Aug 26, 2025 1:53 PM
Blindfold Test: Buster Williams
Buster Williams, who at the age of 83 has been on the scene for 65 years, had never done a Blindfold Test. The first…
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.
“What I got from Percy was the dignity of playing the bass,” Buster Williams said of Percy Heath.
Aug 26, 2025 1:53 PM
Buster Williams, who at the age of 83 has been on the scene for 65 years, had never done a Blindfold Test. The first…
Don and Maureen Sickler serve as the keepers of engineer Rudy Van Gelder’s flame at Van Gelder Studio, perhaps the most famous recording studio in jazz history.
Sep 3, 2025 12:02 PM
On the last Sunday of 2024, in the control room of Van Gelder Studio, Don and Maureen Sickler, co-owners since Rudy Van…
The Free Slave, Cosmos Nucleus and Sunset To Dawn: three classic Muse albums being reissued this fall by Timer Traveler Recordings.
Aug 26, 2025 1:32 PM
Record producer and “Jazz Detective” Zev Feldman has launched his next endeavor, the archival label Time Traveler…
This year’s Jazz em Agosto set by the Darius Jones Trio captured the titular alto saxophonist at his most ferocious.
Aug 26, 2025 1:31 PM
The organizers of Lisbon, Portugal’s Jazz em Agosto Festival assume its audience is thoughtful and independent. Over…
Trio aRT with its avalanche of instrumentation: from left, Pheeroan akLaff, Scott Robinson and Julian Thayer.
Sep 3, 2025 12:03 PM
Trio aRT, a working unit since 1988, shockingly released its very first studio recording this summer. Recorded in…
