Album Review: Nearness by Joshua Redman

In the liner notes for his first collaboration with Brad Mehldau, guitarist Pat Metheny described how he first heard of the pianist. He was talking with saxophonist Joshua Redman one day and Redman couldn’t say enough good things about this young pianist he had just discovered. Metheny claims that later, while driving in his car, he heard Mehldau’s piano work on the track “Chill” from Redman’s album Moodswing.

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Nearness finds acclaimed jazz saxophonist Joshua Redman and pianist Brad Mehldau teaming up for a set of loose yet heartfelt duo performances. Collaborators since they first began playing together in Redman's quartet in the early '90s, Mehldau and Redman have forged their own distinct solo careers. While they have continued to work together in various settings, the duo put a spotlight on their creative friendship with their 2011 tour.

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American saxophone master Joshua Redman and his pianist compatriot Brad Mehldau are long-time collaborators, but this compilation of originals and standards recorded live in Europe in 2011 is their first duo album. They’re improvisationally inseparable on Charlie Parker’s Ornithology, as Redman’s tenor traces the shape of the tune while Mehldau capriciously deconstructs the harmony and rhythms. Thelonious Monk’s In Walked Bud coolly massages a jazz theme famous enough to be mostly implied.

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MAYNARD FERGUSON could play notes on the trumpet that were so high only dogs could hear them – or at least that’s what dogs tell us. By the late 80s, the Canadian horn blower, then in his 50s, was leading a new band that played a very palatable brand of radio-friendly jazz-funk (and, as a seven-piece, it was one that was much smaller than his previous ensembles). Documenting that period is a new two-disc set, Complete High Voltage (***Omnivore), which comprises the original Intima-released LPs High Voltage (1987) and High Voltage 2 (1989).

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