Release Date: July 10, 2020
Undertow
Moe Honk
Silly Little Love Song
Right Back Round Again
Floppy Diss
Father
Your Part To Play
Players:
Joshua Redman (saxophone), Brad Mehldau (piano), Christian McBride (bass), Brian Blade (drums)
RoundAgain
The members of the original Joshua Redman Quartet—Redman (saxophone), Brad Mehldau (piano), Christian McBride (bass), and Brian Blade (drums)—reunite with the July 10, 2020 release of RoundAgain, the group’s first recording since 1994’s MoodSwing. The album features seven newly composed songs: three from Redman, two from Mehldau, and one each from McBride and Blade. A live version of Redman’s “Right Back Round Again” may be seen here, in a video directed by Matthew Beighley:
Redman says of his first group as a bandleader, which was together for approximately a year and a half: “I realized almost immediately that this band wouldn’t stay together for very long. They were without a doubt, for our generation, among the most accomplished and innovative on their respective instruments. They were already all in such high demand—everyone wanted to play with them! And they all had such strong and charismatic musical personalities—destined to start soon pursuing their own independent visions. I knew better than anyone else just how incredibly lucky I was to have even that short time with them.”
In the intervening decades, each has played with one or more of the others on various occasions, but all four had never properly reunited. “I knew it would happen, but I didn’t know when,” Redman admits. “We were all so busy, and we needed the space, both in our schedules and in our creative development.”
“We would have done it ten years ago if it were up to me,” Mehldau insists. “Josh, Christian, and Brian are all my heroes. It’s like playing with The Avengers.”
Blade adds, “This band is like a turntable where the stylus was lifted but the turntable is still spinning. We just had to drop the needle, and there we were with all of the information we had gathered. It has gotten deeper because of life itself, and because Joshua, Brad, and Christian plumb the depths every day.”
“These guys have grown exponentially,” McBride insists. “They are super-monsters now, and playing with them gave me a hard look at myself. And when you’re intimate creating art, even if you don’t play together for twenty years, you only need two bars to realize what the feeling is about, because the feeling never leaves.”
RoundAgain Liner Notes
Back then I didn’t have a clue. But I had the good sense (and even better fortune) to surround myself with those who did.
Nowadays I’m no less clueless. But suddenly, somehow, I know too much.
Sure, I miss that era of exuberant introspection, of aggressive self-doubt, of embryonic taste, and quickcalculated risk. But I’m also grateful those days are long gone, and (YouTube rabbit holes notwithstanding) receding ever further from view.
Making wise choices is the right thing to do, and a rite of passage through middle age. Good decisions sound great; but they don’t always look so hot, nor do they necessarily help you sleep better at night.
In a music of the moment, nostalgia and regret have little place. Pause to reminisce, to celebrate or mourn, or to overindulge the hypothetical; and you’ve already lost your place, dropped the beat, everyone else halfway through the next chorus, the alternate changes long since having passed you by.
A great musician once told me, “You can’t escape yourself.” Truer words there never were. And yet, I’m still running—harder (if not faster) than ever. I guess this feeling of never being happy with what I’ve done will always be a fundamental part of who I am.
Thankfully, there exists a respite, a sanctuary, a home—a place where you can momentarily reclaim that which you thought you’d lost, and at the same time catch a fleeting glimpse of all you’d ever hope to gain. When you are right there, on the bandstand, in the thick and thin, the push and pull, the ebb and flow of it, making music, together, with others, who know you, who understand you, who hear you, who love you—that’s when you are the most completely and assuredly, and the least conditionally or escapably, yourself.
Yes. Better players help you play better. Improvisation is a team sport. Excellence can be infectious; greatness sometimes even temporarily transferable. Spontaneity abhors a vacuum. Invention is seldom remote. I, for one, could never take a solo on my own.
So what, then, of that so-vaunted Individuality? How does it spring? Where does it flow?
Is it not within our inspired interactions that our truest and richest identities are forged? Might it not be through our shared imagination that our deepest and most personal artistry unfolds?
When, in jazz, comes the I without the We? And absent the We, whom is left but an inchoate, wandering I?
An individual musician is a temperament, a perspective, a stylist, a voice. But a band, at its best, is an organism, a faith, a sound, a groove. Perhaps, in music at least, there indeed exists a collective Self.
Every gathering is an opportunity for dialogue, for discovery, for consensus, occasionally even for communion. Seize the opportunity. Honor the occasion. Play your part. And you may just find, half a lifetime later, the pendulum steadily swinging, right back ‘round again, that it is now, more than ever, your part to play.
Joshua Redman
January, 2020