Joshua Redman: Headin’ Home

Joshua Redman's 2000 album Beyond

Birthday greetings to saxophonist Joshua Redman, who celebrates No. 43 today.

Joshua follows father Dewey Redman in most jazz CD collections, but it wasn’t Dewey’s path which put him there. Nor was it so much his father’s influence, but his mother’s.

Renee Shedroff was a dancer and librarian in California; she and Joshua’s father never married, according to enotes.com. Shedroff raised Joshua — they would see Dewey when a concert tour brought him near, and Joshua would hear him among the sounds of a house filled with music — and she introduced him to the arts.

“His mother . . . was the driving force that nurtured his creativity,” wrote Matt Pierson on the liner notes to Redman’s debut 1993 album.

“Materially, I did not grow up privileged,” Joshua told the crimson.com in a 2011 interview. “My mother and I were on welfare at times when I was growing up. I wanted a sense of stability, and playing jazz wasn’t my first choice economically speaking.”

Medicine might have been. Or law. Just not music. Because of his scholarship, Redman didn’t lack for opportunities. He graduated first from his class in high school and went to Harvard, from where he graduated summa cum laude (he may not be the best saxophone player ever — he’s certainly up there — but he’s pretty surely the smartest).

Redman was accepted into law school at Yale, and according to pbs.org, intended to work in civil rights or social work. Like a lot of college graduates, he took time off before matriculating at Yale Law. Redman intended it to be only a year’s sabbatical; we’re now at 21, and counting. We’re guessing Yale’s not saving a spot for him any more.

“I didn’t grow up with my father around, but I know that he struggled to put food on the table for himself and for his family,” Redman told the crimson.com. “I knew that there were many challenges to becoming a creative musician with integrity.”

Perhaps so, and perhaps the challenges are more than we can appreciate. But we also can guess this much: Redman became a “creative musician with integrity,” because he started as one, more than two decades ago when he decided the world could do with just one less lawyer.

“The reason I am playing music is because there is a part of me that feels that I can’t do anything else or there is a part of me that feels I have to play music,” Redman said in an interview with Fred Jung at jazzweekly.com. “It gives me an inspiration and a fulfillment and a joy that nothing else does. That is why I chose to play it. So it wasn’t a career decision. It wasn’t a rational decision in that sense. It was a decision of the heart and soul.”

Sources: enotes.com, crimson.com, jazzwekly.com, pbs.org, baltimoresun.com

James Carter: Pour Que Ma Vie Demeure

James Carter's 1996 album Conversin' With the Elders

Belated birthday greetings to saxophonist James Carter, who celebrated No. 43 on Tuesday, one year closer to being an elder he once was conversin’ with.

Carter is not to be confused with the 39th U.S. President of the same name (who once hosted a group of jazz musicians at the White House and sang Salt Peanuts with Dizzy Gillespie), but he began playing in the last year of his namesake’s presidency, according to his website jamescarterlive.com. Though Carter the saxophonist was recording little more than a decade later, his career has consistently paid tribute to two things: his jazz predecessors and his hometown of Detroit.

“His playing is neither youthful homage nor cynical commercialism,” wrote Don Palmer on the liner notes to 1994′s Jurassic Classics. “There are hints of Gene Ammons, Illinois Jacquet, Sonny Rollins, David Murray, Don Byas, Chu Berry, John Coltrane, Wayne Shorter, not to mention anonymous players whose solos were scuffed and barbed with the harrowing and cathartic burrs, growls, guffaws and melissmas of deep blues.”

It’s the latter it seems Carter most wants to celebrate. His own list of influences and inspirations is atypical; rather than pile plaudits on artists who are already surrounded by them, Carter has made it a point to cite artists less renowned, whose music, if not obscure, isn’t as well-preserved.

“But the world needs to get hip to its antecedents,” Carter told Howard Mandel on the liner notes to 1995′s The Real Quietstorm, and Carter helped his CD-buyers do just that, artist by artist, song by song, offering by offering off the album.

• “Like You Never Told Me That You Care, which  John Gilmore played on Sun Ra’s Sound Sun Pleasure in the late 50′s. People focus on Ra’s extravagance, but he came up through Fletcher Henderson, same as everybody else.”
• “Don Byas, in terms of antecedents, was playing the Cherokee changes at two and three times tempo prior to Charlie Parker’s Koto . . . Now it’s 20 years since Byas’ death, and I think his obscurity is sad.
• “The Stevedore’s Serenade is a clarinet piece for Barney Bigard from an Ellington compilation.”
• “I took Born To Be Blue from Gene Ammons; he put a thing on it in the organ combo context.”
• “And Jackie McLean recorded Ballad For A Doll on Jackie’s Bag . . .”

