James Farm
Wednesday, November 4, 2015
ALL FOR ONE R The latest JOSHUA REDMAN album relies on the force and presence of a new co-operative quartet that goes by the name of James Farm rather than the strength of Redman’s personality on its own.
eally classy contemporary jazz outfits like James Farm – plugged in to the Great Tradition but with ears wide open to the best music being made in other genres (you name it: rock, soul, classical, electronica) – don’t come along all that often, so it’s hardly surprising that journalists have been touting the group as “one of those rare breakthrough bands – Miles and Brubeck did it long ago – that appeals to a significant audience beyond the jazz audience” since their debut performance at the Montreal Jazz Festival in 2009.
Of course, when you look at the individual talents involved in the project – saxophonist Joshua Redman, pianist Aaron Parks, bassist Matt Penman and drummer Eric Harland – it’s hardly surprising that their self-titled debut disc (Nonesuch) should turn out to be such a mature and accomplished statement of intent. I got the chance to talk on the phone to Redman – one of the finest improvising musicians of his generation and an enormously genial interlocutor to boot – about the group and his own career more generally.
‘Chronos’ has a “narrative quality” as well as an atypical time signature, which Redman says is “a specialty of Aaron’s”. “It has many different parts to it, so it’s not the typical formula for jazz performance, which is to play a melody and then a series of solos over that melody.”
All the same, comparatively little was set in stone before the band began to record. They’d performed together live a dozen or so times, but, says Redman: “We didn’t really have a sense of what this band was until we went into the studio to record these tunes.” The songs may have a “narrative quality”, but that’s been achieved in an organic manner. “It’s jazz, so 95 per cent of what you hear is improvisation,” Redman affirms. “The heart and soul of it is improvisation.”
and chosen to explore his musical yearnings instead of going straight on to Yale to get started on that glorious legal career.
That must have been a strange way to relate to your father – through his records, I say. “You know, it’s only strange if you expect something else, and I didn’t know anything else,” Redman responds affably. “It wasn’t strange for me because it was my life. I think often when people ask about that relationship it’s as if they’re searching for a tension or a loss that doesn’t necessarily have to be there. It wasn’t like my father was around and he left. My father and my mother were never married, they never lived together. I was raised by my mother. I always loved and respected my father but I didn’t know him that well.”
Their relationship flourished after Redman’s arrival in the Big Apple, sax in hand. “It was actually quite a natural way to get to know him through playing music. There was an obvious and direct connection so it was a chance for me to learn from a master, play at his side and also get to know my father in the process.”
I begin by asking him about the name. “The band identity isn’t just a way to package our image,” Redman responds. The decision to opt for a group name was partly motivated by the fact that there’s no leader as such: the ‘Joshua Redman Quartet’, for instance, wouldn’t reflect their modus operandi – they operate as a democratic four-piece, with all members contributing tunes to the eponymous debut album. “We really thought it would lead to a different sort of musical expression. Musicians generally have so many different projects going on, and we thought this would be an opportunity to coordinate and integrate our musical visions.”
Not that he finds it easy to explain where James Farm came from or what it signifies. “It’s really just a name,” he laughs. “We went through a long and sordid and not-so-interesting process to get it. We just wanted a band name that we all liked. It doesn’t really have any meaning… or any meaning that’s worth sharing.”
The whys-and-wherefores of nomenclature aside, I ask Redman to tell me about the album and he picks out the Parks composition ‘Chronos’ as a defining track. “That song captures so many elements that this band is about, or so many of the directions that we seem to be moving in,” he says. “It’s a very propulsive tune, with a strong groove and rhythm. We’re all very rhythmic players – it’s a very physical band and one thing we’re all into is working with different grooves.” Part of the players’ emerging group ethos is the distinctive way they yoke together rhythmic complexity and “inherent tunefulness”. In the manner of the songs on Parks’ standout 2008 album, Invisible Cinema,
‘I DON’T SEE JAZZ AS
AN EXCLUSIVELY AMERICAN ART FORM, AND I NEVER HAVE’
– JOSHUA REDMAN
Though he’s barely into his forties, Redman has already enjoyed a rich and varied career in jazz. Not that he appeared destined to become a musician at all until his annus mirabilis of 1991, when he both graduated from Harvard summa cum laude and won the Thelonious Monk Competition. At the time he was due to go on to Yale to study law. I wondered whether he had ever regretted his decision to earn a living from blowing a horn instead. “Never, no!” he laughs. “If I had had nine lives, maybe one of them I could have spent as a lawyer crusading for social justice – hopefully [it would have been as] that kind of lawyer, there are many other types of lawyer too.”
