Don’t you hate trying to find courses to take? Using the timetable and calendar books is bad enough, but the archaic website is even worse! I hate searching for courses, too, so I decided to create a website to make the task easier. Looking for 3rd year psych courses? Just put in “PSY3″ as a course code and hit “Show me!”

Check it out!

Unfortunately, ROSI wasn’t so kind to me this year. I’m in my final year of undergraduate studies and got the late 10 AM enrollment time…leaving me on waitlists for courses that I desperately want to take. But alas, that is the life of a U of T student.

Read what other students are tweeting about course enrollment…some were successful, others, well, not so much!

This year’s Toronto Jazz Festival played host to two legendary groups in two awe-inspiring and sold-out venues: The Dave Brubeck Quartet at Koerner Hall on Tuesday and The Keith Jarrett Trio with Gary Peacock and Jack DeJohnette at The Four Seasons Opera Centre on Wednesday. The Dave Brubeck Quartet gave a solid performance but one that has become somewhat less of a novelty since it was nearly identical to his concert last year and the year before. The Keith Jarrett Trio, on the other hand, gave a concert of sheer ingenuity and brilliance from start to finish, though I’d expect nothing less from this group of masters.

Dave Brubeck Quartet

On Tuesday, the current rendition of the Dave Brubeck Quartet, with Bobby Millitello on saxophone, Michael Moore on bass, and Randy Jones on drums, took the stage at Koerner Hall for one set of standards and one set of what Brubeck does best: his own pieces in odd time signatures. In the first set, they played, among others, “Gone with the Wind”, “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”, “On the Sunny Side of the Street”, and a medley of Duke Ellington Songs: “C Jam Blues”, “Mood Indigo” and “Take the A Train”. The interpretations were competent and fun to listen to, but this really isn’t where Brubeck shines and there are other pianists who have better renditions of these pieces. Nevertheless, it was nice to hear a few pieces that weren’t performed in the last couple of years.

But things got going in the second set, with Dave Brubeck’s son Matthew Brubeck on cello, as they dug into Brubeck’s trademark pieces, which are incredibly hard not to get lost in when counting is done by mere mortals. They played “Three to get ready, Four to go”, which has two bars in 3/4 time followed by two bars in 4/4 time, and then improvisation in a totally different time signature altogether and they kept time. When they played “Unsquare Dance”, a real earworm, in 7/4, they encouraged the audience to clap along with the drums: some people tried and many waited way too long to stop their out-of-time embarrassing clapping efforts. The group, however, had no trouble keeping time. “Blue Rondo a la Turk” was a wonderful foot-tapping experience, of which Brubeck said “this is one of the hardest pieces I’ve ever written for myself. I don’t know why I did that to myself. Every time I go to play it I’m always worried I won’t be able to. But Mathew is here to help me out”. They played a couple of pieces in 5/4, one that we didn’t all know, and one that we did (“Take Five”) and “The Sermon on the Mount” which is perfectly suited for having a cello in the ensemble.

When he takes a solo, Dave Brubeck does a lovely job, with great technique and jive. Mathew Brubeck also brings a beautiful edge to the pieces with his cello, adding an unexpected but perfectly agreeable layer of detail. But their bandmates can’t keep up, except in their ability to literally keep time. Michael Moore is a perfectly satisfactory bassist when he’s playing the bassline but he’s not Stanley Clarke or Charlie Haden or Gary Peacock so his solos aren’t that exciting. Randy Jones is your average run-of-the-mill jazz drummer, though he may have a slightly heightened awareness of time, and Bobby Millitello’s playing rubs me the wrong way: he croons too much without enough definition or character. But there’s something perfunctory about the way these folks trade off solos and play in a style from year’s past without the expected modernity of a solo. There’s little interplay between the group to keep the music charged and so while the individual parts, well the Brubeck parts anyway, are a joy to listen to, the rest falls a bit flat.

This year’s Brubeck concert, the fifth year running at the festival (and the third one I’ve been at), was perhaps the best executed concert. The quartet format, with the addition of the cello, is the right format for Brubeck to be playing at and Koerner Hall is a perfect venue for this group. The acoustics and the seating sure beat the hell out of the Nathan Phillips Square tent from last year, and the music itself was at a higher level.

