Joshua Redman

Berkeley, Harvard, and a law degree never taken up

Joshua Redman was born on 1 February 1969 in Berkeley, California, to the saxophonist Dewey Redman and Renee Shedroff, a dancer and librarian. The parentage is the fact everyone reaches for first, though the household was his mother's; his father played in Ornette Coleman's bands and was largely elsewhere. Redman came up through Berkeley High School, graduating in 1986, and the music was one thread among several rather than the obvious career.

He read social studies at Harvard and graduated summa cum laude in 1991. Yale Law School accepted him. He deferred, moved to Brooklyn and started playing, and in the same year won the Thelonious Monk International Jazz Saxophone Competition — the result that converted a deferral into a decision. Warner Bros signed him off the back of it.

The law degree was never taken up. What survives of that route is audible in how he talks about music: the arguments are structured, the qualifications are real, and he tends to describe what a band does rather than what it means.

Warner Bros, and the habit of building bands

His self-titled debut arrived in March 1993 and drew his first Grammy nomination. Wish followed the same year. Through the 1990s and 2000s he moved between formats without settling: Freedom in the Groove in 1996, the trio-and-beyond experiments of Compass in 2009, the strings of Walking Shadows in 2013.

Alongside the leader records runs a second career in collectives. He co-founded the SFJAZZ Collective in 2000. He put the Joshua Redman Elastic Band together with the keyboardist Sam Yahel and the drummer Brian Blade. In 2009 he formed James Farm with the pianist Aaron Parks. RoundAgain, in 2020, reconvened an old quartet after a quarter of a century apart.

The pattern matters for what came later. Redman has rarely been a hired-gun soloist in front of an interchangeable rhythm section; the working band is the unit he thinks in, and he has replaced it roughly once a decade.

Blue Note, and handing the tune to a singer

Where Are We, released on 15 September 2023, was his first record for Blue Note and his sixteenth studio album as a leader. It was also the first on which he featured a vocalist. Gabrielle Cavassa sings across a thirteen-track sequence built from songs attached to American places — Philadelphia, Chicago, Baltimore, New Orleans, San Francisco — cut at Esplanade Studios in New Orleans with Peter Bernstein on guitar, Aaron Parks on piano and Brian Blade on drums.

The reception was strong: five stars in DownBeat, four in AllMusic and the Financial Times. Redman was on the DownBeat cover that September, and in May 2024 the Jazz Journalists Association gave him both Tenor Saxophonist of the Year and Record of the Year.

Redman has been direct about what a singer did to his own playing. "I love the human voice, who doesn't? It's the most beautiful instrument in the world," he told the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's magazine, adding that the tonal quality of Cavassa's voice "has expanded my tonal palette and expressive palette as a saxophonist". Stepping back from carrying every melody turned out to be the productive move.

The third quartet, and Words Fall Short

The band that backed the Where Are We tour in 2023 — the pianist Paul Cornish, the bassist Philip Norris and the drummer Nazir Ebo — stayed together. Redman has compared Norris to Christian McBride; Cornish, from a Houston musical family, has since signed to Blue Note himself. All three are a generation younger than their leader.

Words Fall Short came out of that. The quartet recorded at Oktaven Audio in Mount Vernon, New York, from 30 November to 2 December 2024, with Redman producing, and Blue Note released the album on 20 June 2025: eight originals, all his, written during the pandemic and running 45 minutes 29. Cavassa sings on "Era's End", Melissa Aldana plays on "So It Goes" and the trumpeter Skylar Tang appears on "Icarus".

Redman has said the record could not have been forced. "It's impossible for me to will a project into being," he told the Beverly Press. "This album came out of a working environment that inspired me to dig into compositions that hadn't found a home yet." On the band: "They're all young, but they're playing music that is very mature. It requires a lot of sensitivity and humility, patience and deep listening."

The Guardian made it its jazz album of the month in July 2025, praising an improviser's delight in the act of playing; Record Collector gave it four stars. The consensus is that it is quieter and more interior than its predecessor, and that the quartet, not the saxophone, is the subject.

Playing for Rollins

Sonny Rollins died at his home in Woodstock, New York, on 25 May 2026, aged 95. Redman booked studio time in New York within weeks of the news and built a record around eleven selections from Rollins's repertoire.

If Ever You Would Leave Us (we play for Rollins) was announced on 17 September 2026 and is due from Blue Note on 20 November, his third album for the label. The lead single is "Grand Street", from Sonny Rollins and the Big Brass, played with Peter Bernstein on guitar, Christian McBride on bass and Marcus Gilmore on drums. The wider cast takes in the pianist Kevin Hays, the bassist Larry Grenadier, the tenor saxophonist Chris Potter and the singers Cécile McLorin Salvant and Gabrielle Cavassa.

Redman described Rollins as "a musical father, grandfather and godfather, all rolled into one", and dated the debt precisely: finding Saxophone Colossus at ten or eleven. "That was my gateway, and my North Star." The parenthesis in the title — we play for Rollins — does the work a dedication usually does, and keeps the record from being billed as a memorial.

Where he stands, autumn 2026

The quartet is the live proposition at the moment, not the Rollins cast. Redman played the Musical Instrument Museum in Phoenix on 23 September 2026 and opens The Wallis's season at the Bram Goldsmith Theater in Beverly Hills on 25 September, with the Skylar Tang Quartet supporting. Vivo Rio in Rio de Janeiro follows on 30 September.

October runs through the Blue Llama Jazz Club in Ann Arbor on the 11th, the Singletary Center for the Arts in Lexington on the 15th and the Cullen Theater in Houston on the 17th, where DACAMERA opens its jazz season and Cornish plays his home town. The George Weston Recital Hall in North York, Ontario, follows on 19 November — the day before the album lands — and the Wisconsin Union Theater in Madison is booked for 1 May 2027. Three countries, a schedule that leaves room rather than filling every night.

He is 57, eighteen months into a band he clearly intends to keep, with a record out in November that puts him back in front of the horn players he grew up on.