Daily Dose Of Jazz…
Walter Dewey Redman was born May 17, 1931 in Fort Worth, Texas. He attended I.M. Terrell High School and played saxophone in the school band with Ornette Coleman, Prince Lasha and Charles Moffett. After high school he briefly enrolled in the electrical engineering program at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama but became disillusioned with the program and returned home to Texas. In 1953, he earned a bachelor’s degree in Industrial Arts from Prairie View Agricultural and Mechanical University and while attending switched from clarinet to alto saxophone, eventually to tenor.
Following his degree, Redman served for two years in the Army and upon his discharge he began working on a master’s degree in education at the University of North Texas. While there he taught music to fifth graders in Bastrop, Texas and worked as a freelance saxophonist at night and on weekends around Austin, Texas. By 1957 he graduated in Education with a minor in Industrial Arts.
1959 saw him moving to San Francisco, California as result of an early collaboration with clarinetist Donald Rafael Garrett. He would go on to perform with Ornette Coleman, from 1968 to 1972 and recording New York Is Now!, among others. Dewey was also a part of Keith Jarrett’s American Quartet from 1971 – 1976, whose album The Survivors’ Suite was voted Jazz Album of the Year by Melody Maker in 1978.
In the mid-70s Redman formed the quartet Old And New Dreams with Coleman alumni Don Cherry, Charlie Haden and Ed Blackwell. They recorded four albums in the period to 1987. He performed and recorded as an accompanying musician with jazz musicians who performed in varying styles within the post-1950s jazz idiom, including drummer Paul Motian, Pat Metheny, Jane Bunnett, Anthony Cox, Cameron Brown, Billy Hart, Matt Wilson, Roswell Rudd, Randy Weston, Clifford Thornton, Jon Ballantyne, Michael Boclan, David Bond, Leroy Jenkins, Dane Belany and Michel Benita.
As a leader with more than a dozen recordings, Dewey established himself as one of the more prolific tenor players of his generation. Though generally associated with free jazz, he would also play standards and ballads reminiscent of the blues and post-bop mainstream and would sometimes hum into his sax while performing.
Tenor saxophonist Dewey Redman, who occasionally played alto saxophone, the Chinese suona and clarinet mainly in the free jazz genre, passed away from liver failure in Brooklyn, New York, on September 2, 2006. He was the subject of an award-winning documentary film Dewey Time and recorded two albums with his son Joshua.
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