In 2009, after his unforgettable Meltdown performance, a multi-generational Royal Festival Hall crowd queued long after the last encore to shake the 79-year-old Ornette Coleman’s hand. The self-taught Texas saxophonist’s music without regular song chords or orthodox pitch had been ridiculed in his early career, but his faith in it proved emphatically justified.
Today, three years after Coleman’s death, a trenchantly personal tribute is being paid by one of the 21st century’s finest jazz improvisers – Joshua Redman, saxophonist son of the late Dewey Redman, Coleman’s tenor-sax partner in the early 1970s. When Coleman went electric with Prime Time in that decade, Redman Sr formed the Old and New Dreams quartet (with Coleman alumni Don Cherry, Charlie Haden and Eddie Blackwell) to play his former boss’s acoustic work. This is a homage both to that group, and to its inspiration’s free and capricious spirit.
Joshua Redman, trumpeter Ron Miles, bassist Scott Colley, and drummer Brian Blade play six apposite but vibrantly contemporary originals, and one track each by Coleman and Haden. The springy New Year, a blend of fanfare and a childlike song that becomes a fast-bop sprint, draws a typically swift and swerving tenor solo from Redman against Blade’s tingling cymbal beat. The staccato yet folksy Unanimity features an even better Redman improvisation, and a Don Cherry-reminiscent fusion of fluency and fierce bluster from Miles. Coleman’s classic 1969 lament Comme Il Faut is a highlight, as is a voice-like slow blues (Blues for Charlie) that smoulders with a melancholy majesty.
This is a supergroup at work, but – as with Coleman’s own bands and Old and New Dreams themselves – they never sound as if they’re trying to make an issue out of that.
This month’s other jazz picks
Swiss pianist-composer Nik Bärtsch has been injecting electronica and minimalism with soul, jazzy hipness and danceable bounce with his Ronin Ensemble since 2001, and Awase – with bass recruit Thomy Jordi adding a new fluidity – deepens the group’s famous expressiveness of tone and texture. Norma Winstone-inflected but intimately original singer Brigitte Beraha and pianist Frank Harrison make a beautiful partnership on the low-key but affecting The Way Home, and the Bill Evans-inspired American pianist Lynne Arriale shows how sensitively she always cares for good songs (such as those of Joni Mitchell, Tom Waits, and Lennon-McCartney) on the trio album Give Us These Days.
