Jan 21, 2025 7:54 PM
Southern California Fires Hit the Jazz Community
Roy McCurdy and his wife had just finished eating dinner and were relaxing over coffee in their Altadena home, when he…
With Elastic, Joshua Redman’s Warner Bros. album set for a Sept. 10 release, the saxophonist and composer rises to yet another artistic challenge in his diverse career. Known primarily for playing swing-based jazz with acoustic ensembles, Redman explores the new textures of electric instruments and funk rhythms. “The goal was to break down the boundaries between an open jazz aesthetic and a tight funk aesthetic,” Redman says. “Rather than creating a groove at the expense of spontaneity and interaction, I wanted to make music that has that clarity and assertiveness in the rhythm but is still open, fluid, flexible, elastic.”
For Redman, the essential idea behind Elastic is its jazz soul. Though he, keyboard player Sam Yahel and drummer Brian Blade are locked in a tight groove throughout the record, they maintain the freedom to improvise as they would within swing’s looser rhythmic setting. Recording Elastic was a creatively liberating experience. The trio’s live performances form the core of the record, with tastefully-used effects and overdubbed accents adding exciting layers to the band’s sound. The record’s 11 tracks draws from the improvisational skills of the band and Redman’s prowess as a composer to tell a dramatic musical story. Part of what makes the record remarkable is the way in which the performers express their own spontaneous ideas within a carefully defined song structure, blending the central tenets of jazz with those of soul, funk and blues.
This concept had long been germinating when Redman began jamming in the late 1990’s with Yahel and Blade at New York City club Small’s. Elastic is Redman’s ninth album as a bandleader and follows 2001’s long-form acoustic jazz suite Passage Of Time.
Gerald and John Clayton at the family home in Altadena during a photo shoot for the June 2022 cover of DownBeat. The house was lost during the Los Angeles fires.
Jan 21, 2025 7:54 PM
Roy McCurdy and his wife had just finished eating dinner and were relaxing over coffee in their Altadena home, when he…
“She said, ‘A lot of people are going to try and stop you,’” Sheryl Bailey recalls of the advice she received from jazz guitarist Emily Remler (1957–’90). “‘They’re going to say you slept with somebody, you’re a dyke, you’re this and that and the other. Don’t listen to them, and just keep playing.’”
Feb 3, 2025 10:49 PM
In the April 1982 issue of People magazine, under the heading “Lookout: A Guide To The Up and Coming,” jazz…
The Old Country: More From The Deer Head Inn arrives 30 years after ECM issued the Keith Jarret Trio live album At The Deer Head Inn.
Jan 21, 2025 7:38 PM
Last November, Keith Jarrett, who has not played publicly since suffering two strokes in 2018, greenlighted ECM to drop…
“With jazz I thought it must be OK to be Black, for the first time,” says singer Sofia Jernberg.
Jan 2, 2025 10:50 AM
On Musho (Intakt), her recent duo album with pianist Alexander Hawkins, singer Sofia Jernberg interprets traditional…
“The first recording I owned with Brazilian music on it was Wayne Shorter’s Native Dancer,” says Renee Rosnes. “And then I just started to go down the rabbit hole.”
Jan 16, 2025 2:02 PM
In her four-decade career, Renee Rosnes has been recognized as a singular voice, both as a jazz composer and a…
