Jazz CD of the month - Joshua Redman/Ron Miles/Scott Colley/Brian Blade: Still Dreaming review

The Guardian 80

(Nonesuch)

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.