Seeing Dave Brubeck in Toronto is an essential for every jazz fan. He is, after all, a jazz great for good reason, and no one else has replicated what he has done in weird time signatures. “Time Out” and “Time Further Out” sit satisfactorily in every serious jazz lover’s collection. But there are only so many pieces from each of these albums, and Brubeck seems to only like to play a few of those, albeit the better ones, so if you’ve seen it once, you’ve seen it all. Just make sure you go when it’s at an excellent venue.

Keith Jarrett Trio

The Keith Jarrett Trio, on the other hand, is a revelation every time they play. As a soloist, Keith Jarrett would easily sell out the Four Seasons Centre where his trio performed, but there’s an exciting additional dimension when he plays with the best jazz drummer, Jack DeJohnette, and the great bassist Gary Peacock. First of all, there isn’t a single low point to the concert: each moment can only be characterized as fantastic or more fantastic. I might even go so far as to say they reach perfection. In their extremely able hands, the music coruscates and they create an experience of immense beauty.

It is possible to listen to each of these magnificent players independently, focussing in on one in particular, and then rotating. But to do that would be to miss the richness of the texture they provide, the way in which they each carefully support one another yet find their own sound and complexity at the same time. When these masters improvise, they do it collaboratively without ever drowning out anything important. Keith Jarrett on piano, of course, leads the show, takes the melody and leads the improvisation. But listen to how Jack DeJohnette deviates from the norm, the subtle changes he makes, how he mimicks and supports what Jarrett does without copying him. And on bass, Peacock holds down the fort with a supportive but complex baseline that tends towards the melodic. The group played a variety of standards, including “My Funny Valentine”, “God Bless the Child”, and “Bye Bye Blackbird”. When they slow it down, it becomes so beautiful that it almost brought me to tears.

Keith Jarrett is probably the best jazz pianist alive right now and Jack DeJohnette is unquestionably the best living jazz drummer of any fame. So it’s no surprise that when they team up it’s dynamite. DeJohnette finds melody in his drumming and can actually make a beautiful line of the piano sound even more melodious rather than wrecking it with some banging. DeJohnette plays notes, not just rhythm. There is nothing run-of-the-mill about either of these two.

Halfway through the first set, Jarrett stopped in the middle of a piece because a note was out of tune on the piano. He asked the audience if “it sounds OK out there?”, and one clever-mouth chimed in “it sounds great, but our ears might not be as good as yours”. Jarrett proceeded to play the note in question repeatedly, commenting that it “sounded like ‘help!’” and that he owed Steinway a phone call to complain about their piano. He decided to go on but switched keys in order to evade the offensive sound.

At intermission, a brand new Steinway was rolled out on stage and fastidiously tuned: good thing they happened to have an extra Steinway Grand just lying around. This seemed to be to the satisfaction of Jarrett, who, after playing an even more amazing second set wowed the audience with not just one or two encores, but three encores. Thank goodness he liked the new piano and the hall. When he was here three years ago, we were treated to two fabulous encores because Jarrett liked the hall. And what’s not to like? The Four Seasons Opera House is a fantastic venue, a beautiful hall with outstanding acoustics: the perfect venue for these jazz masters. When I saw the trio three years ago, their last performance in Toronto, I wrote that it was the best concert I’d ever seen in my life. Well, I’d say their most recent concert on June 30th was exactly on par with the 2007 show: tied for the best concerts I’ve ever seen.

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Photo: Keith Jarrett performing at Carnegie Hall, September 26, 2005, Photo by Richard Termine, ECM Records

On Monday night, I squeezed into a horribly uncomfortable, plastic seat down at Nathan Phillips Square to enjoy what can only be described as a fabulous evening of jazz music, albeit with lame acoustics. The Dave Young Quartet opened the evening with local jazz piano virtuoso Robi Botos, Botos’s brother Frank on drums, Kevin Turcotte on trumpet, and band leader Dave Young on bass. The group played a solid set which included “Me and the Boys” by Coleman Hawkins, “Mean What You Say”, Cole Porter’s “Dream Dancing”, and a very beautiful Danish folksong. The band was at its best when Dave Young and Robi Botos took centre stage, either with the melody or their melodious solos. These two are very talented Canadian musicians, staples of the Toronto jazz scene and for good reason.

