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Changing standards
Redman and Potter make it new

BY JON GARELICK

Woe to the young instrumental virtuosos cranking out album after album with the standard post-bop “acoustic” jazz quartet. How to do something different, something new? Challenge yourself as a writer? The great jazz soloists/bandleaders are not necessarily the great writers. Invite a “special guest”? Cover a Stevie Wonder tune? Go “groove” and get Medeski Martin & Wood into the studio or ask DJ Olive to mess with your shit? The situation hasn’t substantially changed since jazz critic Harvey Pekar’s comic-book persona opened a fresh review package from Downbeat only to find the latest Sonny Stitt album: “Rhythm section and no other horns . . . couple blues, couple standards, couple things based on ‘Rhythm’ changes.” It’s no wonder the best “jazz” album of last year was Uri Caine’s polyglot take on Bach’s Goldberg Variations.

Saxophonists Joshua Redman (who plays Berklee Performance Center this Saturday) and Chris Potter are two of the most respected young soloists working in the mainstream tradition (Redman is 32 and Potter is 30). Redman, a star for most of the past decade, has just released his eighth album for Warner Bros., Passage of Time. Potter, a versatile sideman, released a good half-dozen albums on Concord Jazz before moving to major label Verve for his current Gratitude.

Redman has shown a talent as a writer and a skill at adding contemporary pop to the list of moldy American-songbook standards. But he’s been at his best in the area where mainstream jazz still has an edge — live performance. His bands have been a breeding ground for a new generation of talent: Brad Mehldau, Christian McBride, Brian Blade. And no album — not even his 1995 live double-album set — has captured the Redman band’s ability live to generate long dramatic arcs of music.

Until, that is, Passage of Time. The album was conceived of as a suite, and for a change that word is accurate. There are recurring motifs in the 50-minute set of eight original compositions, but what’s equally important is that most of the tunes segue one to the next without a break. The introductory “Before” begins with an a cappella statement from the leader (he plays only tenor sax throughout the CD), who alternates skittering runs and lyrical fragments with a deep, braying bottom note that acts as a kind of pedal tone. When pianist Aaron Goldberg finally joins Redman with a chord on one of those bottom notes, it becomes the beginning of the second tune. Such felicitous transitions occur throughout the album, and they never feel forced or overdeliberated.

In an interview with Ice magazine, Redman says that on the first day of recording, suffering from a high fever, he played the entire set straight through and that most of that first take was preserved for the final album. However the album was recorded, what’s important here is that it feels as much through-performed as through-composed. It surges and breathes from track to track, Goldberg beginning his solos with a phrase picked up from Redman, or running alongside him in parallel figures, drummer Gregory Hutchinson picking up on phrases from each, subdividing the beat and then expanding on it, bassist Reuben Rogers playing countermelodies or anchoring straight-time excursions with a firm 4/4 walk. What’s more, Redman provides plenty of rich, spiraling melodies in his writing. It’s as free as jazz can get while still being humble.

Potter, meanwhile, takes another course on Gratitude, a 70-minute outing with two Redman-band alumni, drummer Blade and pianist Kevin Hayes, plus bassist Scott Colley. Each of the 13 tunes in Potter’s “suite” has a different dedicatee. Sometimes the connection is explicit — a calypso for Sonny Rollins, a “Body and Soul” for Coleman Hawkins, after Hawkins’s most famous recorded performance. But most of the time this “gratitude” seems simply a personal debt being paid by Potter. What’s more interesting is what he does with the tunes. He plays “Body and Soul” as a lovely, subdued bass-clarinet piece in duet with Colley. His tenor feature “High Noon” (for Eddie Harris) is a wonderful loping funk, with an irresistibly dragging groove laid down by watery Fender Rhodes piano, Colley, and Blade, and what sounds like a bass clarinet (it’s uncredited). His “Vox Humana” for Ornette Coleman doesn’t pay tribute to Coleman in the obvious ways — alto sax, Coleman quartet instrumentation, melody. Instead, Potter picks up a Chinese wood flute and, against chiming percussion, spare piano chords, and bass, gets to the heart of the “human voice” of Coleman’s sound, its childlike directness. In other words, Potter, like Redman, provides enough formal and textural variety that he can hold our interest — one more time — in the vitality of the post-bop quartet.

The Joshua Redman Quartet plays the Berklee Performance Center this Saturday, April 14. Call (617) 876-7777.

Issue Date: April 12 - 19, 2001