Q&A: (Joshua Redman)

After graduating from Harvard University in 1991 with a bachelor's degree in urban studies, tenor saxophonist Joshua Redman tinkered with the idea of returning to the halls of academia to earn a medical degree. He also thought about a law degree after receiving acceptance into Yale University, but in the end the richly historic and unique world of jazz captured his interests.

In the latter part of 1991, Redman entered the prestigious Thelonious Monk competition on a whim and won it. Warner Brothers Records then offered him a contract and his debut album with the label was released in 1992.

Redman, who has musical talent in his blood with his father being famed sax man Dewey Redman, grew up in Berkeley, Calif., with his mother in a one-bedroom apartment.


Over the past decade, Redman produced mostly acoustic albums, averaging one a year, with well-known quintets that sometimes featured pianist Brad Mehldau and bassist Christian McBride. With his most recent recording, "Elastic" Redman gives new meaning to the word trio with drummer Brian Blade and keyboardist Sam Yahel. It's a complex album derived from grooves and interesting effects that give the work a very rich and intriguing sound, which makes one wonder how only three musicians made this happen.
Wy: For those listeners searching the liner notes of your latest album 'Elastic' for a bass player, could you explain who's playing the bass lines and how is it being accomplished?
Redman: It's a trio. It's myself on saxophone. Sam Yahel plays a variety of keyboards. Our original drummer was Brian Blade, but these days we're mostly playing with a great drummer, Jeff Ballard, whom I think is going to be with us when we come to L.A. There is a bass player, but he's also the keyboard player. What Sam does is he has the equipment and the ability to kind of play a lot of different roles at once. He plays the bass parts mostly on an old analog synthesizer that he makes sound a lot like a bass, and then he plays keyboard parts on Fender Rhodes and other synthesizers. He also plays a fair amount of Hammond B-3 organ.
Your keyboardist, Sam Yahel, not only plays as the keyboardist, but he also plays the keys that serve as the songs' bass lines. He not only plays the keys wonderfully, but he moves rather well as a keyboardist running bass lines. Were you looking for someone on the keys, who could do that for this album?

I thought about doing an album like this for a long time. What I've done up to this point has been almost entirely acoustic jazz and the music has mostly been swing-based, not as much groove-based. I always thought that someday I'd do a record that would be more groove-based with a wider variety of instruments, electric as well as acoustic instruments. But I always thought in that situation that I would have an electric bass player and maybe an electric guitar player and who knows maybe a DJ, a horn section, you know, Go Go dancers. I always thought it was going to be a bigger spectacle. I never imagined I'd be playing music like this in a trio format, but it just so happened that by accident I started to play this music with Sam and Brian in a different context. Something about the chemistry we had and our personalities, the way they intersected musically, it really worked and I found that even though it wasn't the original instrumentation I envisioned, that somehow being just a trio made the music in a certain way more open. There was more freedom and that's something that's very important for us in this band. We want to be able to groove. We want the music to have a great feeling of power and force, but we also wanted to remain very open and interactive. That for me is what jazz is about -- the spontaneity, the improvisation in the music. I found that with this band we can kind of do both, have our cake and eat it too. So I definitely wanted the groove, but when I found I could do it with this kind of instrumentation, I found it had a lot of advantages.

Does it pose a challenge at times?

Sure, it's a great challenge at times. With three musicians, we're playing music that should really be played by six in a lot of ways. Through the challenge we grow and it make us better musicians. We discover things that we wouldn't otherwise discover. Sometimes the most creative things happen when you have to face a lot of challenges, when you have to surmount a lot of obstacles.

This album is all about grooves and some songs I couldn't help but think of a rubber band, which makes sense with the title. The grooves are tight, but they are able to stretch so they're just as much tight as they are flexible. There seems to be a lot of freedom on the saxophone but at the same time the compositions seem nailed down, so it's an interesting piece of work in that I think the listener doesn't know when the improvisation begins and the composition ends or vice versa. How did you develop the presentation of the music on this album?

