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Don Redman: Setting the Template
by Jim Gerard
As someone who came to jazz as a young man in the 1970s, I can attest that subsequent generations of both its chroniclers and, even sadder, its practitioners, have succumbed to the peculiarly and regrettable American disease of a-historicism. They've shoved jazz history through a sieve, reducing it from an epic tale of heroic evolution with a cast of hundreds--if not thousands--to a denuded sliver of text that could fit in a single tweet--one that might read like ...
Continue ReadingThe Don Redman Orchestra: Geneva 1946
by Jack Bowers
From an historical standpoint, it’s beneficial to have on compact disc this concert date by saxophonist Don Redman’s orchestra, recorded by Swiss Radio during a tour of Europe undertaken only one year after the end of World War II. Redman’s well–disciplined orchestra nimbly straddled the fence between two eras — swing and bop — and numbered in its ranks such acclaimed sidemen as Don Byas, Tyree Glenn, Quentin Jackson and a 25–year–old pianist named Billy Taylor. In other particulars the ...
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