Joshua Redman’s set on Monday kicked off with what could be described as a deviation from his usual style. His group played “A Message To Unsend,” the opening track from his most recent album, Words Fall Short, a moody 7/8 fare with a mournful melody. His opening solo kept to the piece’s mood, sticking mainly to subdued lyrical phrases before passing the baton to pianist Paul Cornish. The surprisingly morose opening to the show was over before the end of the piece, as Redman soon returned for a second solo, this time exploding with energy and exploring the full range of the saxophone, just the way any longtime listener will know he can do. Tonal shifts like this were a constant throughout the set, showcasing the group’s strong ability to control the energy of their performance.

Redman’s group, it’s worth mentioning, is composed entirely of jazz’s ‘up-and-comer’ generation, with all members well below the age of 35. Paul Cornish, bassist Philip Norris, and drummer Nazir Ebo are certainly names to watch out for.

A highlight of the show came during the piece “Borrowed Eyes,” with Norris’ extended bass solo. He played with impressively lyrical phrasing and occasional flourishes of blues language, filling the room with sound in a way that bassists rarely manage to do. Equally memorable was the collective improvisation on “She Knows,” particularly the interplay between Redman’s saxophone and Cornish’s piano, which emulated (intentionally or otherwise) the chatter between birds in a forest.

Incidentally, however, the set saved its highest peak for the encore, when the group played “Jig-A-Jug,” a blues recognized from his ‘90s album Spirit of the Moment: Live at the Village Vanguard, honouring a request they had previously received from a nameless but persistent listener. Here, the gloves really came off, with each member seeming to relish the familiar blues form and enjoy the moment. There is a sense of extravagance that Joshua Redman plays with, which, coming from anyone else, might seem egotistical. From Redman, however, you can tell when watching him that he’s not doing it to show off; he’s doing it to entertain himself – and thoroughly succeeding.

PAN M 360 had the chance to speak with Joshua Redman the day after the performance. He discussed the state of jazz, upcoming projects, and more.

PAN M 360: There’s a long history in a jazz world of established musicians, jump-starting the careers of younger ones through having them in their band. Was the choice to have a younger band on your latest album [Words Fall Short] and on this tour a deliberate one or was that just who you found yourself wanting to play with?

Joshua Redman: No, it absolutely wasn’t. And it’s funny, like, all of a sudden, I’m getting asked these questions all the time, like, all of a sudden, I’m the old guy (laughs). I mean, I of course recognize that pretty much all the bands I’ve been in before were either my peers, musicians from my generation or very close, or older musicians, or some combination. And this is the first time that I’ve been in a band with musicians from an entirely different generation, and I’m old enough to be their parent! But I never made a deliberate, conscious choice to get a young band. It wasn’t about that at all. The way this band came into being was that I made a record with the vocalist, Gabrielle Cavassa, where are we? We made that record with a kind of an all-star band. Brian Blade was on drums, Joe Sanders was on bass, Aaron Parks was on piano, and we knew that that band wasn’t going to be able to tour long-term for that project. I knew, when they were building the tour, that I had to put a band together that could commit for a long period of time. And so I was looking for a band of great musicians that would really fit that project and hopefully commit to it. I’ve been listening a lot and asking around, and now, it’s a little embarrassing, but you can do a lot of research on the internet, you know, you see clips on YouTube or whatever. And I even did some gigs with these musicians leading up to it in various combinations. So I was really confident that this was the right band for that project. And that band kind of came together playing music that wasn’t originally played by them or written for them. And, you know, these guys, they were just able to learn music so quickly, but also so deeply, and get to the heart of whatever the song was. It was like, whatever I threw at them, they would make it sound good. And so I started to bring in some original music, I guess it was fall of 2024. I was like, oh, I’d love to make a record with these guys and so we recorded Words Fall Short, with original music, and we’ve been touring that – that came out in June of last year – and we’ve been touring that since. We actually have a new record. There’s another record of all original music. It’s a double record. Probably won’t come out till the end of next year.

PAN M 360: So, we talked a little bit about generation gaps. Would you say that there are any big differences that you see in the jazz communities that you operate in now versus when you were first coming up? 

Joshua Redman: That’s a really good question. I mean, first of all, I want to say that, even though they are younger musicians from a different generation, my relationship with them really isn’t any different than it is with musicians of my own generation. Like, I don’t look at this band in any way different than any band I’ve looked at. 

