San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Joshua Redman to lead S.F. Conservatory of Music’s jazz program.
Before naming conductor Edwin Outwater as the school’s new music director, the San Francisco Conservatory of Music conducted a twoyear search encompassing candidates around the world. The quest for the new artistic director of the conservatory’s innovative Roots Jazz and American Music program, known as RJAM, was a much more abbreviated affair.
In explaining how the school selected Joshua Redman, conservatory President David Stull made it clear that the Berkeley tenor saxophone star was the first and only candidate. “I thought, ‘Why would we go someplace else?’ ” he said. “There was an obvious first conversation to find out whether he was interested, but we knew from the start he was the ideal person.”
The conservatory launched the RJAM program in 2017 under the direction of Australianborn pianist Simon Rowe and Houston saxophonist Jason Hainsworth, drawing on the SFJazz Collective for the bulk of the faculty. Beyond geographic desirability and wellearned star power as one of his generation’s great improvisers, Redman, 51, comes to the position with deep SFJazz ties, including a fourseason stint as the collective’s founding director from 2004 to 2007.
“He’s been doing some teaching at Stanford, and he’s a brilliant teacher,” Stull said. “And, of course, Josh is one of the great saxophonists. He’s bringing all these variables together. Simon Rowe
came in as the administrative head to get the program started. We were ready for the next phase where we’re really developing the artistic vision.”
It’s easy to see all the ways that Redman is a nobrainer for the position, but he’s also a leftfield choice who doesn’t come with the resume one might expect for an academic gig. Unlike the vast majority of his peers, he didn’t go to music school or conservatory.
While he played in the Berkeley High Jazz Band throughout high school and the Harvard Jazz Bands in college, Redman graduated with a degree in social studies and was heading to Yale Law School when he decided to take a gap year in New York City. He never showed up at Yale. Plunging into the New York scene, he got his musical education on the bandstand playing with peers and veteran masters like his father, saxophone great Dewey Redman, Charlie Haden and Elvin Jones. Documented on the 1994 album “Moodswing,” his first touring band helped boost three extraordinary young players who were on a more typical path, with Juilliard graduate Christian McBride on bass, New School alum Brad Mehldau on piano and drummer Brian Blade, who had spent several years studying music at Loyola University in New Orleans. Reunited for the first time in a quartercentury as the
Moodswing quartet, the group is featured on Redman’s upcoming Nonesuch album “RoundAgain.”
With a pedagogy that locates jazz within a larger matrix of American and Africandiaspora music, the RJAM program was ripe for an academic outsider.
“We needed someone not trapped in the dogma of the old school,” Stull said. “Josh values tradition and he’s informed and driven by that, but he’s not trapped in traditional structures.”
He joins a faculty brimming with jazz heavyweights, including Basie Orchestra vocalist Carmen Bradford, local prodigy turned revered guitarist Julian Lage and drummer Matt Wilson. For his part, Redman was drawn both by the unorthodox program and the quality of the students it attracts.
He has had a few opportunities to watch them playing original compositions and arrangements and came away “amazed at everything the RJAM students and this worldclass faculty have been able to accomplish in such a short time with this exciting new program,” Redman said.
“They sounded wellstudied, highly proficient, fluent, energetic, virtuosic — everything you would expect from serious young jazz players today — yet strikingly also with their own emergent identities and approaches.”
Heady praise indeed, but Hainsworth described Redman offering the students the ultimate compliment, admitting that the freshmen fueled his own creative drive. At the end of their set, he seemed itchy to leave, telling Hainsworth, “I can’t wait to get home. I want to practice.”
Redman starts the position in July, arriving at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music just as the 103yearold institution opens a glorious new chapter. Its new building is scheduled to open in November (even with coronavirus disruptions). Equipped with several performance spaces, including a streetlevel recital hall with a capacity of about 200, a recording studio and guest housing for visiting artists, the stateoftheart facility offers the RJAM program an ideal environment in which to evolve.
“A lot of it is a work in progress,” Hainsworth said. “It’ll morph over time. Josh’s primary role will be mentorship: How to go about getting a successful record date made or finding musicians who can play the music you’re writing. How do you build a tour? He’s been out there for almost 30 years doing this at the highest level.”