After intermission, the high energy Stanley Clarke Band featuring Hiromi took the stage by storm with Clarke on electric and acoustic bass, Hiromi on a Yamaha grand piano, Ruslan Sirota on keyboards, and Ronald Bruner Jr on drums. Clarke started out the evening with some electric bass, which proves that if he were a less serious musician he could have been a seriously big-time rock star: he’s cool, he’s assured, and he’s incredibly good. Clarke took good advantage of the portability of the electric bass to move around the stage and play some great call and response music with each of his musicians, standing up close to them, one by one, and jamming.

At the end of the first piece, an audience member shouted out “You’re the king, Stanley” and Clarke responded “I’m just a bass player, that’s all”. But he is the king, not because he can be a rock star, but because of his incredible talent and skill on the bass. He is a one-of-a-kind bass player who can take the melody and have it work, who can play at the top and the bottom of the piece, and who can make melodic music with just a few notes. Of course, his mastery is best show-cased on what is thankfully his preferred instrument, the acoustic bass. After the first piece, much to my surprise and glee, Clarke set aside his electric bass in favour of the acoustic bass, and moved us into some middle ground between jazz and jazz fusion, but far enough away from pure fusion that I was happy. It was especially a treat to hear some pieces from the “Jazz in the Garden” album such as Clarke’s “Paradigm Shift (Election Day)”.

The group then went on to play a Return to Forever piece, which was even better than the first piece and featured a truly memorable drum solo by Bruner. When he lost his first drum stick during the solo, Clarke turned to him and said “you lost your drumstick! WOW!”. And then the comedy routine began: in the middle of his solo he starts beating the drum with his foot so that his hands are free to take a drink and wipe his face. Once he’s using both hands again, with a new soon-to-be-lost drumstick, he starts beating the drums in a regular pattern. As the pattern becomes familiar, Bruner encourages the audience to clap along, when he decides to mischeviously skip a beat as though to say to us “hah! got you! didn’t play that note!”.

There were some sound troubles involving painful feedback which deafened the keyboardist and was really annoying Mr Clarke, so we took a break to fix the sound.

When the music got going again it was at its peak. Clarke and Hiromi are the real stars of the band and we really see them shine when they play together and each take their own solos.  These musicians are so in tune with each other that every note fits, every rhythm jives, and every second is musical.

Every time Clarke took a solo it was breathtaking. As I was watching him really slap that bass in a way I’ve never seen anyone play the bass before, I would glance back and forth at his band members and what I saw was sheer joy on Hiromi and Sirota’s face: they were just as blown away by Clarke as the audience was. And their smiles were infectious. Watching these musicians enjoy themselves onstage while they made music just made the already good music that much more engaging.

Stanley Clarke is the master of tension and release which makes it hard to do anything but get engaged and concentrate on the music. His music always melodic, in a way I’ve never heard the bass be melodic, and it’s infused with life and urgency. When I interviewed Joshua Redman, he commented that “jazz has a built in modernity and relevance through improvisation”, and the full meaning of that statement comes to light when watching Clarke solo and do joint solos with his bandmates.

The other star of the concert was Hiromi, an incredibly talented pianist whose well-refined jazz piano has such melodic force: it’s hard to believe she’s only thirty and can only just reach an octave. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen fingers move that quickly on a piano. As Hiromi told me in an interview before the festival “It requires a lot of practicing to be able to play the right notes, but I want to hear the sound and so I work hard to hear the sound.”  Her technique is impeccable but praising that alone would hardly do this musician credit. Hearing Hiromi play is like hearing a young, modern-day Oscar Peterson, but with her own personal and wonderful flare.

Clarke closed the concert by returning to the electric bass, which seemed to be a real audience pleaser. Don’t get me wrong, he’s wonderful on the electric bass, but sometimes the electric bass is about making noise. Clarke can make noise perfectly well but what makes him a standout bassist is his ability to turn the bass-line into melody and into music. When they finished their last piece and left the stage, someone came promptly onto the stage to remove Clarke’s bass, which seemed a clear signal that no encore was to be had. But a well-deserved prolonged standing ovation amazingly coaxed him back on stage for a solid encore. Overall, it was a great concert with enough jazz to please the real jazz fans, and enough rock-like flare to appease the fusion-obsessed.