PAN M 360:Not trying to be, like, a mentor or anything necessarily. 

Joshua Redman: No, I really don’t feel like that. I mean, I feel like I’m learning way more from them than they could ever learn from me. And, I mean, I just have so much respect for them and each of their individual perspectives, what they bring as a group. I mean, my goal as a band leader is just to try to create the conditions in which musicians can fully realize their individuality, but within a true group, collective context. So I’m responsible for that. I pick the tunes and write most of the tunes, and think about how to structure the sets, and run the rehearsals when we have the rare chance to rehearse, but I honestly can say I don’t interact with them any differently than I would, you know, Brad Mehldau, or Christopher McBride, or Brian Blade, you know? Some of the beauty of this music is that, yes, there is a great history and a legacy, and there is a tradition of mentorship. But there’s always so much cross generational pollination and interaction in this music – I think more so than in other forms of music – that to me, jazz can kind of collapse, whatever theoretical boundaries are between different people from different generations or different walks of life or whatever. What was the original question?

PAN M 360: I guess about whether the way things operate, the scene has changed much since you were first coming up. 

Joshua Redman: It’s hard to say. I mean, I came up in a time where, you know, there was kind of, I mean it wasn’t like there was a jazz Renaissance, ’cause jazz has always been in great shape musically. But there was a bit of a resurgence in terms of jazz’s penetration into popular culture. The record industry was in a very different place, right? You know, pre-streaming. So I think there were more opportunities for musicians. There were more gigs, there were more places to play. It was easier to put tours together. It was harder to make a record. It’s so easy to make a record now which is great. But there’s just, I don’t want to say that there’s a glut, but so much music out there, and it’s so easy to get that music into people’s ears, you know, but are people really listening? And I mean, there were gatekeepers, and they weren’t necessarily the right gatekeepers, but at least there was some filter, you know. Now there’s so many demands on your attention, and we’re living in an age where people have no attention, right? So I think that’s different. But the music, I think, is in great shape. I mean, I’m playing with three of the greatest musicians I feel like are playing today. I’m lucky. There’s so many great young musicians coming up, you know, It’s going to be okay.

PAN M 360: Yeah, I hear a lot of musicians say, and I see myself, that the scene has always been there, whether or not it’s at the forefront of the mainstream, or being seen by the people who aren’t in the scene.

Joshua Redman: I think so. I think the one thing you have to be mindful of when the scene hasn’t penetrated the culture as much, and also with the growth of the music academy and jazz education – which is an amazing thing – but there is the possibility of it becoming a more insular scene. I mean, of course, musicians play music for other musicians. Of course, other musicians are going to relate to your music and understand your music and understand the language and the nuts and bolts of it better than anybody. I think it’s natural for musicians to want to be embraced by and validated by their fellow musicians, but I think it’s also very important for musicians, jazz musicians in particular, to have opportunities to play their music for people who aren’t musicians, and who haven’t gone to music school. There’s no shortage of musicians who are doing that. But I think especially within what I might call, for lack of a better term, mainstream acoustic jazz, that there’s maybe a little bit more of a possibility of it becoming a little too removed and a little too insular. 

PAN M 360: So thinking about the new record, a lot of the titles come from passages in literature. Is that like a concept that you set out with or it kind of developed along the way? 

Joshua Redman: No, I mean, a lot of times when I’m writing songs, I rarely have a title, you know? And then I’ll after a while settle on something, sometimes the title changes, but ultimately, I’m trying to capture something about how I feel about the music. And one of the one of the strengths and the weaknesses of instrumental jazz is, there are no words, so it becomes that much more broadly interpretable. And when I select a title, I want to find a title that somehow captures what might be some of the meaning of the music without it feeling too limited. But it just so happened, that’s how it worked out. I’ve never written a song about a book or about a passage. I’m not a voluminous reader, but literature has had a profound impact on me. It just seemed natural. 

PAN M 360: It comes in through osmosis, maybe. 

Joshua Redman: Yeah, yeah.

PAN M 360: Cool. So, I wanted to talk a little bit about the concert last night. I noticed a lot of the solos that you took, kind of went in quite different directions. Specifically, when you played ‘A Message to Unsend’, you took two solos, and one of them was a bit more, I guess, there was more restraint in it, and it, like, stayed with the mood of the main melody of the tune, and then later on, you came back, with more dynamic range. I wonder, do you ever come into playing a solo with a preconceived idea of what the solo’s gonna be? Do you plan at all, or does it all just come off the cuff? 

