The saxophonist Joshua Redman has been one of the most visible jazz musicians of the last fifteen years, and that says something not just about his natural flow as an improviser and his command as a bandleader but about his willingness to use words. Being given the chance to represent jazz to the outside world involves a certain amount of rhetoric, and Redman has been rhetorical, in a friendly, nearly guileless way.
At least since 1996, when he released Freedom in the Groove, Redman has been working on a theory of how jazz can share a space with pop. It has to do with sincerity as much as form: acknowledging what musicians truly listen to as they grow up and develop, as much as figuring out a way to make jazz phrasing fit over backbeats. Ultimately, he is playing what he likes and trying to make jazz records that in a gingerly way reflect advances in pop.
“Art, in the world of honest emotional experience, is never about absolutes, or favorites, or hierarchies, or number ones,” he wrote in the liner notes to Freedom in the Groove. “These days, I listen to, love, and am inspired by all forms of music . . . I feel in much of nineties hip-hop a bounce, a vitality, and a rhythmic infectiousness which I have always felt in the bebop of the forties and fifties. I hear in some of today’s alternative music a rawness, an edge, and a haunting insistence which echoes the intense modalism and stinging iconoclasm of the sixties avant-garde.”
He has played what he wrote, veering back and forth between mainstream jazz and different versions of funk and pop; for a while he kept a trio rightly called the Elastic Band. Yet he also avoided combative language in that defining statement and in his playing too. He is a well-articulated moderate. Nothing he has said or played has come back to haunt him as either too radical or too traditional.
Lean, shaven-headed, and energetic, Redman speaks with fidgety, amiable confidence, saying “yes” regularly as you make your points, even if he goes on to disagree. He is direct. He wants to engage you, and his music has a kind of uprightness about it, a responsibility, even as it is geared toward pleasure and inclusion.
His father was the great saxophonist Dewey Redman, a poetic improviser, a genius of blues tonality and free improvisation, and an important collaborator with Ornette Coleman and Keith Jarrett. (Dewey Redman died in 2006, just after the birth of Joshua’s son, Jadon.) He was raised in Berkeley, California, by his mother, Renee Shedroff, a retired dancer and librarian. In the early years of the new century, he left New York, returning to Berkeley and then Oakland.
I talked with him in 2004, when he was still working as the artistic director of SF Jazz, which organizes a year-round schedule of concerts as well as a jazz festival, and which started its own in-house band, the SF Jazz Collective, with Redman as figurehead. (It was a facile comparison, but one almost had to make it: as the public face of a major jazz institution, Redman was briefly the West Coast version of Wynton Marsalis.) He left the organization and the band in 2006 to make time for his family, but his sense of pluralism had already helped define SF Jazz’s program, centering on jazz as it has sounded since the 1950s, and reaching into every other kind of music with which it shares affinities.
Preparing for our conversation, Redman came up with two different lists—a long one and a short one—and nearly thirty records, including Meshell Ndegeocello, Tortoise, Led Zeppelin, D’Angelo, Keith Jarrett, Dexter Gordon, and Björk. It was pretty easy to condense them. For Redman, all other interests recede when you bring up Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane.
One other choice muscled in, a still-current band that many younger musicians see as a creative ideal in jazz: the Paul Motian–Joe Lovano–Bill Frisell trio. We met on a Saturday afternoon in the New York City office of Bob Hurwitz, the head of Redman’s record label, Nonesuch. I brought everything with me, but it wasn’t necessary; Redman had all the tracks on his traveling laptop and had burned copies of everything.
Rollins is the living exemplar of narrative structure in jazz improvisation, and that is principally what Redman has absorbed from him: the logical, symmetrical, advancing-and-recapitulating, storytelling impulse. We listened to “St. Thomas,” the calypso track from Rollins’s 1956 album Saxophone Colossus.
“It’s funny,” Redman said as the track started. “I actually haven’t listened to this album for many years. But I went through a period where this was literally the only thing I listened to. I discovered it shortly after I started playing the saxophone, when I was ten. I’d certainly listened to a lot of jazz records—a lot of Coltrane, some Miles, Cannonball Adderley, Ornette Coleman, Keith Jarrett, you know, the musicians who my father was associated with.
“My mom couldn’t afford to buy me that many records,” he continued, “so I went to the public library in Berkeley, checked this out, came home, put it on, and here was the first track. And it was, for me, as monumental an experience as I’ve had listening to music. It unlocked a door to the potential of what improvisation really could be.”
I asked if it was as if he hadn’t realized before that one could do that sort of thing out loud.