On the other hand, it must have been obvious at some level that a career in jazz beckoned for Redman. After all, as the son of Dewey Redman, a key member of one of Ornette Coleman’s greatest bands, he could be described as part of a jazz dynasty. All the same, you’d be wrong to imagine the junior Joshua learning sax improv at his father’s knee. “I grew up listening to his music but I didn’t really get to know him until after I moved to New York, when I was 22 years old.” That was after he’d graduated from Harvard
Did the fact that his father was a saxophonist influence his own choice of instrument? “Not consciously – but, you know, Freud could have had a field day [with that]! I didn’t feel as though I chose the saxophone because I wanted to follow in my father’s footsteps. But obviously there are many things about our motivations and choices that we make that aren’t wholly conscious” – a fact that a great improvising musician in particular would be aware of. “If there’s something I’m doing that’s helping to carry on some of the spirit of my father’s music, then I’m proud, and I hope I’m doing it justice.” But, he concludes, creating a reed-based lineage wasn’t his original intention.
Having never consciously plotted a career for himself in music, after his move to New York Redman rapidly found himself adopted as an icon of the emerging young American jazz generation of the early 1990s, helped along among other things by that Thelonious Monk Competition win. A series of strongly promoted and extremely well-received albums for Warner Bros followed. How did it
32 MAY11 // Jazzwise feel to become an overnight star? “Being a star in jazz sounds like an oxymoron to me,” he laughs. “But very quickly I was able to have a career playing with my own musicians and making my own records. I managed to skip over a lot of hardship that quite a lot of players – a lot of great players – have had to endure to put food on the table.”
In many ways, Redman could be seen as the quintessential US ‘Young Lion’ of the premillennial years. How does he feel about the increasingly widespread view that, after decades of American hegemony, jazz no longer has a fixed home address? “I don’t see jazz as an exclusively American art form, and I never have,” he says. “In its origins and the early part of its history, it was primarily American but certainly now it’s a music of the world. There are jazz musicians everywhere doing interesting things and creative things. I don’t see myself as an American jazz musician first or as beholden to any particular tradition in jazz other than what excites me and attracts me.”
In support of this, he mentions his recent experience of playing with Norwegian musicians. Typically he’s not entirely convinced by the notion of the much-mooted ‘Nordic tone’. “Everybody is always very quick to try to put a label on musicians – you know, they have an American sound and so on. One thing I’m always struck by among musicians generally is the tremendous variety and diversity of approach.” The most he’s willing to offer by way of generalisation is that “musicians from Norway tend not to play swing-
based jazz out of a bluesy tradition” – although he’s quick to point to exceptions even to that rule. Of course, Redman’s own tastes away from the jazz tradition have often been noted. There was a cover of James Brown’s ‘I Got You (I Feel Good)’ on his self-titled 1993 debut and a version of Led Zeppelin’s ‘The Crunge’ on his 2005 Elastic Band album, Momentum, and his influences are regularly cited as including the likes of Prince and The Police. “People always make a big deal of that but I feel it was part of jazz from the beginning,” he says. “Jazz is a music that was cobbled together out of and born of so many other traditions.” Certainly, for the players who make up James Farm and their generation generally, music has no generic boundaries.
Though he had never played with Parks before, Redman had performed with his other current bandmates, Penman and Harland, as part of the SFJAZZ Collective, the highly influential ensemble created by Redman and SFJAZZ executive director Randall Kline in 2004. At the moment Redman has no plans to perform with them again, although he’s a warm advocate of such ventures and the opportunities they give musicians to hone their talents. “The great thing about that band was that it was structured in such a way that we had a fair amount of time to rehearse, so people could write very ambitious and very difficult music. I had a chance to learn how to play in all sorts of different rhythms and harmonies and structures that I wasn’t used to playing in.”
Talk of structures that allow artistic ambition to flourish brings us, naturally enough, to the subject of funding cuts. I mention the impact shrinking public subsidy is having in Britain. “I don’t think we’ve ever had very reasonable public subsidy in America for jazz,” says Redman. “The subsidies have generally come from private foundations. And those have been hit, probably harder than government subsidies in Europe, because when people have less money, they give less money.” Of course, successive UK administrations have been pushing for more widespread exploration of the US model of corporate sponsorship for the arts, but it’s clear that tough financial conditions will inevitably have a major impact on funding whether the money that’s underwriting them is public or private in source.
“It’s not the best economic climate for jazz right now in the United States. It’s particularly difficult for younger musicians who are just starting to make their way,” Redman continues, though his conclusion is typically upbeat. “But there’s still great music being made, and great musicians out there.”
Nor is he pessimistic about the place of jazz in general culture either. “There was a time – a short time – when jazz was a popular music of the day: the big-band/swing era in the late-1930s,” he allows. “But that hasn’t been the case since bebop… I don’t have any aspirations or wish for jazz to be ‘popular’. It would be great if it could reach a wider audience, but it’s a complex, demanding music. It’s a music that requires a lot not only of musicians but of listeners as well. It’s not music that caters to you; you have to work to listen to jazz. So in our culture, which is becoming increasingly about short attention spans and immediate gratification, jazz doesn’t serve those cultural trends at all well.”
But Redman’s realism about the reach of his music of choice in no way obstructs his ambitions for it. “Jazz can continue to be relevant and can continue to reach people. It might be a small number of people, but that small number of people can be moved in very exciting and profound ways.”