Can a star jazz improviser used to unimpeded spaces and a composers’ trio who have been wriggling in and out of confined ones for 15 years make music together? That’s the challenge that saxophonist Joshua Redman and The Bad Plus set each other at New York’s Blue Note club in 2011, and with this studio album of originals, and the answer was a big affirmative. Redman plays with imagination and empathy – in delicately hooty upper tones and darker ruminations over the piano hook and periodically sly rhythm lurch of bassist Reid Anderson’s As This Moment Slips Away, or negotiating Anderson’s anthemic standout song, Dirty Blonde. But Redman’s swing on his own Friend or Foe, his free-jazz blasting on pianist Ethan Iverson’s strutting Country Seat, and his ballad dialogue with Iverson on Anderson’s Lack the Faith But Not the Wine show how brightly his jazz flame burns. It’s a must for Joshua Redman and Bad Plus fans alike.