“Exactly,” Redman answered, sharply. “Exactly. I certainly was very familiar and comfortable with the idea of improvisation—I mean, the way I started playing music was by improvising. I never really had any formal musical lessons. But what Sonny showed me was that you could be completely spontaneous and at the same time have this unerring sense of logic and structure.” He paused briefly. “He shows you how effortlessly the two can be fused. You don’t ever get the sense that he’s sitting back, outside of himself, thinking about the architecture from a kind of third-party view. You don’t ever get the sense that he’s playing licks, even when he plays something that you know he’s played before. It never sounds like, two-five, lick, insert.” (Here Redman was talking about the ii-V changes, the most basic harmonic progression in jazz.)
After the opening theme statement, Rollins plays a two-note pattern, messes around with it, and comes back to it again. “As symmetrical as it is,” said Redman, struck by it anew, “it still has the element of surprise. It’s not bland; it’s not derivative. And he’s going to do it again here.” The same two notes, the fifth and first degrees of the scale, return to close the next chorus. “It’s like you couldn’t have written it better, but you couldn’t have written it. You know?”
This has been the overriding view of Rollins since Gunther Schuller wrote “Sonny Rollins and the Challenge of Thematic Improvisation,” a persuasive essay published in the Jazz Review in November 1958. But Redman’s deeper point is that Rollins heightens your awareness to what really is possible. “He makes it sound easy. And yes, he makes you think you can do it, and he makes you really want to do it.” He stopped cold to hear Rollins play a singsong five-note line and then repeat it eight more times, just before Tommy Flanagan’s piano solo.
“There’s a quality about Sonny Rollins’s playing that makes improvisation acceptable. No, it isn’t easy,” he said, smiling. “You do have to immerse yourself in the language. And the more you try to do it like him, the more you realize how freakin’ hard it is.”
We listened to it again, picking out a few strange points. One occurs in Rollins’s second solo, after Max Roach’s drum break, when Rollins plays three braying, stubborn, bending notes that unravel the eighth-note swing he’s established. I suggested that he’s doing a few different things here: asserting control and elbowing the listener, as if to ask, “Are you still with me?”
“It’s definitely assertive,” Redman agreed. “I don’t know how much I feel it’s like asking the listener that. It’s very different from the way Illinois Jacquet would use repetition in his ‘Jazz at the Philharmonic’ solos—you know, riff-based repetition to get the band going and get the crowd going. That’s very powerful and exciting, but it’s a kind of specific device. To me, Sonny’s use of repetition is not like that. It’s always in service of a flow. It’s as if he were speaking to you and he made a point, and he makes that point again, and again. It’s just like, ‘This is my point, and now I’m moving on.’ ”
Another point arrived at the start of the bridge of the following chorus: “Ohhh . . . ,” Rollins interjects, before generating the next new phrase. “He’s going for something,” Redman said. “He’s got this idea, and maybe it didn’t come out, or the idea is just a second before the execution, so he’s like ‘ohhh!’ Then he plays. It reinforces the fact that this is so off-the-cuff. He’s out there in the wilderness, like we all are when we’re trying to improvise.”
Redman is an on-the-one-hand, on-the-other kind of talker and by extension tacks naturally toward self-effacing comments, often to the effect that he hasn’t heard enough, or that he can never reach the level of understanding or sheer musicianship of someone else. “Listening to an improvisation like this,” he continued, “I’m struck by the mastery and the seriousness of it, as this perfectly constructed, spontaneous narrative. And at the same time, there’s this quality in Sonny: he cautions you against taking anything too seriously.”
Redman knew he wanted to talk about Coltrane, but thought it might be too obvious, and then fretted about what to choose. Since he felt the album suite A Love Supreme was too sacred to pick apart, he chose Transition, from 1965, one of the last recordings of the intact Coltrane quartet, with the pianist McCoy Tyner, the bassist Jimmy Garrison, and the drummer Elvin Jones. “It’s pretty long, so let’s just play it and start talking. It’s going to be a little sacrilegious for me,” he confessed, “but hey.”
Transition isn’t an album often cited as anyone’s favorite. In the time line of Coltrane’s career, it sits just inside the period when he started to make individual pieces that sounded rather alike, often built on a single mode. What does Redman hear in it? “The sheer force of it,” he replied, quickly. “As far as a single piece of Coltrane with the classic quartet, it has perhaps the greatest force, impact, feeling of surrender, you know, abandon, devotion. I had been listening to Coltrane since the day I was born, probably, but someone turned me on to this record in college.”