Real Quietstorm was one of Carter’s earliest releases, preceded by Jurassic Classics (a collection of standards)  and soon followed by Conversin’ With The Elders (cover above). On the latter, Carter saluted and played with five of his favorite artists — trumpeter Harry “Sweets” Edison, saxophonist/clarinetist Buddy Tate, the Art Ensemble of Chicago’s Lester Bowie, the World Saxophone Quartet’s Hamiet Bluiett and Detroit saxophonist Larry Smith — and referenced his favorite recordings of all. In little more than half a decade, three of the elders had died.

Carter didn’t stop there, though. The 2003 release Gardenias for Lady Day was in memory of Billie Holiday, the 2000 release Chasin’ the Gypsy was dedicated, while not specifically to Django Reinhardt, according to Carter, but to the Paris  music of the 1930s associated with Reinhardt and bandmate Stephane Grappelli.  ”Although Carter insisted that the record wasn’t an outright tribute,” wrote Nate Chinen for jazztimes.com, “its title, repertoire and instrumentation pointed resolutely in the direction of Django Reinhardt, gypsy guitarist and spiritual leader of the fabled Hot Club of France. Atlantic, which didn’t share Carter’s reservations, emblazoned copies of the album with a sticker playing up the Reinhardt angle.”

 On Carter’s 2004 live album Live At Baker’s Keyboard Lounge, he performed with saxophonists David Murray, another of Carter’s favorites from the WSQ, and Johnny Griffin, who was 73 when the album was recorded in 2001 and died at 80 in 2008.

“I’m not inspired by individual players,” Carter told Palmer on the liner notes to Jurassic Classics. “A lot of players get hung up on someone like Trane. They look at the superficial elements, the finished product, and get the tune down. I feel I need to get to the spirituality of the piece and how he got to the finished product.”

A link below to a cut from the 2008 album Present Tense. According to jazz.com the cut Pour Que Ma Vie Demeure (For That My Life Remains, if our translation is close), is a Reinhardt piece Reinhardt never recorded and “pays unabashed homage to the nonpareil Sidney Bechet.”

Sources: jamescarterlive.com, allaboutjazz.com, jazztimes.com, jazz.com

Steve Forbert: Steve Forbert’s Midsummer Night’s Toast

Steve Forbert's album Mission of the Crossroad Palms, released in 1995, which would make him at least 40 on this cover, though it's hard to tell

Birthday greetings to Steve Forbert, who celebrates No. 57 today.

Once upon a time, Forbert was anointed “the next Bob Dylan,” if for no other reasons than they both wrote music, played harmonica and came from states that started with Mi. (Minnesota and Mississippi).

Of course, this made them no more similar than William Faulkner and Sinclair Lewis because they both wrote books. Forbert’s songs were simpler, peppier and younger; Forbert often wrote about his world, with “a young man’s ear;” Dylan wrote about the world around him with an old man’s eye.

“Being called the next Bob Dylan wasn’t exactly a good thing . . .,” wrote Steve Leggett on allmusic.com, “first because who on earth would want that hung around his neck, and second because his approach and style were nothing much like Dylan in the first place. It was a recipe for perceived failure . . .”

A career letdown for sure. Forbert’s Romeo Tune, on his second album Jackrabbit Slim in 1979, peaked at No. 11, but he never got that high again; of course he wasn’t the next Dylan because there’s no such thing, anymore than there’s a next Ali or Sinatra or da Vinci.

 ”It was just a cliché back then, and it’s nothing I take seriously,” Forbert said in a 2009 interview with NPR (npr.org). “I’m off the hook — I don’t have to be smarter than everybody else and know all the answers like Bob Dylan.”

Many of Forbert’s early songs were coming of age, and having come of age, material wasn’t as prevalent. He’s continued to write and perform, and his work has matured, even if you can’t tell it by looking at him. It’s hard to believe the artist staring back at you from 2009′s The Place And The Time, his most recent album, was then 55.

Or maybe age is in the eye of the beholder. Young and hopeful, Forbert went down to Laurel for love  with “just a touch of madness in my eye” (“I’m glad to be so young talkin’ with my tongue, Glad to be so careless in my way”). He still looks young and hopeful, although even Forbert’s optimism didn’t spare Laurel (“It’s a dirty stinkin’ town yeah”).

(On a personal aside, we once wandered into Laurel, Miss. during the heyday of Forbert’s popularity on an overnight ride to New Orleans. I asked our server at the all-night diner if she knew that Forbert had written a song about her town. When she said no, I figured it best to spare her the details lest she spill the coffee. And though my memories are bleak, I don’t remember Forbert’s description being wrong).

A link to Steve Forbert’s Midsummer Night’s Toast below:

 I got my fingers a-tapping on the hard,
stone steps.
I’m waiting for lightning and the rains to fall.
Young lovers are loafin’ with their sidewalk smiles
And all their rainbow dreams.

sources: allmusic.com, wikipedia.org, npr.org