Virginia - Old Dominion itself, one of the original 13 - is about as teeming with historical and cultural significance as a state can possibly be. “But it also literally has a visceral connection,” says trumpeter and saxophonist Marcus Tenney - one fifth of the Richmond-based, boundary-erasing quintet Butcher Brown. His mind wanders to Saturday afternoons in fall - cruising west on Highway 64, down the 81, soaking up the increasingly dazzling hues. “Especially when you don’t want to play a wedding gig, you start trying to find things that are cool about it,” he says wryly. “And then, over the course of however many years, it becomes a personal thing to drive those roads.” Similarly, Butcher Brown’s bassist, Andrew Randazzo, attributes their kinetic, atmospheric essence to “the sights, the sounds, the landscape, the foliage.” “It’s almost subconscious,” he reflects. “All that stuff is going to seep into what comes out in the music.” Of course, when considering the commingling of Black musical traditions, Butcher Brown - whose sound encompasses jazz, hip-hop, soul, funk, R&B, and that’s just the beginning - is one dot on a sprawling landscape. But across more than 15 years and something like a dozen albums, Tenney, Randazzo, guitarist Morgan Burrs, percussionist Corey Fonville, and keyboardist DJ Harrison have managed a lane all their own. Butcher Brown describe their new album, Letters from the Atlantic - out March 28 via Concord Jazz - as a travelogue up and down the East Coast: from the Chesapeake Bay to New York, down to Florida, and over to Europe. From the seventh-heaven opener “Seagulls” to a celestial cover of the late Wayne Shorter’s “Infant Eyes,” it could be their purest distillation of that crisp Virginia air. Their omnivorous muse, too.