After Berkeley High School, Redman went to Harvard in 1987, eventually completing a premed degree while edging closer to jazz and playing with musicians from Boston’s Berklee College of Music in the summertime. “Someone from Berklee hipped me to this,” he recalled. “I think it might have been Mark Turner, I don’t quite remember, but someone said, ‘Man, if you think the other stuff is potent, check this out.’ I remember thinking, ‘How could it get more intense?’ ” As he was talking, Coltrane had moved up to the next level in his soloing, chipping up his fast and assured middle-register runs with high shrieks on the tenor saxophone.
“With this track, from the beginning, there’s no intro, there’s no lead-in,” he said. “It’s just, like, bam: here we are at the apex. You can’t go any higher. Yet they keep climbing and climbing, and then they come down a little bit, and then they climb again.”
He also observed—and liked—that Coltrane, here, was trying to place all his studies in harmony within a freer and more furious style. “If you pay attention to the notes that Trane is playing,” Redman said, “you hear the harmonic sophistication of what he’s playing, all these complex devices and maps that he’s created for himself. You can hear him playing ‘Giant Steps’ stuff in there,” chordal and melodic movement in thirds, which Coltrane had built into that composition six years earlier.
We started the piece over again from the beginning: Jones hits the downbeat, and Coltrane lines out a scale. “You know, that was the melody, basically. It’s so simple. And just the quality of Trane’s sound,” he remarked. “It sounds like he’s screaming and praying at the same time. He’s playing so much horn, so much technically, so much harmonically; the constituent elements of what he’s playing are so complex. Yet it’s like he’s trying to blow the horn apart and just play his emotions through the instrument.”
Redman said he was moved by it spiritually, but then allowed that he wasn’t a religious person and hadn’t been raised religiously.
What do you mean by spiritual ? I thought.
At this point, Coltrane returned in the track, going up so high, with so much force, that Redman laughed. He apologized for sounding new agey, then went ahead. “At certain times in my life this music has kind of swept me up and transported me to a place where I can sense that there is something greater than the material existence of things. And a fabric that binds the material world together and offers an escape from that world. This is definitely one of the last for this band where everything is still happening around a tonic center, a mode. It’s in D-something: D-Phrygian, D-Dorian. And they’re still operating in these even-numbered bar phrases. Not when Coltrane’s playing, but the way McCoy and Elvin interact, every sixteen bars, there’s that big crash on the cymbal and the bass drum, and McCoy playing the root and the fifth. That was a style that they introduced in ’62 or ’63, I guess, but here you hear it at its furthest development. You can hear the band pushing the limits of its style. You can hear Trane’s desire to escape. Part of Elvin is pushing in that direction too, but part of him wants to stay, wants to keep those cycles in place. McCoy probably even more so than Elvin. You can hear that McCoy is a little bit closer to the ground. And so you can hear a little tension in the group.”
It’s still mysterious, I said, how Coltrane started going all-out during this period, just as a matter of course. “Yeah,” he said, “I can’t imagine doing that. But the sense you get from Trane is total commitment. I think that exists for all of us jazz musicians, as this ideal. I mean, he’s like an ideal type, a Platonic ideal. He represents something I could never be and, I think, most jazz musicians could never be, but that I want to strive for as much as I can.”
We had a brief Aristotelian conversation about modes, and what feelings they effect in the listener, but Redman eventually shifted back down to his root position of awe. “It’s difficult and dangerous to try to talk about what Coltrane was trying to do, using these different musical elements. Was he consciously saying, ‘This drone allows me to create this?’ I don’t get that sense. I don’t get the sense that there was that element of being outside of the music, or removed from it. In fact, precisely the opposite: no one else was so inside his music. It’s completely first-person.”
It is now understood better than ever that great bands, more than great individuals, make jazz matter in the larger culture. “This group,” he said, “the Coltrane quartet, has had a profound influence in terms of making us aware of the importance of a group, and that the greatest groups are greater than the sum of their individual parts. This is not music of individuals. This is not the music of John Coltrane and his rhythm section. It’s the music of four men under the leadership of John Coltrane, but what’s being created here is a true group undertaking. And this is in contrast to the Sonny Rollins track, in which there’s that feeling of Sonny being out front, making his statement, and everyone else kind of supporting him. Here, everybody is wholly committed to the cause.