Joshua Redman: So, I mean, the easy answer is no. Because for me, it’s improvisation, and there’s something sacred about that, you know? That doesn’t mean that I’m never gonna play the same thing twice, of course, I play the same thing millions of times. I think there’s a platonic ideal of improvisation, which is that you are creating something wholly and completely new in the moment, something that’s never been said before, that it’s a reaction to how you’re feeling and thinking in the moment. And I think it’s an ideal worth striving for, but it’s also an impossible ideal. I mean, we’re using language, we develop language through our practice, through osmosis, through listening. And I don’t like the idea of muscle memory, because I want everything to feel like it’s intentional, but, you know, when you’re in the heat of musical battle or whatever, there’s a certain automaticity that will be there, So I never have a sense of, like, okay, this is what I want to play on this solo, at this time. You know, for me, the feeling is just being in the moment and letting it flow in the most spontaneous, natural way possible. Now, that being said, as we play songs night after night, and as those songs tend to fall in certain places in the overall narrative of the show, I think that there are certain natural, textural, emotional arcs that become a part of the meaning of the song. So, with that song, ‘A Message to Unsend’, which is often the tune that we open with, to be very simplistic about it, it’s kind of like a big arc. You know? Like, I play and there’s a little arc, and then [Paul Cornish] picks up, and then I’ll pick up from him, and kind of structurally and emotionally, we’re building to a kind of climax at the end of the very last bridge of the song. And then it comes back down and the energy drops kind of dramatically and it becomes very intimate again. So in that sense there’s a certain kind of meaning has been built into the song. 

PAN M 360: You come into a way of playing it, I guess. 

Joshua Redman: Yeah, yeah. But within that, there’s a lot of difference.

PAN M 360: I know that you mentioned you’ve been touring a bunch for this new album. You have a bunch of touring coming up in the summer and the fall. Do you tend to write a lot of music while you’re on tour? 

Joshua Redman: No. I’ve written very few songs, actually, on tour. I have written some, but these days, I write very infrequently. There was a point in which I was like, maybe I’m not gonna ever write another song again. And then I wrote a bunch of songs for this band! There will come a time where I can’t play anymore, [and] I can’t imagine what that’s gonna be like. But I can imagine a time when maybe I just feel like I don’t have anything left to write, you know? I think Stevie Wonder said, you only get, like, 100 good songs – I’m sure that’s not true, ’cause he’s probably got 500 – but sometimes I’ll be writing something and I’ll be like, oh, this is cool. And then, I’ll step back and I’m like, this is just like something I wrote 15 years ago. Yeah, we’ll see!

Photo by Benoît Rousseau

Immanuel Wilkins, 38, is considered among the most accomplished alto saxophone players and improvisers of the current Jazz world. His phenomenal articulation, his multi-layered sound, and his high creative capacity tell us that he is one of the best. But obviously not a big star for the mass audience; musicians and connoisseurs admire him so far. So let’s try to make him bigger! Originally from Pennsylvania, he lives in New York City, where he studied at Juilliard School with Bruce Williams, Steve Wilson and Joe Temperley. His debut album as a leader, Omega, was released in 2020 with the same nucleus playing at the Montreal Jazzfest – Micah Thomas on the piano, Daryl Johns or Ryoma Takenaga on the bass, Kweku Sumbry on the drums; those musicians also recorded the recent live album at the Village Vanguard. 

So this is why PAN M 360 wanted to interview this great African American sax virtuoso, improviser and composer. Immanuel Wilkins answered generously to our questions, a few hours before his excellent set on June 27.

PAN M 360 : I know you, well, I saw you playing  a long time ago at the Jazz Gallery in New York.

Immanuel Wilkins : Oh man, okay. So you’ve been around for a while.  

PAN M 360 : Yeah it seems so!  So you come from a great lineage of alto sax players

Immanuel Wilkins : Definitely. 

PAN M 360 : Your description and explanation will be better than mine.

Immanuel Wilkins:  Yeah, man, I mean, yeah, for me, I mean, yeah, the people I grew up, my first love was Kenny Garrett when I was young back then.

PAN M 360 : Very heavy alto.