Nevertheless, I can’t help thinking what a shame it is that these great musicians were put in such a terrible venue. The sound was loud and muddled making it often impossible to make out notes being played on the keyboard or hear Hiromi at all when she wasn’t solo-ing or duet-ing with Clarke. I was wearing drummers ear plugs the  whole time to fend off deafness while those with less tailored ear plugs were feeling their ears ringing. Great music deserves great acoustics. Toronto has so many fabulous venues that it seems a waste not to use them on this group for an already expensive concert ($40-50). But don’t let me being a curmudgeon deter you from seeing the Stanley Clarke Band featuring Hiromi live at the next opportunity, or for checking out “Jazz in the Garden” or the “Stanley Clarke Band”’s new album: the music speaks for itself and it has nothing but wonderful things to say.

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Image from Stanley Clarke’s flickr stream.

That’s the really frustrating thing about the humanities, even more than quantum physics – that so much of what happens in the humanities has small effects, maybe inspiring an article here, a dinner-time discussion there. If even. But every now and then, something earth-shattering comes along, some profound thought that changes the way we view ourselves, what we study, how we live, and what we do. Like the writings of Rousseau, Locke, Neitzsche, T.S. Eliot, that changed the way entire generations, entire centuries viewed themselves, or that changed, like Locke, the layout of the entire world. Celtic studies, Middle Eastern studies, and Eastern European studies are so contentious because people are still using them to define themselves. When Edward Gibbon wrote his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, his work said as much about Victorian England as about late antiquity.

And then there are those works in the humanities that will never shake the earth, but that make that which shakes the earth happen. Every discovery builds on previous thoughts. Robert Butts and Lawrence Cremin’s A History of Education in American Culture is not a groundbreaking work – it is only available in one copy in the entire U of T library system – but it informed the opinion of the court in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education supreme court case, which ended school segregation in the United States.

And then there are those ideas that never really gain a significance outside of their own fields, but that keep the fields going for their own sakes, that make us think about something more than just our taxes while we cook dinner or walk our dogs.

The humanities, far more than the sciences, are unpredictable. There are no set experimental steps that will take you to a set outcome, and the impact of research is nearly impossible to measure. So it’s all too easy to write the humanities off as useless, or a waste of money. The thing is, as important as our gadgets may be, society and social change are what define our lives and the way we live them – and neither of those things can function without the products of work in the humanities. That is why cuts in humanities funding, like King’s College London’s recent decision to scrap the UK’s only Chair in Paleography, are atrocious. That is why we owe it to ourselves to create the best possible environment for study and research in the humanities. That is why the humanities matter.

K-os @ Yonge & Dundas Square

8:30 pm on the sunny Friday evening found me hitting up one of the free NXNE shows at Y&D Square. Arriving just on time I valiantly dove into the beyond packed crowd of fans, random wanderers, and broke music lovers to get a better look at the Toronto emcee who strode onto the stage with a full sense of ownership. The crowd was diverse reflecting his appeal and his increasing mainstream status. K-os has a quick, rapid, and smooth delivery, that was backed by a full live band plus DJ/producer. Not bothering with intro stage banter, he launched right into his first song and then quickly blew through a couple of old hits like “Superstarr” and “Man I Used to Be” which prompted cheers. Like any good emcee K-os repeatedly engaged the crowd and by the time he launched into “Crabbuckit”, probably his most well known song, a significant number of the crowd were dancing as much as possible given the extremely tight confines.

DD/MM/YYYY @ The Gladstone Hotel Ballroom

It took until 11 pm for me to make it back into The Gladstone because Timber Timbre, a band that had topped multiple “best of” lists last year and which I definitely wanted to see, had previously played at 10 causing a massive overflow of people. Earlier the place had not only been over capacity, but was also endowed with a huge winding line of people outside that had stupidly arrived far too late.  After Timer Timbre’s set there was a sizable exodus, and only then was I able to make it in. Fortunately all was not lost as the next band was hometown heroes DD/MM/YYYY who play loud, jerky, fast, 80’s video game synthesizer drenched, rhythm and percussion driven math rock.