The way we developed this music was, well, first you have to understand that Sam, Brian and I had been playing together informally for about two years in a totally different musical context as an organ trio under Sam's leadership. We had familiarity with each other as musicians. So when it came time to for me to start moving this band in another direction, we had something to build upon. We have chemistry, a rapport. So the first thing we kind of had to figure out was how the instrumentation worked and Sam and I did some research on experimenting with different kinds of keyboards and sounds. Then we started to rehearse the music, and we went out on the road and started playing the music. We did about three weeks on the road before we recorded the album. When we got in the studio we basically recorded all of the tunes live and then found good takes of each tune. Then from that point we enhanced them a little bit, always with the sense of balancing composition and improvisation. Improvisation is the most important thing. We're jazz musicians and it's the essence of the music. That's one of the most important things about the music and that's what we live for. I mean, 90 percent of what you hear is improvised, but I think with this band, perhaps more so than with any other band that I've had, there's a real heightened compositional sense. The compositions themselves are maybe more involved, but also what's important is the sense that the improvisations take place within a compositional framework so that even though we're taking solos, we're doing so with the sense that it's a part of something larger. From beginning to end, we are trying to tell a story. We are trying to create something that has shape.

You mentioned you went on the road and then went into the studio. It seems like more and more rock and pop bands are doing this nowadays where they are taking their songs out on the road and then coming back and recording them. What do you think this does for the song?

It's hard for me to answer that question because I don't know of any other way of doing it. With jazz, generally that is the way we work because jazz musicians don't have the luxury of being able to sit in the studio for six months and come up with a few power chords and create a masterpiece rock record. We generally have to have our stuff together before we set foot in the studio. I find that the more you've played the music on the road, the more you really understand the music and the more the music becomes real. You can write a composition from beginning to end, but until you've played it and performed it, it's almost like you haven't really given birth to the music yet. I would love to be able to have the luxury of spending a lot of time in the studio and really develop things in the studio because I really think there is a creative process that can happen in there which is unique. I think about some of the great pop and rock records made over the years, and a lot of those were made with a tremendous amount of time spent in the studio.

For any of your songs on any of your records, how do you pick which saxophone you want to use for each tune?

Each has a different voice and certain voices sound better on certain songs. The way I pick which one I'm going to use is the one that sounds the best. It's hard to put into words what the different instruments are like, but say you compare the tenor sax to the soprano. The tenor sax, which is my main instrument, has a very powerful, full-bodied sound, a muscular sound. It has a tenderness and a poignancy to it and it's in general, a fuller, richer sound. The soprano is a more mysterious and more haunting sound. It also depends on how the song is written and what octave the melody is in. Certain melodies sound better in certain octaves. It also depends on what the other musicians are doing. What I've tried to do over the years is develop the certain saxophones to the point where each one really is it's own independent voice where I can be expressive on each one. As a saxophone player, if you can play one then you can pick up any of the others and get a sound out of it, but just because you can physically play it doesn't mean you can really express yourself on it.

On this album, you're also overdubbing the soprano and tenor with harmony parts over some of the songs. In this process, are you actually writing out harmonies or are you listening to the songs and then just throwing things in spontaneously?

This is the first time I've ever done this on an album. So, in sense it was my first experience with being a little bit more creative in the studio. The improvisation in the studio, playing live, became the basis for more composition. So in other words, maybe there was something I played on the saxophone that was just an improvised idea that all of a sudden made me think about what would it sound like if I harmonized that or there's a certain keyboard part that Sam's playing and I would think of what it would sound like if I had a horn section underneath it. It's a very creative and exciting process for me and I feel like I've only scratched the surface of it as a jazz musician.

On the song 'Boogielastic' I hear hints of Radiohead happening there and you strike me as the person who listens to everything. In being a part of such a free art form that's always evolving, how do you feel your interest in all kinds of music has influenced both your technique and writing style?
There's really no style of music that I don't listen to except I've never really got into a lot of country and western. I like Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson. I grew up listening to a lot of classic rock, and a lot of classic soul and R&B. I came of age with hip-hop and so most forms of pop music I've listened to and been influenced by. It gives you so many options, so many resources. I think the fact I enjoy so many different kinds of music, it gives me a wider perspective and more fuel for the fire, more ideas and inspirations. I think it's a great advantage as a jazz musician to listen to a lot of different kinds of music. As a jazz musician you're being called upon to improvise to create something in the moment from scratch and I think the more you've listened to in a certain sense, the more material you have to work with. The danger of course is losing focus because I can listen to John Coltrane one minute and say that I just want my music to sound like that or I can listen to Stevie Wonder the next minute and want my music to sound like that or I can listen to Nirvana the next minute and say if I had electric guitars I would want my music to sound like that. You can't start to lose focus, but actually now in my life and in my music, I'm starting now to have more focus and be able to bring all of the different influences in to develop a sound which is my own.