders left his California home to attend the University of Kansas in the mid-’90s and studied communications, while also walking onto the school’s Division I basketball team. He would later go on to earn an advanced degree in social work, before heading to the Berklee College of Music — and forming a decades-long musical bond with vibraphonist Warren Wolf — when he was 25 years old.
“I’ve always liked the way that Brandon plays,” Wolf said recently. “A lot of drummers nowadays — and definitely back then — were always trying to show one another up. But Brandon, what he did on the drums, he stayed in the pocket. It’s just very comfortable playing with him.”
Sanders shares candidly the potentially treacherous road he’s traversed. A part of that journey is related to his composition “Central and El Segundo,” a tune written about a time and place in the drummer’s past growing up in Compton, California that still affects how he interacts with the world.
“The whole thing with this record is, no matter how rough life gets or no matter where you’re from if you stick with what you believe and stick with your mission, the tables will turn,” Sanders said. “So, you have a guy getting chased at the intersection of Central and El Segundo in Compton, and he stuck with it. To be honest, at 19 years old, I told someone I wanted to play the drums, and he said, ‘Man, if you hadn’t started at 3 years old, forget it.’”
While working to finish the album, the drummer and Wolf individually took a shot at devising the tracklist — and concocted strikingly similar visions, saving the title track, “The Tables Will Turn,” for the record’s conclusion.
Sanders also imbibes that idea, too: succeeding at multiple levels of the higher-education system and then using his wealth of knowledge to help a new generation of students as a counselor at the Master’s School in Dobbs Ferry, New York.
Bandleader Willie Jones III, who first met the drummer about a decade back, has produced both of Sanders’ recordings for Savant Records and watched the Compton native’s compositional acumen grow.
Sanders, who’s already begun working out ideas for his third leader date, said he never saw jazz as a way to make money or earn notoriety. It’s a platform to tell his own story.