Immanuel Wilkins: Yeah, exactly, yeah, super, like, I mean, full sound. 

PAN M 360 : He was married with a Montreal woman.

Immanuel Wilkins: Oh, really? Wow, okay, man, I didn’t know that. Yeah.

PAN M 360: His wife Sayda, is the daughter of the late Sayd Abdul Al-Khabyyr; she was a very good flute player.

Immanuel Wilkins: Wow, incredible. Yeah, I started out listening to Kenny, and then from there it was like Johnny Hodges and Ben Webster, a lot of tenor players too, like. 

PAN M 360 : Johnny Hodges is very soft, quite different from Kenny Garrett!

Immanuel Wilkins : Yeah, yeah, yeah. He was  a great player, I love him. And then in college I started listening to Ornette Coleman, and Ornette really changed things for me. He was like, he was the best, the best one for me. He was really, I mean, yeah.

PAN M 360 : Did you have the chance attending Prime Time band concerts?

Immanuel Wilkins : Oh, man, I wish, I wish, but I got to study, when I was really young, but I studied with two members of Prime time.

PAN M 360 : With Jamaaladeen Tacuma?

Immanuel Wilkins : Yeah, yep, exactly, Jamaladeen, who was in Philly, and this other cat, Charles Ellaby.  

PAN M 360 : Yeah, I know, I saw this, well, I’m old, so I saw them many times. 

Immanuel Wilkins : Oh, killing, yeah, man, I wish I got to see them, man, they’re a great band.  

PAN M 360 : Years later fortunately, we see a new interest for jazz and you are absolutely part of this new historical influx of energy in the jazz world after many years.

Immanuel Wilkins : Yeah, totally.

PAN M 360 : How do you see yourself in that?

Immanuel Wilkins: I mean, I see myself amongst a bunch of friends who I went to school with, you know? I mean, like, I feel like I kind of just lucked out when I moved to New York. Just the names of people, like Gifton Gellin, Kalia Vandever, Leslie Mock, Joel Ross, James Francis, Jeremy Dutton, to name a few. I mean, there were so many people who, like, upon moving to the city, like, were my age, making really great music, and so it was just nice to be able to start working with them pretty early, you know?

PAN M 360 :  Yeah. And do you go back often to Philadelphia? 

Immanuel Wilkins: Yeah, I do, I do. I spend about 50% of my time there. I have my apartment in New York, but I’m back in Philadelphia all the time.

PAN M 360 :  So now let’s see about what you’re presenting in this summer tour, after releasing Volume 1 at the Village Vanguard on Blue Note Records.

Immanuel Wilkins : Yeah, man, I mean, this is a cool period for us. I feel like this is the first time that I think we’re aware of how long we’ve spent together. You know, like, this is the first time we’re aware of our age as an ensemble. You know what I mean? Like, we’re approaching ten years soon, and maybe a year or two, we’ll be at ten. I think we’re at like eight now. And I think, yeah, like this time kind of just marks like a point at which we feel like we’re, you know, we feel like we’re a unit. We feel like there’s like some synergy and there’s, like, a language there, you know, that feels telepathic, you know.  And I feel like my first three records, I really was occupied with conceptual recordings.

And this one, I felt kind of freed up to make the kind of technology of the ensemble the concept. You know, that is the meaning. You know, the meaning is just like how four people kind of work together, you know. And so, yeah, I mean, it’s been great. It feels good.

PAN M 360 : If we talk about artistic direction and the way your ensemble and your own aesthetics is going to go in the next, well, the close future. So, do we expect something in the jazz spectrum of expressions? 

Immanuel Wilkins : Man, that’s a good question. I have no idea where I stand in the context of jazz music right now, but I definitely feel like I’m always trying to reinvent myself and challenge myself to do different stuff. Yeah, I feel like I’m always just trying to get to the next thing. So, yeah, I feel like the real goal, the real goal is to have people who listen to the music, who are radically committed to listening, you know, and have trust and give the artist the benefit of the doubt. You know, I think that’s the most important thing that a listener can do.

You learn a lot as a listener and you learn a lot as a musician that way in which, you know, I like I want to be. I want to feel free to experiment and do, you know, crazy stuff, you know, and not have it cancel my career, not have it in my career. 

PAN M 360 : You can do both so well !

Immanuel Wilkins : Yeah, yeah.

Photo by ProductionsNOVAK