[Dixielandjazz] JOSHUA REDMAN, Jazz Messiahs, etc.

[Charles Suhor]

Thanks, Steve. This is well worth reading, especially the discussion of 
Rollins, Coltrane, and Lovano that begins about 9 paragraphs down ("Mr. 
Rollins is the living exemplar..."). I wonder how listmates who don't 
connect with modern jazz react to this. The passion and intelligence of 
both the conversation and the music they're talking about are as 
compelling as the talk and writing about early jazz that's began around 
the 30s and continues today.

On a different tangent--an interesting inference that can be drawn from 
the talk, widely accepted I think by jazz historians, is that the habit 
of looking for a new "giant" who'll move jazz in transforming ways (as 
in Louis, Bix, Eldridge, Diz, Miles....) is now gone. What's happened 
since Coltrane and Ornette is interesting syntheses of what came 
before, soemtimes fusion with non-jazz styles, represented by fine 
artists like Lovano, Redman, Wynton Marsaslis, etc. Some lament the 
lack of yet another jazz-redefining genius, but where we are seems to 
be the natural evolutionary spot, nothing wrong with it, because what's 
happening is still exciting music.

In fact, the anticipation of a new jazz Messiah cultivated a snobbish 
hipness-for-its-own sake that kept young musicians and others from 
enjoying the richness of older jazz styles. Too bad, they didn't (and 
don't) know what they're missing. Possibly, the lack of a new Messiah 
has caused players like Wynton, Nicholas Payton, and others to look 
back, digest, and make use of earlier jazz as influences in their 
playing.

Charlie Suhor



On May 27, 2005, at 8:29 AM, Steve barbone wrote:

