Saxman with Chops All His Own.

• Author: Lewis, Andrea
• Position: Saxman Joshua Redman, interview - Interview

If ever there was a player perfectly suited to the title of heir apparent in the world of jazz, saxman Joshua Redman is it. After listening to his music, you know intuitively that jazz is in his veins.

I'm not referring to the fact that the thirty-one-year-old Redman is the son of tenor saxophonist Dewey Redman, well known for his musical fusion of blues, free-form, and hard bop. Joshua has chops all his own.

He won the prestigious Thelonious Monk International Saxophone Competition in 1991. He snatched up a recording contract with Warner Brothers and released his self-titled debut album in 1993 to critical acclaim. He was voted Rolling Stone's Hot Jazz Artist and was also dubbed the Number 1 Tenor Saxophonist Deserving of Wider Recognition by Down Beat's critics' poll that year. This year, Redman was named artist-in-residence and the artistic director of the San Francisco Jazz Festival's spring season.

Redman possesses an enviable passel of talents, including an intriguing composition style, an easy, flowing technique, and stunning dexterity.

As if those qualities weren't enough, his musical sensibilities comfortably bridge a variety of musical styles. Take his 1999 release, Timeless Tales (for Changing Times). He offers deft interpretations of songs from the canons of Cole Porter, Joni Mitchell, Irving Berlin, and Bob Dylan. On the record's first cut, Redman sends George Gershwin's "Summertime" through a dizzying array of rhythmic and harmonic changes that jump off as easily as fish in that easy-livin' season. Later he settles comfortably into Stevie Wonder's "Visions."

Redman's rise might be labeled meteoric, but his was not a straight shot. "My first experience playing instruments was at the Center for World Music in Berkeley in the early seventies," Redman told me during a recent interview. "I was three or four years old, and I messed around in a class-type environment with Indian drums. I played in an Indonesian gamelan orchestra, played a little recorder, taught myself guitar, had a few piano lessons, played clarinet, and finally the saxophone."

Redman says that his father had little to do with his decision to play sax. "From the time I started with the saxophone when I was ten, I always had a sense that if I was going to be a musician and have a voice through an instrument, it was going to be with the saxophone," he says. "Certainly, I grew up listening to my father's music and loving it and being influenced by it, but I didn't grow...