Dewey Left Town!

[allblues]

For Dewey

Living on the edge

of soundsigns and expectations:

choices, musics, silence.

Spirits of our ancestors coincide,

mysteries playing

a ballad of the fallen.

In the ear of the behearer,

the struggle continues:

birth, crisis, and broken shadows.

Look for the black star,

an African sunrise,

and old and new dreams.

[sidewinder]

Very sad news to start the day - RIP.

[Guy Berger]

One of my favorite Dewey Redman moments is at the end of Keith Jarrett's Survivor's Suite, where Dewey states (wails, really) the final theme over the rumbling rhythm section. First time he plays it straight, then more loosely the second time. It's really powerful.

Guy

[B. Goren.]

Today I'll listen to this one:

A great trio and one of Redman's best, IMHO.

[king ubu]

Sad news on this sunday morning. R.i.p., Dewey

Glad I caught his one Zurich concert of the last years.

[Clunky]

Saw Dewey twice a few years ago, in a duo with Ethan Iverson and a trio with Dave King and Reid Anderson in a packed Henry's in Edinburgh. Dewey took some time to warm up at the latter. Eventually he hit his mark but he was clearly tired. Will spin it again tonight.

[Simon Weil]

I remember a gig he did with Old and New Dreams at the Lyric Hammersmith in London. Maybe it was the end of the 70s. A gig sparked by Ed Blackwell, eventually. The whole band seem to take off and go to another place. Ian Dury (the disabled pop star) was in the audience. All these (named) guys are now gone.

It really gets to me, his passing.

Simon Weil

Edited September 3, 2006 by Simon Weil

[Hardbopjazz]

Thanks for all the music you gave us.

[agriffith]

God Bless Mr. Redman. I'll have to get out the duo album he did with Ed Blackwell live!

[Chalupa]

Damn.

R.I.P.

[poljazz]

I first heard Dewey's band in London in 1978 - Eddie Moore, Mark Helias, Norman Simmons - beautiful, ethereal, soulful, profound music. What a band, what a sound. Then two years later with Old and New Dreams.

Later back home in Australia a few of us started a non-profit jazz organisation to support the local scene. We received money to do a mini-festival with an international guest and we brought Dewey out as a single. It wasn't ideal but money was tight and a full band out of the question. Dewey enjoyed himself, especially as the other horn player was one of the local icons, an alto player called Bernie McGann, whom he'd met in NYC a few years earlier and whose playing he really liked (check Bernie out, he's an original).

Anyway, I loved working with Dewey and because of his presence the event was a big success, helped the local scene and put our organisation on the way.

We brought Dewey out again in '88, with Geri Allen and Eddie using Lloyd Swanton, of The Necks, on bass, and again in 1994 when he brought Skip Hadden and the band included Lloyd again and Barney McAll, who these days plays with Gary Bartz.

Dewey and I became friends and I used to call him every couple of months for a chat. When I started to travel overseas regularly in the 1990s I'd always meet him if he was in New York. He was such alovely man, with so much music in him and such love for people.

Once he called me after Eddie Moore died and cried on the phone that his "friend was gone". I feel like calling someone now and saying the same.

[John L]

I can still close my eyes and feel myself back at those magical moments with Old and New Dreams when Dewey would hook up with Ed Blackwell for 15 minutes or so of pure musical ecstasy.

RIP, Mr. Dewey Redman. We love you!!!

[7/4]

details

[7/4]

WKCR memorials:

Jazz Profiles: Sunday Sept. 3, 2-7 pm edst

and then the stations memorial: Monday Sept. 4, 2am-9pm edst

[ep1str0phy]

I'll be damned if that didn't well me right up. Thanks for showing up, man.

I first heard Dewey's band in London in 1978 - Eddie Moore, Mark Helias, Norman Simmons - beautiful, ethereal, soulful, profound music. What a band, what a sound. Then two years later with Old and New Dreams.

Later back home in Australia a few of us started a non-profit jazz organisation to support the local scene. We received money to do a mini-festival with an international guest and we brought Dewey out as a single. It wasn't ideal but money was tight and a full band out of the question. Dewey enjoyed himself, especially as the other horn player was one of the local icons, an alto player called Bernie McGann, whom he'd met in NYC a few years earlier and whose playing he really liked (check Bernie out, he's an original).

Anyway, I loved working with Dewey and because of his presence the event was a big success, helped the local scene and put our organisation on the way.

We brought Dewey out again in '88, with Geri Allen and Eddie using Lloyd Swanton, of The Necks, on bass, and again in 1994 when he brought Skip Hadden and the band included Lloyd again and Barney McAll, who these days plays with Gary Bartz.

Dewey and I became friends and I used to call him every couple of months for a chat. When I started to travel overseas regularly in the 1990s I'd always meet him if he was in New York. He was such alovely man, with so much music in him and such love for people.

Once he called me after Eddie Moore died and cried on the phone that his "friend was gone". I feel like calling someone now and saying the same.

[Kalo]

Today I'll listen to this one:

A great trio and one of Redman's best, IMHO.

Yes. Thanks for the reminder.

[Niko]

also heard him live once in 1998 or so with his quartet, one of the greatest concerts i ever attended - that day of the year has been my lucky day ever since... RIP

[relyles]

I woke up at 4:00 a.m. and have not been able to get back to sleep. I have been listening to the WKCR stream of the Redman tribute since.

His voice will truly be missed.

[HolyStitt]

I just heard about this.

Very sad news.

I was able to see Dewey twice and each time was wonderful. The last time I saw him perform was in a quartet with Bill Carrothers.

[RDK]

Nothing to add. R.I.P.

He'll live on through his music...

[7/4]

September 4, 2006

Dewey Redman, 75, Jazz Saxophonist, Dies

By BEN RATLIFF

Dewey Redman, an expansive and poetic tenor saxophonist and bandleader who had been at the aesthetic frontiers of jazz since the 1960’s, 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-1950’s jazz tenor saxophone players, Mr. Redman was informed by the sound and style of Dexter Gordon, John Coltrane and Sonny Rollins. But he didn’t immerse himself in technique and harmonic theory, as those musicians did, or lead a band until his mid-30’s. 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 doesn’t 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 else’s written music, as in parts of Tom Harrell’s 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. Coleman’s 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 Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra in 1969 and then, beginning in 1971, spent five years off and on with a band known to historians as Keith Jarrett’s 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. Coleman’s, 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. Redman’s 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. Coleman’s repertory. Though he had stopped playing with Mr. Coleman’s bands, he never stopped proclaiming his admiration for his old friend’s work and performed brilliantly during Jazz at Lincoln Center’s 2004 concert of Coleman music, with Mr. Coleman in the audience.

From the mid-60’s 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.

[sal]

Very sad news. Thanks for the beautiful sounds, Dewey. RIP.

[sheldonm]

Joe Lovano announced this at the Chicago Jazz Festival on Saturday night, very sad. I was part of a three way conversation with Matt Wilson and another photographer at the festival last night and he said he had been up to visit Dewey the morning he passed; he was bummed! Here are the last couple images I made of Dewey a short time ago!

m~

[sheldonm]

...and

[CJ Shearn]

did Joshua and his dad have a good relationship? from what I've gathered, no, but they made a record together right?