The 5 piece band produced a primal and guitar heavy trance inducing onslaught that was overlaid by brief, simple, and repetitive lyrics that are more embellishment and emphasis than content. Often the vocals are not even words, being yelps, grunts, and cries fractured into repeated beats. At their best the band has layered vocals and rhythms that play off of each other and can go from cacophony to order and back again repeatedly,  always with hard beats, high energy, and incredible stamina. There were barely noticeable stops between most of the songs with the band launching into the next one immediately after the last ended. In the rare moments of pause, the band engaged the audience by screaming phrases like, “You wanna dance? Please dance with us!”. Despite the sometimes sudden momentum and time signature changes mid-song, DD/MM/YYYY still play strangely and vividly danceable music that the crowd took full advantage of. The band is definitely, in my opinion, one that would be perfect to orchestrate a futuristic post-apocalyptic action chase scene.

C’mon @ The Gladstone Hotel Ballroom

At midnight the veteran band C’mon came on stage to a rowdy crowd ready to tear the place apart/ This was fitting since the band’s give’em f*#% reputation definitely preceded them, testified by a slightly drunk fan who had randomly accosted me during DD/MM/YYYY’s set to enthusiastically gush about the last C’mon show he was at. The 3 member band play very hard, basically metal rock with intense riffs. They are true performers with showmanship to spare and tons of in-your-face attitude. Ian Blurton (lead guitarist and main vocals) wasted no time to launch into theatrics and midway through the first song jumped right into the crowd and stumbled around like a slow drunk while still perfectly shredding his guitar before falling backwards onto the crowd. Katie Lynn Campbell (lead bass and vocals) spent the second song taunting the crowd exclaiming that the band and the rowdy crowd were “Not from Toronto, that’s why we’re partying”, despite the fact that the band definitely, and the crowd presumably, actually were. Not deterred, Campbell shouted out Sudbury and Sue Saint Marie and the crowd went wild, which Blurton responded to by accusing the crowd of lying. Finally the drummer Dean Dallas Bentley was barefoot and throughout the set seemed like a man possessed, wailing at his drum set with crazy energy while the crowd almost universally head banged to the beat. Near the end Campbell screamed out once again to the crowd, accusing them of “fading” while yelling out expletives. During the last song, Blurton, again the consulate performer, jumped into the crowd once more and tilted the mic stand downwards to finish the song by sharing vocals with a member of the crowd. After the raucous show I was prepared to call it a night and as I made my way out the door I noticed that C’mon was the first band to have managed to fill the ballroom all the way,  which was unsurprising and well deserved.

Mountains & The Trees @ Gladstone Hotel Ballroom

As I got there it was barely 9 pm and the Gladstone ballroom was practically empty despite the show and first band having started at 8 pm. The thin crowd was mostly media by the looks of the plentiful amount of expensive professional DSLR cameras in sight. The Mountains & The Trees, a friendly looking guy/girl duo was introduced refreshingly in an honestly enthusiastic way by a CBC Radio 2 personality. Fronted by Jon Janes, fittingly and perhaps purposely dressed in a classic logo CBC sweater, on acoustic guitar and Jillian Freeman on a rotating everything else, The Mountains are a likable folk band from the Maritimes that exude earnest rustic charm. Their music is light and sprightly, simple and sparing, consisting of personal story/narratives that have a small town nostalgia mixed with a yearning for bigger and greater things. They’re at their strongest with their more energetic songs and when they sing duet. Janes has an easy and welcoming style which he paired with humorous soft spoken but interesting banter. On another song named “Carry On” he prefaces it with the fact that everywhere they played it in Europe, people mentioned how Canadian it was…joking that it most likely was due to the fact that it fondly recalls snow mitts, trees, and the outdoors. Freeman is an able accompanist switching easily from xylophone to harmonium, bells, and various percussion instruments while also doing backup vocals. The band wrapped up their set with Janes doing a song, “Letters to a friend”, a classic folk parable, solo in an even more intimate form in front of the stage amongst the now slightly bigger crowd. With its steady beats and dreamy storytelling vibe, The Mountains & The Trees is a band I would imagine would be the perfect soundtrack to be listening on a sunny long distance car trip across the Canadian landscape.

Women @ The Great Hall

10 pm found me a couple of blocks east in the supposedly newly renovated but apparently unchanged venue of The Great Hall for the Calgary band Women. They played to a third capacity crowd beginning their set with a song steeped in heavy distortion with a sustained whine in time to epileptic neon blue lights flashing, which was entirely too jarring a transition for me from the folk pop of the last band. The band themselves didn’t seem to really hit their pace themselves until the third song as well. Musically experimental, the band is a four piece with multiple vocals interweaving cacophony, drone, and tight instrumentation to produce a visceral and trance inducing screeching rock that is intense and driving in momentum. The appreciative crowd grew quickly to fill about half the venue as the band ripped through their set. I left early however to make it back for at The Gladstone.

