Profile
Sax and the Cities
From his hometown of Fort Worth to hippie San Francisco and hip New York, jazz journeyman Dewey Redman has always been a player.
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Dewey finally made the move east, though even after woodshedding in San Francisco, he was insecure about his chances in New York. He had recorded a rollicking free-jazz debut album, Look for the Black Star, and had grown considerably as an artist. Yet at 36, he was much older than most of the New York scenesters, and musicians he had met on the West Coast were snubbing him. Worse, his first Manhattan gig came with a sucker punch. "It was Sonny Simmons, Sunny Murray, and me," Dewey recalls. "End of the first set, a brother comes up to me and says, 'Wow, man, what is your name?' I said, 'Dewey Redman.' He says, 'You just got in town, huh?' I said, 'Yeah.' 'Oh, wow, how long have you been here?' I said, 'A month or so.' Then he asks me, 'Where are you from, brother?' I said, 'I'm from Texas, actually, but I came from San Francisco.' And he said, 'You need to go back to Texas 'cause you sound like shit.'" Clearly, his summer of love was over.
Dewey frequented Coleman's SoHo loft, where they jammed with Anthony Braxton, among other greats. "Ornette would play for awhile, and then he would stop for awhile," Dewey recalls. From there the relationship grew. "One day he said, 'We're gonna record with Jimmy Garrison and Elvin Jones [Coltrane's longtime rhythm section].' We had a couple of rehearsals, but I was terrified, man." Eventually Garrison would calm him down, and the sessions — Dewey's second time ever in a recording studio — would prove fruitful, yielding Coleman's 1968 Blue Note albums New York Is Now and Love Call. Dewey's tenor infused the proceedings with an improvisational spirit that irrevocably forced him into the forefront of New York's avant-garde.
Suddenly, Dewey was hot. "I was in a trio with Keith Jarrett and Paul Motian in the late sixties," remembers longtime Coleman associate Charlie Haden. "Keith had heard Dewey on some of Ornette's records and loved his playing. When I introduced Dewey to him, he made it a quartet." The persnickety Jarrett, with his by-the-book approach, was nothing at all like Coleman, who implored his musicians to "create as if you were the leader." Dewey toured Europe and America with both bands and recorded an album with Haden's Liberation Music Orchestra.
Despite all this activity, however, Dewey's own work was his primary concern. He found time to release four well-reviewed albums in the seventies, full of soulful and haunting compositions; yet his late start seemed to keep him one step behind his peers. Wonderfully conceived and executed, his own cutting-edge material was overshadowed and overlooked.
Though Coleman was off the scene at the end of the seventies, Dewey would find himself again in the midst of the visionary's influence. Guitarist Pat Metheny's 80/81 was a Coleman-inspired tribute that featured Redman and Haden. Old and New Dreams was even more of an homage — a group consisting of Redman and the three original members of Coleman's quartet (Haden, Don Cherry, and Ed Blackwell). "Ornette wasn't playing then, and we wanted to keep the music going," Haden explains. "We made an identity for the band and made albums and everybody loved them. I think Old and New Dreams is one of the best bands that ever played."
Jazz fans everywhere agreed, but the positive reaction doubled back on Dewey. "A strange thing happened," he says. "I would go to promoters, and they'd say, 'No, man, we're not going to hire you on your own. If you play with Old and New Dreams, then we'll hire you.' I couldn't get gigs. So one day I called up Charlie and Blackwell and Cherry and I said, 'Look, man, get another saxophone player, 'cause I got to have my little thing.'" Indeed, to the consternation of the others, he turned down many lucrative tour offers. "It was very difficult for me," he says. "For two or three years I didn't work at all. I don't know how I made it." During this period, he did manage to record one of his finest albums, The Struggle Continues, one of only four released under his name in the eighties. And, in time, he was able to gig on his own again, but Old and New Dreams' high profile did little to advance his solo career. "Dewey is a very nice person," explains Coleman. "I get the feeling that he hasn't had the support musically and hasn't had the exposure he would like to achieve. So he's always in a low key."
The past few years have been difficult for Dewey. Though his album output doubled in the nineties, almost all of them were released by small, less visible labels like Enja and Palmetto. (Momentum Space, a recording of a 1999 trio date with Elvin Jones and Cecil Taylor, was put out by Verve — his first major label release in years.) He has suffered personal setbacks as well. In 1997 he was diagnosed with prostate cancer; though the disease is in remission, he is on medication and must constantly monitor his health. And last summer, his mother passed away. The day I saw him, he was back in Fort Worth to put her affairs in order, having timed the trip to coincide with an Austin concert a few nights earlier. That show — at which he emphasized his straight-ahead jazz skills, his avant-garde credentials notwithstanding — was his first Texas appearance in several years. These days, he claims, he can't even get a gig in his own hometown.
As Dewey has mellowed, his relationship with Joshua has grown. "It's funny, I find that the more I discover my own original voice, the more I'm starting to hear greater connections between what I do and what my father does," Joshua says. "There's a certain spirit and soulfulness and a kind of blues inflection and a certain approach to tone." Joshua, who reports without the slightest bitterness that he was raised "exclusively" by his mother, graduated from Harvard University and was on his way to law school when his love of music intervened. He got to know Dewey well only as an adult, joining him and his band to record and tour. "I've always realized that there's a very vague and indirect correlation between someone's talent as a musician and what they have to say artistically and their success in the professional world of music," Joshua says. "I've never seen my success, or what might be perceived to be my father's lack of success, as in any way reflective of what we're doing musically."
Dewey is proud of each of his three sons — who were born to different women — but the famous one remains a constant reminder of what could have been. Fans have given him Joshua's albums to sign, asking questions like "Do you play music too?" "My son has gotten everything that I never got: All the awards, and he's sold over a million CDs. He's just a remarkable young man. But it makes you wonder . . . "
He smiles impishly as he delivers what is no doubt a well-practiced line: "I tried to teach him how to be successful, but I don't think he listened to me."
Jeff McCord wrote about Negro League baseball players from Texas in the August 1999 issue of Texas Monthly.
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