“It’s always been very important to me to have a regular working band,” he continued. “Right now, this is the first time that I haven’t really had one. The Elastic Band has been on hiatus. I’ve been doing some acoustic trio stuff, too. But not one of them is a full-time, year-round commitment. I think the most interesting jazz these days doesn’t take the form of a soloist backed by accompanists; it takes the form of a group interacting, improvising together.”
This is a central belief among many musicians of Redman’s generation in jazz. He was born in 1968, and his Rosetta stones are bands, not individuals: Coltrane’s “classic” quartet; Ornette Coleman’s late 1950s and early 1960s quartets; Miles Davis’s mid-1960s quintet; Bill Evans’s early 1960s trios; and Keith Jarrett’s mid-1970s American quartet, with Redman’s father, Dewey, on saxophone.
In the mid-1990s, Redman was among the last beneficiaries of major-label largesse in jazz; Warner Brothers helped lodge him into popular culture. He made an appearance on Arthur, the children’s television show, as a cartoon version of himself. He toured with the Rolling Stones, playing the solo in “Waiting on a Friend,” originated by Sonny Rollins. He appeared in fashion magazines. He appeared on talk shows. (A couple, anyway.)
But this is all history; he’s a working musician. More recently he has become part of a few other people’s bands, too: the guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel and the keyboardist Sam Yahel. That version of Rosenwinkel’s band existed only for several months in 2003; after touring Europe, it recorded Deep Song, one of the better places to hear a rawer, more adventurous side of Redman’s playing.
He first played with Rosenwinkel at Smalls, the club in New York City’s West Village that opened in 1994. Redman was already established by then, having played at the Village Vanguard with his father in 1990, signed to Warner in 1991, and recorded his first album in 1992. “I had subbed for Mark Turner a few times in Kurt’s band in the midnineties, at Smalls, and it was always really inspiring,” he said. “But I always felt kind of like a sad substitution for Mark Turner.” Though he was the one with the much greater fame, it wasn’t until he played again with Rosenwinkel in 2003 that he felt comfortable amid that group’s fluid collective improvising.
That isn’t surprising. Redman isn’t as much of a superstitious worrier as his hero Rollins, but he does share certain cautious traits, which tend to come out on his sometimes overdetermined records. It was clear, to anyone who saw him in his early performing years, that he could do remarkable things within a saxophone-bass-drums trio: he had the flow, the freshness, the stamina. But he didn’t display it, at least not on record, for fourteen years—not until 2007, on Back East, the best record he has ever made.
The record isn’t a Sonny Rollins homage per se, yet it explicitly, thunderingly references him—in the use of the saxophone trio, which Rollins first made famous; in its material (“Wagon Wheels,” “I’m an Old Cowhand,” both from Rollins’s Way Out West album); and in the title. But it doesn’t matter. Somehow copping to his Rollins obsession freed him. In his trio concerts with Reuben Rogers on bass and Eric Harland on drums that followed the album’s release, Redman tore through advanced sequences and patterns with personal authority; he was playing lots of notes but giving all of them meaningful relationships, too.
Talking about the importance of groups brought him to “It Should Have Happened a Long Time Ago,” by the Paul Motian–Joe Lovano–Bill Frisell trio, from the 1994 album Trioism. “That’s the highest level of free group improvisation that you can get,” he said, when he first brought up the idea of listening to the track.
“It’s kind of like magic,” Redman said, as the track started misting out of the speakers, with saxophone, guitar, and drums playing fragile counterlines against one another. “The sense of three musicians becoming one.” After the group reached the end of the melody, he continued. “I mean, now they’ve finished the song, I guess, but who’s soloing?” Lovano’s saxophone extrudes a short line. “Joe’s kind of soloing, but Bill’s in there. This is true group improvisation, and it’s not just melodic improvisation.
“Right there, they’re playing in a minor key, and Joe introduces the major third. All of a sudden it’s this new color, and Bill picks up on it. It’s not like one person is soloing and other people are accompanying. And secondly, it’s not like the improvisation is happening in only one realm. It’s group improvisation in the melodic realm, in the harmonic realm, in the rhythmic realm.”
We went back and listened again to the major third coming in. “It’s astounding,” he reacted, “the degree to which they’re listening and reacting to one another, the sense in which each voice will kind of come to the fore and then recede in a completely continuous way. It’s so fluid. It’s like water.”
Set List
Sonny Rollins, “St. Thomas,” from Saxophone Colossus (Prestige), recorded 1956.
John Coltrane, “Transition,” from Transition (Impulse!), recorded 1965.
Paul Motian Trio, “It Should Have Happened a Long Time Ago,” from Trioism (Winter & Winter), recorded 1994.