Redman Returns With New Sense of Maturity

Joshua Redman was hard to avoid last year. Selling records by the thousands, modeling DKNY clothing, playing impressively enough to convince many that his was the tenor saxophone voice of the ‘90s, his career was in high gear.

So it was reasonable to expect, after taking a lengthy hiatus earlier this year to get married, that Redman would return to action with some kind of fanfare.

But not so. Thursday night at Cal State Long Beach’s Carpenter Performing Arts Center he turned up with little advance publicity or promotion in an ensemble booked as Trio: Joshua Redman, Christian McBride, Brian Blade.

Despite the insistence upon the “Trio” title for the booking, however, the performance sounded, perhaps understandably, given Redman’s considerable powers, more like a soloist with rhythm accompaniment than an interactive trio. Occasional moments--a unison bass/tenor saxophone line on a Redman blues was typical--suggested the potential for true trio interactivity. More often, the music fell into the familiar jazz patterns of soloist and accompanists, playing theme and variations.

On an individual basis, Redman seems to have returned from his hiatus in fine musical fettle. On the negative side, some of his less appealing habits from the past were still present--over-milking his high notes, building to climaxes with riff-like repetitions, playing off his audience’s enthusiastic responses, abandoning his sense of quest in favor of listener gratification.

But there also was a greater sense of maturity in his playing that allowed him to stretch out. The result, in his better solos, was a collection of melodic fragments, brief sequential passages and rhythmic accents that produced striking musical mosaics--attractive examples of the fashion in which a talented jazz artist can employ the small elements of improvisation to produce a much larger musical portrait.

McBride’s acoustic bass work was, as always, impressive, and on several numbers he switched to an electric instrument, revealing that he is just as effective with funk-oriented lines as he is with straight-ahead jazz. Blades, working with a fairly minimal drum kit, generated a vibrant array of sounds, countering his solid backup playing with thoughtful soloing.