> CAVEAT: - NOT OKOM - LONG - ONE EYED FOLKS (Bill Haesler) :-) VBG, 
> MIGHT
> WISH TO DELETE NOW.
>
> However, for anyone who is interested or curious about how the mind of 
> a
> talented "Modern Jazz" musician works, this article is wonderful. 
> Joshua
> Redman is one of the top Jazz Saxophonists in the world today as well 
> as a
> very nice, intelligent, gentle man.
>
> Cheers,
> Steve Barbone
>
> Playing the Diplomatic Changes
>
> By BEN RATLIFF NY TIMES May 27, 2005
>
> THE saxophonist Joshua Redman is one of the most visible jazz 
> musicians of
> the last 15 years, which says something not just about his natural 
> flow as
> an improviser and his command as a bandleader, but also about his
> willingness to use words. The chance to represent jazz to the outside 
> world
> involves a certain amount of rhetoric, and Mr. Redman has risen to that
> challenge in a friendly, nearly guileless way.
>
> Since at least 1996, when he released "Freedom in the Groove," Mr. 
> Redman,
> now 36, has been advancing a theory of why jazz can and should 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 90's hip-hop a bounce, a
> vitality, and a rhythmic infectiousness which I have always felt in the
> bebop of the 40's and 50's. 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 60's avant-garde."
>
> What he plays reflects the noncombative nature of those liner notes, 
> and
> nothing he has said or played has come back to haunt him - even as 
> jazz has
> increasingly come to be seen by some as endangered by pop rather than
> enriched by it. He currently plays with his trio, the Elastic Band, 
> veering
> back and forth between mainstream jazz and different versions of funk 
> and
> pop.
>
> Like a lot of jazz musicians, Mr. Redman talks about paring down, 
> working
> toward an ideal of simplicity. At the same time, his interest in pop 
> music
> with strong beats and a more digitally processed sound - records like
> Meshell Ndegeocello's "Peace Beyond Passion" or Tortoise's "Standards" 
> - has
> led him toward the atmospheric funk of "Momentum," his 10th album, 
> which
> Nonesuch released this week.
>
> Basically, his music is geared toward pleasure. Some feel that this is 
> a
> fault, that his inclusive conception of jazz doesn't stake enough of a
> claim, is not finally exclusive enough. If so, perhaps that's the San
> Francisco in him.
>
> His father is the jazz saxophonist Dewey Redman. He was raised in 
> Berkeley
> by his mother, Renee Shedroff, a retired dancer and librarian, and he
> recently bought a house there after having returned to the Bay Area in 
> 2002,
> completing a full-scale return to his hometown that was in the works 
> for
> five years. Since 2000, he has balanced his own career with his
> responsibilities as artistic director of SFJazz, the San Francisco jazz
> organization, which increasingly looks like the West Coast equivalent 
> of
> Jazz at Lincoln Center.
>
> His sense of pluralism helps define the SFJazz program, which centers 
> on
> jazz as it has sounded since the 1950's and includes every kind of 
> music
> that shares affinities with it. Nonesuch also released this week the 
> first
> recording by the SFJazz Collective, eight musicians who make up the 
> resident
> orchestra of SFJazz.
>
> Recently, while in town with the SFJazz Collective, Mr. Redman agreed 
> to
> listen to a few pieces of music (not his own) that he had chosen; the 
> goal
> was a conversation about how the music works and the possible musical 
> ideals
> it suggests to him. In preparation, he came up with two different 
> lists and
> nearly 30 records, including Led Zeppelin, D'Angelo, Dexter Gordon, 
> Keith
> Jarrett and Bjork. But it was pretty easy to condense them. For Mr. 
> Redman,
> all other interests recede when you bring up Sonny Rollins and John
> Coltrane. One other choice got in, a current band that many younger
> musicians see as a creative ideal in jazz: the Paul Motian-Joe 
> Lovano-Bill
> Frisell trio.
>
> Mr. Rollins is the living exemplar of narrative structure in jazz
> improvisation, and that is principally what Mr. Redman has absorbed 
> from
> him: the logical, symmetrical, advancing and recapitulating 
> storytelling
> impulse. We listened to "St. Thomas," the calypso track from Mr. 
> Rollins's
> 1956 album "Saxophone Colossus."
>
> "It's funny," Mr. 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 10. 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." (Dewey Redman played with Mr. Coleman 
> from 1967
> to 1974, and with Mr. Jarrett from 1971 to 1976.)
>
> "My mom couldn't afford to buy me that many records," he added, "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."
>
> After the opening theme statement, Mr. Rollins plays around with a 
> two-note
> pattern, finally breaking into a flowing melody, and returns to the two
> notes again. "As symmetrical as it is," said Mr. 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?"
>
> Immersed in the Language
>
> This has been the overriding view of Sonny Rollins since Gunther 
> Schuller
> wrote "Sonny Rollins and the Challenge of Thematic Improvisation," a
> persuasive essay published in Jazz Review in November 1958. But Mr. 
> Redman's
> deeper point is not so much that Mr. Rollins does the impossible, but 
> that
> he heightens your awareness of what really is possible. "He makes it 
> sound
> easy, you know," he said. "And yes, he makes you think you can do it, 
> and he
> makes you really want to do it."
>
> (Here he stopped cold to hear Mr. Rollins play a sing-song five-note 
> line,
> and then repeat it eight more times, just before Tommy Flanagan's piano
> solo.)
>
> "There's a quality about Sonny Rollins' playing that makes 
> improvisation
> acceptable - no, it isn't easy," he continued, laughing. "You do have 
> to
> immerse yourself in the language."
>
