March 14, 2025
Brandon Woody has shared “Wisdom; Terrace on St. Paul St.,” the second single to be revealed from the trumpeter’s highly-anticipated Blue Note debut For The Love Of It All out May 9. A sweeping piece with a soaring, heartfelt solo by Woody, the track features his band Upendo with Troy Long (piano, keyboards), Quincy Phillips (drums), and Michael Saunders (bass), and follows last month’s release of the album’s lead single “Real Love, Pt. 1.”
“Wisdom; Terrace on St. Paul St.” evokes the sensation of tuning into a distant memory. During the intro, Woody and Long materialize in a muffled melody, as if transmitted through a clock radio lost in time. And at the thirty-sixth second, the static sharpens, and we are transported to 2020, standing on a St. Paul Street terrace, witnessing an earlier version of the quartet unravel the chords before us. This transition also acts as a prophetic meditation on the fruits of wisdom. The static-laden radio dissolving into crystalline compositions reflects the slow revelation of understanding — proof that what feels like defeat now is merely a prelude to alignment. Woody himself has lived this truth. He describes dropping out of school once feeling like “rock bottom,” but it became his ascension.
For The Love Of It All is more than the trumpeter and composer’s recording debut; it is a manifesto, a ritual, a hymn to the enduring power of love. The Baltimore-born and based artist extends an invitation into communion with a striking body of work that surges with love, not as a fleeting sentiment but as an elemental force channeled through sound. Each song emits a lineage of perseverance, an inheritance of resilience passed down through intuitive memory. This project sews a tapestry of music that holds space for the unseen — love in its purest form: communal, generational, and radical. It is a reckoning with history and a strong gesture toward the future, where the boundaries between emotion and sound dissolve, leaving only the raw, unmediated truth of connection.
With his debut on Blue Note Records, Woody positions himself as both an innovator and a griot, balancing technical mastery with a reverence for his roots. This album anchors itself in the past while reverberating forward, tethering listeners to something larger than themselves. In every track, love is palpable, not idealized, but complex, textured, and human. This is music that carries, uplifts, and insists that survival is its own form of artistry, powered by the knowledge that love, in all its dimensions, is what binds us across generations and geographies.
