KEEPING OLD AND NEW DREAMS ALIVE MOROCCAN ADVENTURE
Saxophonist Joshua Redman connects his latest project with a past that includes his father’s band An avant-garde feast in Fez
On Still Dreaming, saxophonist Joshua Redman leads a spectacular band featuring cornetist Ron Miles, bassist Scott Colley and drummer Brian Blade through eight songs loaded with energetic improvisations and plenty of open-ended elasticity. Six of the songs are band-member originals, the other two are Charlie Haden’s Playing and Ornette Coleman’s beautiful Comme Il Faut.
These two tunes tie in the Still Dreaming project with Old and New Dreams, a quartet that featured Redman’s father, Dewey, bassist Charlie Haden, cornetist Don Cherry and drummer Ed Blackwell.
All four heavyweights played as members of Coleman’s free jazz groups. From 1976 to 1987, as Old and New Dreams, the musicians continued to revisit and expand on the music that came from that period. Redman recalls listening to a lot of this music growing up and admits that this style of jazz remains so alive.
“I didn’t grow up with my father, but I did grow up with his music, whether it was as a leader or in other artists’ bands, and I was fortunate enough to see Old and New Dreams,” said Redman. “But growing up with this sound and a lot of other jazz around me, I’m not sure I understood what made it so ‘out.’ Frankly, some of what my father played in Old and New Dreams and with Ornette (was) so incredibly compelling and beautiful.”
But the music being made had an absence of pre-determined harmonic or rhythmic form. Coleman was one of the first to develop these ideas, and it led to seminal recordings such as 1959’s The Shape of Jazz to Come and 1960’s Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation. These recordings led Miles Davis to declare that Coleman was “all screwed up inside.” But his music also had champions and Joshua Redman thinks the gorgeous melodies in songs such as Comme Il Faut can’t be disputed.
“Everything Ornette played, even at its most abstract, was always asserting the primacy of melody,” said Redman. “There was always this lyrical, melodic quality that he improvised off of to create new melodies, which in turn generated harmonic and rhythmic
implications for the band to improvise from.”
As Redman learned to play improvisations and got serious about jazz, the free style wasn’t emphasized as much as mastering the changes in a lyrical and technical context. He says that he never really found himself in that freer headspace until he began playing with the Bad Plus in 2011.
“They don’t sound like Ornette or Old and New Dreams, but that music was a touchstone for them and they play a lot of music that is heavily informed by that approach,” he said. “Playing with them and hitting a point in my own influence and legacy gave me an idea to put this band together and see what we could explore in terms of this kind of music.”
All the members of Still Dreaming are very capable improvisers, naturally, but it was the first time Redman had formed a band out of a pre-conceived concept.
“I knew each of them had connections with this music, but more so that they had this direct relationship to the members of Old and New Dreams,” he said.
“Ron has a lot of Don Cherry in his sound, in his willingness to bring in other non-traditional textures and techniques to the cornet. Scott was a protege of Charlie Haden, who was one of his first teachers. Brian and I have played a lot together.”
Still Dreaming songs such as Colley’s opener New Year make clear that Redman read the players’ sensitivity to each other right. The eight-measure phrases that Colley and Blade trade down lock in to a fierce fluid swing while Miles’ cornet floats between almost classic bebop lines to pairing with the saxophone for smooth conversation between the two. It’s obvious that this is music made for the live concert stage.
On the studio recording, the ideas are kept in check by the demands of the delivery medium. Redman said that they went into the studio during a break on tour, and were at a point where the live music was already becoming really long, wide-ranging and open and flowing into another into something new.
“I had no idea how that would work in the studio, but we decided to do a few versions of everything we played in the set and to try to keep them short,” said Redman.
With many songs clocking in at more than 14 minutes live, it wasn’t going to work out for a vinylpressed single album. So the band went in, kept it tight and focused, and wound up with 25 tunes to sift through. Redman says a lot of great moments didn’t make the final cut.
He recommends going to see Still Dreaming live to get a taste of the rest.