RIP Dewey Redman

[Allan Songer]

Just came over the air that he passed today. I have some friends who heard him play last Sunday in New York and they told me he tore the place apart--really played GREAT. And now he's gone.

Gotta go spin some of his records now . . .

[Me Loves Khorns]

Seeing that announcement, hit me, my last name is also Redman, no relation.

RIP

[jazman]

Just came over the air that he passed today. I have some friends who heard him play last Sunday in New York and they told me he tore the place apart--really played GREAT. And now he's gone.

Gotta go spin some of his records now . . .

Allan,

This is a complete surprise. I thought he was past the problems of prostate cancer, and had not heard that he was currently sick or with failing health. He was a tremendous musician, and a former SF resident. He will be missed.

Klipsch out.

[cubdog]

I just saw this. What a bummer. A great player who never got the recognition he deserved.

cubdog

[coda]

write up in the New York Times

Dewey Redman, 75, Jazz Saxophonist, Dies

Dewey Redman in his last concert, Aug. 27 at Tompkins Square Park.

Dewey Redman, an expansive and poetic tenor saxophonist and bandleader who had been at the aesthetic frontiers of jazz since the 1960s, died on Saturday in Brooklyn. He was 75 and lived in Brooklyn.

The cause was liver failure, said Velibor Pedevski, his brother-in-law.

Walter Redman was born and grew up in Fort Worth. He started off on clarinet at 13, playing in a church band. Not long after, he met Ornette Coleman when they both played in the high school marching band. Their friendship would become one of the crucial links in his life.

Typical of late-1950s jazz tenor saxophone players, Mr. Redman was informed by the sound and style of Dexter Gordon, John Coltrane and Sonny Rollins. But he didnt immerse himself in technique and harmonic theory, as those musicians did, or lead a band until his mid-30s. Until then, he said, he was largely playing by ear.

Consequently his playing always kept a rawness, a willingness to play outside tonality, a closeness to the blues and above all a powerful sound: an expressive, dark-toned, vocalized expression that he could apply in any situation. (This power could also come through his second instrument he played a double-reed instrument he called a musette.) He has often been called a free-jazz musician, and he could indeed put a logic and personality into music that had no chord changes. But that designation doesnt acknowledge how authoritatively Mr. Redman could play a traditional ballad like The Very Thought of You, or how his solos could become dramatic diversions in someone elses written music, as in parts of Tom Harrells 1998 album The Art of Rhythm.

After attending Prairie View A&M University in Texas, where he played alto and tenor saxophone in the college band, and then a stint in the Army, Mr. Redman taught fifth grade in Bastrop, Tex., near Austin. In 1959 he moved to Los Angeles and then San Francisco, playing with Pharoah Sanders, Donald Rafael Garrett and others.

Mr. Redman missed the ascension of his old friend Ornette Coleman, moving to New York to join the band only in 1967. His performances with Mr. Coleman over the next seven years, on albums like New York Is Now!, Love Call and Science Fiction, on which his tenor saxophone meshes with Mr. Colemans alto, are good ways to understand some of the great jazz of the period, intuitively finding a third way between general conceptions of the jazz tradition and the avant-garde.

Mr. Redman also recorded with Charlie Hadens Liberation Music Orchestra in 1969 and then, beginning in 1971, spent five years off and on with a band known to historians as Keith Jarretts American quartet, which included Mr. Jarrett, Mr. Haden and the drummer Paul Motian. Underrated by the public and ever important to musicians, it played a music that was more determined by harmonic structure than Mr. Colemans, but equally challenging and prescient in its drive to make organic sense of various schisms in jazz since post-bop.

Mr. Coleman then provided the impetus for the next phase of Mr. Redmans work, but in absentia. Old and New Dreams was a quartet of mainstays from different Coleman bands: Mr. Redman, Mr. Haden, Don Cherry and Ed Blackwell. They recorded and toured from 1976 to 1984, relying mostly on Mr. Colemans repertory. Though he had stopped playing with Mr. Colemans bands, he never stopped proclaiming his admiration for his old friends work and performed brilliantly during Jazz at Lincoln Center's 2004 concert of Coleman music, with Mr. Coleman in the audience.

