Brandon Woody, on the cusp of jazz stardom. (Yes, it's a thing.)

Several tunes into their powerfully transporting show at Solar Myth on Thursday night, Brandon Woody’s Upendo offered up “Never Gonna Run Away” — a trance in song form, unless it was the other way around.

Built around a short, stirring chord sequence with gospel underpinnings, the tune rolled in an unhurried triplet feel with shifty demarcations; my hasty attempt to reckon with its form subdivided a 32-beat cycle into units of six, eight, ten, and eight again. But math was the furthest thing from anybody’s mind as the musicians dug into this theme, turning each chordal repetition into a whirling eddy while Woody’s trumpet slashed forward. It was a persuasive portrait of collective abandon, teetering on the razor’s edge of sublime surrender and supreme control.


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