Concert Preview: Joshua Redman @ TROY SAVINGS BANK MUSIC HALL 2/7/24

Saxophonist, composer and bandleader Joshua Redman calls his new album “where are we.” The answer on Feb. 7 will be local: Onstage at the Troy Savings Bank Music Hall with, as usual, a new band. 

If “location, location, location” explains the prime factor in valuing real estate, it has a similar power in jazz where regional styles and song titles cite places.

Sounds steeped in or describing key places locate the musical ideas on “where are we.” In fact, echoes and evocations of location unify it, despite Redman’s avowed aversion to concept albums – “especially my own!”  as he states in explanatory materials via Blue Note, his new record label.

The ever-restless Redman also seems chronically averse to staying in one place musically for long. While he recorded “where are we” with drummer Brian Blade, pianist Aaron Parks and bassist Joe Sanders, he plays in Troy with a new touring ensemble retaining only Cavassa, plus pianist Paul Cornish; bassist Philip Norris and drummer Nazir Ebo. Both studio and touring bands feature singer Gabrielle Cavassa – a first for Redman whose saxophone has long carried the melody in his many bands.

Redman’s manager alerted him to the singer by text from a party she was singing in New Orleans. Checking her out, Redman recognized, “she has an expressive quality and an intimacy and a vulnerability in her sound that is singularly captivating.” The strength in Cavassa’s conversational phrasing and her authoritative but evocative sound balance with instantly accessible feeling, just as Redman’s tenor sax has always done. 

That “always” is a big bag of disparate music making.

Hearing of his Feb. 7 gig, I dug in Gazette and Nippertown archives and found a trail of local shows across the decades, so numerous I almost certainly missed some:

• The Egg with a band with two names – YaYa3 and the Sam Yahel Trio (2002)
• At The Egg with his Elastic Band (2005)
• At The Egg again, opening for Me’Shell Ndegeocello (2006)
• Once more at The Egg, with his Double Trio (2009)
• At Skidmore’s Zankel Music Center in a duo with pianist Brad Mehldau (2010)
• Back at The Egg with James Farm, a long-lived (for Redman) quartet with pianist Aaron Parks, bassist Matt Penman and drummer Eric Harland (2011)
• Two years later, again at The Egg with another quartet: pianist Mehlhdau, bassist Christian McBride and drummer Brian Blade (2013)
• Back at the Zankel with the Bad Plus ( and later that same year with the same crew at Alive at Five (2015)
• And then, the big one: Freihofer’s Saratoga Jazz Festival with his Mehldau, McBride and Blade quartet (2019)

In addition, Redman has played sideman gigs with everyone from the Rolling Stones to jazz stalwarts Milt Jackson, Elvin Jones and his own famous father Dewey Redman.

Redman’s first album for Blue Note and his 24th overall, “where are we” earned a spot in the Boston Globe’s favorite albums of 2023 list and was Jazzwise magazine’s Album of the Year.  

“This was an album whose meaning revealed itself in the making,” Redman has said of its free-wheeling musical travels.

While noodling around an arrangement for “I Left My Heart in San Francisco,” Redman found that Thelonious Monk’s “San Francisco Holiday” had “just sort of popped unannounced into my head.”

Other tune twins popped together: Charles Ives’s “Three Places in New England” mashed up naturally with Betty Carter’s “New England;” the Count Basie/Jimmy Rushing blues “Goin’ to Chicago” jigsaw-fit up against Sufjan Steven’s “Chicago” into what they call “Chicago Blues” on the album.

Sounding more than a little professorial, Redman said, “The duality of ‘Stars Fell on Alabama’ and John Coltrane’s ‘Alabama’ “quite consciously juxtaposes two very different views and experiences of the American South.”

Can a mash-up of “Troy Is a Wonderful City On the Hudson River, Yep!” by The Guy Who Sings Songs About Cities & Towns with Elvis Costello’s “I’ve Been Everywhere” be far behind? OK, so it’s a stretch, along the Hudson banks:

“The women in Poughkeepsie 

Take their clothes off when they’re tipsy

But in Albany, New York

The love the filthy way I walk.”

Or, hey! – what about Billy Joel’s “New York State of Mind”?

“But I’m taking a Greyhound on the Hudson River Line

I’m in a New York State of mind.”

OK, I’ll stop now.

Joshua Redman plays Wednesday, Feb. 7 at Troy Savings Bank Music Hall (30 Second St., Troy). 8 p.m. $49.60, $39.50, students $20 518-273-0038 www.troymusichall.org