Olenka and The Autumn Lovers @ Gladstone Hotel Ballroom

10:45ish I was back at the Gladstone with folk music to catch the end of Olenka and The Autumn Lovers set. O&AL is a sprawling band of 7 members, 3 women and 4 guys, but definitely girl fronted and led with the guys composing the rhythm section. The band features a really diverse collection of instrumentation from trumpet, violin, sax, harmonica, and cello to the more typical guitar and percussion. The ballroom at this point is now about half full and the crowd is enthusiastic. O&AL’s music is more country at some points than The Mountaintops & The Trees and at others much more rock with very tight vocal harmonies which are definitely one of the band’s strength. One of their last songs was referred to as “another communist song” and featured soft harmonies with vaguely Asian tinged melody and timing that exemplifies the mix of genres and styles that the band easily flows through. At their best the band is full, powerful, superficially rough but extremely tight and shine during the louder, quick, and energetic songs that allow them to truly rock out.

Rock Plaza Central @ Gladstone Hotel Ballroom

By 11:15ish the ballroom is much fuller with a rowdy crowd anxious for the critically acclaimed home town band, Rock Plaza Central to begin continuing the folk to rock progression at the Gladstone. Their first song is, as expected, dramatic and chaotic like a storm gathering with militant thunder, as the deep resonant percussion drives it forward impressively but unfortunately drowns out the low vocals that need adjusting. RPC’s songs are overwhelming and enveloping with grand orchestral movements and sometimes frantic energy. By the second song, ”How Shall I To Heaven Aspire?”, the vocal levels have been fixed which makes for a much more satisfying experience. The crowd of obvious hard core fans often sing along loudly when the band reaches appropriately worded chorus like “I wanna be a shining example” and both the atmosphere and songs are joyous with the crowd starting to dance. All in all the vibe at the Gladstone was familial and warm. Its evident that this folk-rock band have the energy to be able to perhaps one day pull off an arena sized venue.

Little Girls @ The Drake Underground

Way past midnight, I was at The Drake Underground to hear the end of Toronto punk band Little Girls‘ set. Their songs all had a high energy  endless and insistent forward momentum that had the dense crowd swaying with a mosh pit which reached all the way to the front. The band ended their set with destruction as the lead singer tossing his synth onto the ground while flailing around and the crowd going wild.

Glass Candy @ Wrongbar

By 1 am I had made my way west under the CN railway bridge into Parkdale to get to Glass Candy’s 1 am set at Wrongbar. The place was fairly packed and smoky with an evident media presence. After some audio difficulties, the vocals and producer girl/guy duo Idano and Johnny Jewel started their set with a low airplane liftoff sound that flowed into atmospheric synth and deep base beats. Idano swayed and danced before purring and singing in a nasal and sharp voice “This is yellow, this is yellow, this is yellow” repeatedly as she launched into “Digital Versicolor”. Both Idano and Johhny Jewel have a cool confidence and their music oozes slow heavy electro disco funk pierced periodically by Idano’s reverberated screams in punk sized 3 minute songs. They had the crowd right bobbing right away and by song two, everyone was full out dancing and partying. Glass Candy knows how to rev up a crowd and Idano projects a stage presence that is half diva and half rap emcee.

Joshua Redman is one of the best jazz saxophonists and composers in the jazz scene today, so it was a great honour to interview him for BlogUT last week; he’ll be coming to Toronto on June 30th with his new collaborative project, James Farm. With clear influences ranging from his father, Dewey Redman, to saxophonist Sonny Rollins, Joshua Redman has developed his own unique style. It is a style that is very inventive and innovative, which so often makes you want to tap your feet, dance, and listen very closely. His albums have only gotten better and better. He is a very cerebral musician, articulate both in his performance and in his discussion of music, with a great sense of humour. Luckily for the music world, after completing his undergraduate degree at Harvard University in Social Studies, he turned down his offer at Yale Law School to pursue music, instead, in the early 1990s.

