"MSM Molecular Systematic Music Live (...) gives us a glimpse of Lewis and company at their absolute peak. Obviously, the exhilaration of finally playing together after a 16-month hiatus plays a part, but the album's greatest strength is the way it crystalizes Lewis' vision of his "molecular systematic music.""

"Lewis says that his Molecular Systemic Music approach to jazz is a "braiding together the fundamentals of music with molecular biology. It is a system built on five pillars of understanding and continued scholarship in Metaphor, Intuition, Semiology, Music and Molecular Biology." As with trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith and saxophonist Ornette Coleman, things get deep with the thinking behind the act of the creation. But what is not deep is the fact that James Brandon Lewis is pushing the art forward with his Molecular Systemic Music Live, in his leading of one of the premier saxophone- and-a-rhythm-section quartets"