> We listened to it again, picking out a few strange points. One occurs 
> when
> Mr. Rollins plays three braying, stubborn long-notes that break down 
> the
> eighth-note swing he's established. I suggested that he was 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," Mr. Redman agreed. "I don't know how much 
> I
> feel it's like asking the listener that. I mean, it's very different 
> from
> the way Illinois Jacquet would use repetition in his Jazz at the
> Philharmonic solos; like, 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 the service of a flow."
>
> Lean, shaven-headed and energetic, Mr. Redman speaks with fidgety, 
> expansive
> comfort, saying "yes" regularly as you make a point, even if he goes 
> on to
> disagree. He is also an on-the-one-hand, on-the-other kind of guy, 
> which
> perhaps explains his frequently self-effacing comments - that he hasn't
> heard enough or that he can never reach the level of someone-or-other.
>
> "Listening to an improvisation like this," he said, "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
> that he cautions you against taking anything too seriously."
>
> The Sacred and the Coltrane
>
> Mr. Redman knew he wanted to talk about Coltrane but thought it might 
> be too
> obvious, and then fretted about what to choose. He felt, he said, that 
> the
> suite "A Love Supreme" was too sacred to pick apart, so he chose
> "Transition," an album from 1965. It is 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," he said. 
> "It's
> going to be a little sacrilegious for me - but, hey."
>
> "Transition" isn't cited often as anyone's favorite album. In the 
> timeline
> of Coltrane's career, it sits just inside the period when he began 
> making
> individual pieces that sounded rather alike, sometimes built on a 
> single
> mode. What does Mr. Redman hear in it?
>
> "The sheer force of it," he said 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."
>
> Trane to the Next Level
>
> After Berkeley High School, Mr. Redman went to Harvard in 1987, 
> eventually
> completing a B.A. degree and graduating summa cum laude and Phi Beta 
> Kappa,
> while edging closer to jazz and playing with musicians from the Berklee
> College of Music in Boston in the summertime.
>
> "Someone from Berklee hipped me to this," he said. "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?"
>
> (Coltrane moves 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,"
> Mr. Redman 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."
>
> We started it over again from the beginning: Jones hits the downbeat 
> and
> Coltrane lines out a scale. "You know, that was the melody, 
> basically," Mr.
> Redman said. "It's so simple. And just the quality of Trane's sound - 
> it
> sounds like he's screaming and praying at the same time. I mean, 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."
>
> Mr. Redman said he was moved by it spiritually, but then added that he 
> was
> not a religious person. So what does he mean?
>
> Apologizing for sounding new agey, he said: "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," Mr. Redman continued. "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 16 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."
>
> A Regular Working Band
>
> 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."
>
> With Coltrane, and with himself, it's the group that makes the music 
> work,
> he explained. "It's always been very important to me to have a regular
> working band. Right now this is the first time that I haven't really 
> had
> one. I do the Collective, which is a couple months out of the year. The
> Elastic Band has been on hiatus, and we're going to start working 
> again.
> I've been doing some acoustic trio stuff, too. But not one of them is a
> full-time, year-round commitment."
>
> He was also part of the guitarist Kurt Rosenwinkel's group for several
> months last year; after touring Europe, it made the recently released 
> album
> "Deep Song" (Verve), one of the better places to hear Mr. Redman's 
> rawer,
> more adventurous style, which doesn't get as much of an airing on
> "Momentum."
>
> Mr. Redman first played with Mr. Rosenwinkel at Smalls, the West 
> Village
> club that opened in 1994. He was already established by then, having 
> played
> at the Village Vanguard with his father in 1990 and having recorded his
> first album for Warner Brothers in 1992.
>
> "I had subbed for Mark Turner a few times in Kurt's band in the 
> mid-90's, 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 Mr. 
> Rosenwinkel
> in 2003 that he felt comfortable amid that group's fluid, collective
> improvising.
>
> A Group's Fragile Counterlines
>
> Talking about that kind of sound brings him to "It Should've 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."
>
> "It's kind of like magic," Mr. 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."
>
> The group reaches the end of the melody. "I mean, now they've finished 
> the
> song, I guess, but who's soloing?"
>
> Here Mr. 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. I mean 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."
>
> We went back and listened to the major third coming in again. "It's
> astounding," he remarked, "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."
>
>
> The following CD's feature the music Joshua Redman discussed with Ben
> Ratliff. Prices range from $11.98 to $16.98 for a single CD.
>
> SONNY ROLLINS "St. Thomas," from "Saxophone Colossus" (Prestige).
>
> JOHN COLTRANE "Transition," from "Transition" (Impulse/Universal).
>
> PAUL MOTIAN TRIO "It Should've Happened a Long Time Ago," from 
> "Trioism"
> (Winter & Winter).
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Dixielandjazz mailing list
> Dixielandjazz at ml.islandnet.com
> http://ml.islandnet.com/mailman/listinfo/dixielandjazz
>