# For Living Lovers, featuring Brandon Ross and Stomu Takeishi, mesmerizes the Yamaha salon: Video

- Link: https://jazzblues.eu/2019/06/11/for-living-lovers-featuring-brandon-ross-and-stomu-takeishi-mesmerizes-the-yamaha-salon-video/
- Published: 2019-06-11T13:15:52+01:00
- Author: https://JazzBlues.EU

**For Living Lovers — an improvising chamber duo composed of Brandon Ross on acoustic
guitar and Stomu Takeishi on acoustic bass guitar — makes quietude feel like anything
but a restriction. **

In a recent performance at the WBGO Yamaha Salon in midtown Manhattan, its music
felt expansive and spacious, setting the stage for an immersive sort of listening.

Ross and Takeishi first met in the mid-1990s, bound by a mutual association with
composer and multi-reedist Henry Threadgill. Introducing their set, I pointed out
that they both appear on a list of my Favorite Jazz Shows of 2018 — Takeishi as 
a member of Myra Melford’s Snowy Egret, and Ross as one-third of Harriet Tubman.

For Living Lovers is a different proposition entirely. The duo has released one 
studio album, Revealing Essence, in 2014, and its language keeps evolving. At the
Yamaha Salon, the set list included “Hammer,” one movement from _Immortal Obsolescence,_
a song cycle inspired by the work of Venezuelan photographer Carolina Muñoz Parra.
They also performed an Ornette Coleman composition, “Race Face,” entwined with a
Ross original called “Old People.”

![Brandon Ross, one half of For Living Lovers, at the WBGO Yamaha Salon on Feb. 
27, 2019.](https://i0.wp.com/www.wbgo.org/sites/wbgo/files/styles/medium/public/
201906/_DSC7293.jpg?w=640&ssl=1)

### _Related_