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SFJAZZ Spring Season 2006 • March 17-June 17, 2006

"75th Birthday Celebration"

Dewey Redman Quartet

Sunday, April 30 • 7pm

  • $53
  • $38
  • $30
  • $25
    • “It's poetry, some of the most cliché-free saxophone playing you'll hear today.”—The New York Times

    Boasting “limitless capacity for improvisational invention” (JazzTimes), tenor sax master Dewey Redman has been one of the most forward-looking artists in jazz since the ’60s, both as a leader and as a collaborator with the likes of Ornette Coleman, Charlie Haden, and Keith Jarrett. On the cusp of 75, he is “a daredevil with time,...nail[ing] the notes with the offhand sweetness of experience” (The New York Times).



     

    Program Notes

    Tenor sax master Dewey Redman returns to the SFJAZZ stage on the cusp of his diamond birthday, ready to showcase the “limitless capacity for improvisational invention” (JazzTimes) that has marked him as a true musician’s musician for four decades in the jazz spotlight. As The New York Times summed up Redman’s limitless powers of invention: “It’s poetry, some of the most cliché-free saxophone playing you’ll hear today. He’s a soulful player, feeling rhythm without strictly delineating it; it’s as if he’s drifting while knowing exactly where he’s going.”


    In Redman’s own words, published in All About Jazz: “If you listen to my records, I’m not just in one dimension or one style. I play some blues, which is from Texas. I play ballads. Some avant-garde. I like all of the above. If I played in one style all night it would bore me.”


    Born in Fort Worth, Texas, Redman began playing music at age 13, performing on clarinet in his high school marching band—an ensemble that, prophetically, also included a young Ornette Coleman. Following an early career as a schoolteacher in his home state, Redman struck out for San Francisco, where he worked for seven years as a professional saxophonist. In 1967, he reunited with Coleman, joining the alto sax maverick’s group and appearing on classic albums like New York Is Now and Love Call (recorded at the same 1968 sessions) and 1971’s Science Fiction. In addition to other celebrated associations with bassist Charlie Haden and pianist Keith Jarrett, Redman has long distinguished himself as a leader in his own right, both onstage and on discs like The Ear of the Behearer (1973) and The Struggle Continues (1982). In 1998, he joined two other legends of the leading edge, pianist Cecil Taylor and drummer Elvin Jones, on Momentum Space, earning apt praise from JazzTimes as “a graceful anarchist and poet.”

     

    — Matthew Campbell
    Dewey Redman tenor saxophone
    Phil Hey drums
    Gordon Johnson bass
    Frank Kimbrough piano