Joshua Redman is an amazing musician but also sincerely humble, thoughtful, and self-deprecating (“I have this book of études that are really kicking my ass, actually.”), which was clear throughout the interview and through the wonderful material he has compiled on his website talking about music. “To me, jazz has a built in modernity and relevance through improvisation”, he said, which is perhaps why even his recent rendition of “Surrey with a Fringe on Top”, on his 2007 album Back East, is my favourite rendition of the piece. On a personal note, I’ve been a fan and audience member since age 5.

Of his music, he says, “My goal as a jazz musician has been always to just try to play as honestly and expressively and creatively as I can: that’s what jazz is about to me. I’ve always believed that if you do that then your music will reach people, on an intellectual, and more importantly, an emotional level.” Read on to hear Mr Redman’s many other interesting insights.

Alex: How did you decide to play the saxophone?
Joshua Redman: It was just always the instrument that spoke to me. I was always intrigued by and loved the sound of it. I saw a connection to it, I guess, hearing great saxophonists like John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins, my father Dewey Redman, and Dexter Gordon. All these saxophonists had incredible sound. It was the depth of feeling the instrument can produce, the emotional range, the power of the instrument, and the poignancy of the sound. Of course, you don’t think in those terms when you’re 10 years old. Maybe I just thought it was cool. I played the clarinet for a couple of years before I started playing the saxophone and was interested in the clarinet but I always wanted to play the saxophone. Besides, the clarinet is too hard.

Alex: What projects are you working on at the moment?
Joshua Redman: I’ve been largely doing trio work and double-trio stuff. I’ve been touring with my main band for the past 5 or 6 years, which is a trio with sax, bass, and drums. We made “Compass” last year, which is a double-trio concept, where there are two trios: a sax, two drums, and two basses. This summer, I’m going to be doing my first major tour with the double-trio. I’ve also been doing a lot of stuff with Brad Mehldau, the pianist: we’ve been doing some duo gigs and I’m going to be playing with his group – an orchestral project – at the end of the year. And finally, there’s this new band that I’m a part of called James Farm.

Alex: How is James Farm different from your other bands?
Joshua Redman: One of the main ways in which it’s different is that it’s not my band. It’s truly a collaborative band; each of us has an equal voice in the musical shape of the band, the direction, and the material that we play. Each of us is a composer and each one of us writes songs for this band. All musical decisions are made collaboratively, like a true band. Each of us is a very distinct musician, with a unique perspective on music, and a really strong musical personality. So it’s four very strong, unique personalities that have come together, and we share a lot of values in common and through those shared values we are finding ways to really produce some interesting and hopefully inspiring music.

Alex: Where does the name James Farm come from?
Joshua Redman: Everyone always wants to know that. It’s just a name. It has some significance. There’s a story behind its derivation but that we prefer not be told, so for all intents and purposes, it’s just the name of the group.

Alex: What is on your active playlist right now? What music are you listening to?
Joshua Redman: Not so much right now because I have a newborn. My daughter was born a week and a half ago; I also have a son who is four. So there’s diapers on my playlist right now. A lot of them.

There’s this band called Pomplamoose that I’ve been listening to that you can check out on youtube. They are a duo: there’s a singer who also plays bass and the other guy plays every other instrument under the sun. They’re really really cool.

I’ve also been listening to a lot of classical recently, in particular a lot of string quartets, especially Shostakovitch’s string quartets. I’m also listening to Brahms and Beethoven. I never listened to much classical for a lot of my life. Classical music is something I’ve always appreciated but always been a little intimidated by. Maybe I didn’t have the patience and concentration to listen to it the way that it needed to be listened to until recently.

I’m also listening to Ornette Coleman, and Flying Lotus, an electronic hip hop DJ out of LA. I’m also listening to a lot of Radiohead’s “Hail to The Thief” album.

Alex: I understand you were working on a pretty interesting and challenging project to learn the Bach Cello Suites by ear on the saxophone.
Joshua Redman: Well, I only did two of them, but that was a lot. It was a little project a while ago. I chose it because it’s beautiful music, music that is written for a solo instrument and I can only play one note at a time on the saxophone. I wasn’t trying to learn classical repertoire for the sake of playing it with someone else. I just wanted to get into the language a little bit. I knew there was just a wealth of harmonic and melodic information in there, written for a solo instrument. Also the tenor sax and the cello, though the cello has a much broader range, do overlap in some places, so it just seemed appropriate. And I just loved the music and found it beautiful.