From the mid-60s on, Mr. Redman often led his own bands, usually quartets with piano, bass and drums; he recorded twice with his son Joshua Redman, the popular jazz saxophonist. Most recently his band included the pianist Frank Kimbrough, the bassist John Menegon and the drummer Matt Wilson. He played his final concert on Aug. 27 at the Charlie Parker Jazz Festival in Tompkins Square Park on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

He is survived by his wife, Lidija Pedevska-Redman, and two sons Joshua, of Berkeley, Calif., and Tarik.

........................................

Jazz Police

Dewey Redman, an Enduring Original, 1931-2006

Contributed by Andrea Canter, Contributing Editor

Sunday, 03 September 2006

I like to think of myself as an original. I have my own sound. That's not easy to come by, I worked on it for many years. But I like to think that I sound like Dewey Redman Dewey Redman

Dewey Redman once described himself as survivor. He survived criticism of the free music he played with Ornette Coleman in the late 60s, well before the jazz public was ready for the unusual harmonies of what was then known as avant garde. He survived prostate cancer (diagnosed in the late 90s), coming back to perform and record in the 21^st century, playing into his 70s and outliving, outplaying many of his early cohorts. And he survived a fair amount of oversight, these days known more as the father of modern lion, Joshua Redman, despite his years as a singular artist with a very different style than his offspring. Dewey passed away on September 2^nd at age 75 due to liver failure. Probably his music will finally receive the level of recognition it always deserved.

Growing up in the 30s in Ft. Worth, Texas, Dewey heard Duke Ellington on his parents records. He also traces his musical inclinations to a man he later realized was most likely his uncle, the great bandleader Don Redman, whom he never met. At first he sought trumpet lessons, because it had three keys. I figured I could work that out. However, he was discouraged when the school music teacher told him your lips are too big. Instead, Dewey started out on clarinet in a church band at 13 and later played in his high school marching band with another young musician named Ornette Coleman. He was largely self taught, having learned by trial and error and watching other saxophone players do what I do and asking them questions. That's the best lessons in the world.

Redman played alto and tenor in his college jazz band at Prairie View A & M, finally settling on the tenor. After a stint in the Army and years of teaching music while gigging on weekends, he moved to California in 1959, working with Pharoah Sanders and Wes Montgomery around the Bay Area; he moved to New York in the late 60s where he became a part of the avant garde scene with old pal Ornette Coleman. In addition to his work with Coleman, he displayed a talent for adapting to a wide range of styles, playing with Old and New Dreams (Don Cherry, Charlie Haden and Ed Blackwell), Pat Metheny, Keith Jarrett, Carla Bley, and Hadens Liberation Orchestra, and leading his own ensembles. I like to play it all-styles as far as I can, because in my band we are playing the so-called avant-garde, a little be-bop, ballads, blues. I also play the musette it comes from the Middle East. I try to do a variety of styles, because one style bores me.

Redman was a more popular performer in Europe than in the U.S., noting that I especially like to play in Europe, because the appreciation for jazz is much greater than it is in America outside of New York, New Orleans and Chicago. America is not as great for me as Europe. Free or bop and everything in-between, Dewey released more than a dozen recordings under his own name, and twice recorded with son Joshua on Coincides and African Venus. Last spring, Redman celebrated his 75^th as part of the SF Jazz season (directed by son Joshua) in San Francisco, performing with a quartet anchored by Twin Cities giants Gordon Johnson (bass) and Phil Hey (drums), with Frank Kimbrough on keys. He reconnected with Johnson and Hey at the Twin Cities Hot Summer Jazz Festival in June. Noted Phil Hey, "He was a great artist and a very cool guy. I never met anyone who loved music more."

Dewey was still blowing strong at the end. He played his last gig just a week earlier in Manhattan at the Charlie Parker Jazz Festival in Tompkins Square, with his quartet including Frank Kimbrough, John Menegon and Tani Tabaal.

With his limitless capacity for improvisational invention (Jazz Times), Dewey Redman was one of the last of the great Texas Tenors, but perhaps more than any other, had a sound that defied classification, a style that was free yet melodic, beyond mainstream yet always accessible. It was a sound that, like Dewey himself, endured despite the ever-changing norms of the jazz audience.

What I reach for first when I play is sound. Technique maybe, but there is technique in sound. Dewey Redman