Alex: Are you still playing any classical music now?
Joshua Redman: I play études. I have this book of études that are really kicking my ass, actually. I have no classical background, no training in classical music, and I don’t have any plans to be performing as a classical saxophonist. It’s just a way for me to develop my technique, my ears, and my resources as a musician.

Alex: Some people are saying that jazz is becoming music for older people. Some jazz musicians have a younger audience but a lot of them have an older audience. How do you make jazz compelling to a younger audience?
Joshua Redman: I don’t know, and I don’t mean to sound, well, I’m not sure what I don’t mean to sound like, but I guess I don’t really care. The reason I say that is not because I don’t think jazz can appeal to younger audiences or that I don’t care about younger audiences. But but my job and my goal as a jazz musician aren’t specifically to appeal to any audiences, older or younger.

My goal as a jazz musician has been always to just try to play as honestly and expressively and creatively as I can: that’s what jazz is about to me. I’ve always believed that if you do that then your music will reach people, on an intellectual, and more importantly, an emotional level. I think if you really put your heart and soul and creativity into your music, and it comes from an honest and genuine place, it will have the potential to reach many different sorts of people at many different stages in their lives.

I was fortunate when I was in my 20s in the early 1990s, the average age of my audience was in their 30s, but there were people of my generation coming to my shows. I do see a lot of people in my generation and also younger people at the shows. It would be great if a there were a little more balance demographically in jazz and I think the potential exists. But it’s not something that I really focus on. I focus on the music and the rest will take care or not take care, as the case may be, of itself.

Alex: Do you do any teaching?
Joshua Redman: Every once in a while I do master classes. I sometimes teach workshops. I did some teaching at Stanford jazz this year. I don’t consider myself much of a teacher or educator. I don’t have any formal training through music, and I don’t really feel like I’m an expert. I don’t know what I have to offer as a teacher so it’s not a main focus.

Alex: I understand you have used some computer software sometimes when you’re composing, such as Sibelius. Are you still using that?
Joshua Redman: I do use Sibelius as a tool, but with something like that you’ve got to be careful. The computer can’t write music for you. Computers are very powerful now; the software is powerful. At the click of a button you can harmonize and transpose things and rearrange things. But music isn’t going to sound good or truthful or have depth like that. I do use the software but the content comes from my ears and my ideas. The computer is a tool but I can’t use it as a source of creativity. I, generally, a lot of times will start at the piano and move to the computer at some point.

Alex: When can we expect to see a new disk from you? “Compass”, with the double-trio, came out in 2009, so what are you working on now? What are your recording plans?
Joshua Redman: I’ve done a lot of recordings with the trio, and then there was the double-trio on “Compass”. I’ve also recorded with Brad Mehldau on his last record, “Highway Rider”. And with James Farm, we’re going to record at the end of the summer at the end of August, so the James Farm album should be out by next year.

Alex: Where do you see jazz going in the future?
Joshua Redman: Jazz is creative music that is continuing to grow and expand. One of the wonderful things about jazz is that jazz is a music that really allows you to express your ideas and feelings and thoughts of the moment since it’s music based on improvisation. Through improvisation, jazz musicians are able to incorporate everything that they are listening to and that they are experiencing into their music. To me, jazz has a built in modernity and relevance through improvisation. I think jazz is in an interesting time and an exciting time. Jazz musicians now are very fluent in music: they are knowledgeable in the history and vocabulary of music. I think it’s a very open-minded, open-eared period in jazz right now. Jazz musicians are really finding ways to bring all their influences to bear in the music and to not be trapped in any one sort of idiom or style.

In my desperate plea to see Redman and Mehldau together in Toronto (please come!):

Alex: Will you be performing with Brad Mehldau in Toronto anytime soon? We have a lot of great concert halls!
Joshua Redman: Not to Toronto with Brad Mehldau any time soon. The only concert this year in Toronto will be with James Farm. But there’s nothing with Brad planned soon.

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I would also recommend taking a look at the FAQ section and blog on Joshua Redman’s website where he very articulately discusses his creative process, how he perfects his technique, and many other elements of his music.