New York based saxophonist Joshua Redman is widely recognised as one of the most celebrated and popular young musicians in jazz today, and represents the new breed of jazz artists. According to the Associated Press, this Grammy Award nominee and son of tenor saxophonist Dewey Redman is undoubtedly, "the crown prince of the saxophone," while in the words of Pat Metheny he is, "the most important new musician in twenty years." Joshua Redman has performed and recorded with many of today’s major musical figures, such as Dave Brubeck, Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock, Quincy Jones, Chaka Khan, B.B. King, Pat Metheny and Marcus Miller; his talent officially recognised in 1991 with the first prize in the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz Competition. In 1993, his self-titled debut and follow-up ‘Wish’ albums collectively went on to sell over a quarter of a million copies, a rare event outside of the pop-jazz world. His latest offering is titled ‘Beyond’ and represents his seventh release to date.

How did your musical career initially take off?

JR: I spent the first twenty-two years of my life training to be pretty much everything but a musician (chuckles). I played music from a very early age, but never wanted to pursue it professionally. I grew up in Berklee, California, and my mum took me to this place called ‘The Centre for World Music’, which was basically a centre where you could get introductory instruction in a lot of world musics, Indian music, Indonesian music, Middle Eastern music. So the first instruments I ever played were these South Indian drums and Indonesian Gamelan. I played in a Gamelan orchestra when I was four years old, and then taught myself a little guitar, took a few piano lessons, played the recorder, the clarinet, and then the saxophone. But I had no intention of being a professional musician. So I went to Harvard University in Boston, and enrolled as a pre-med there, but then ended up majoring in sociology — that led me to an interest in going to law school, so I applied and was accepted into Yale law school. And I had every intention of going, I took what I thought was going to be a year off, just to kind of chill and relax, and moved to New York during that year. And in New York I got caught up in the jazz scene, and found myself with an opportunity to play with great, great musicians. And here I am today (chuckles).

Do you subscribe to any particular philosophy or technique with regards to playing the saxophone?

JR: To me technique is never an agenda, it’s a resource, but technique is always incidental. What I try to do with the saxophone is: I am trying to sing through the saxophone. And I think drummers are trying to sing, pianists are trying to sing. Once again my goal is to try to communicate these things that are inside of me, and to try to express them in hopefully original and creative ways. And over time I have developed an interest in exploring the saxophone as a textural instrument, not just as a purely melodic instrument. But I think I do see the saxophone as a melody instrument, and that’s my focus.

In the classical world what you do is regarded as extended techniques, but in your world it is probably just a normal part of playing.

JR: We just don’t have an official name for it, but I suppose it is extended techniques. There are a lot of things that you can do on the saxophone that aren’t what it was originally intended to do. You know, you can get harmonics out of it, you can slap tongue it, you can pop the notes, and there’s a whole range of the saxophone called the altissimo range that I actually explore a lot, which is really way above the range that you are supposed to play the instrument in. So I guess it’s extended techniques, but for me it’s more like those are just natural extensions of my search. It’s not like I sat down one day and was like, ‘OK, I wanna learn a new technique on the saxophone.’ In the course of playing, and in the course of hearing other people play, you start to hear things, and I guess I’m trying to stretch the limits of my resources on my instrument, because the more things I can do, the more I can express.

Tell me about jazz at present. Where do you feel that it’s heading stylistically?

JR: It’s heading stylistically in a multitude of directions, and I think that the vast majority of them are very positive. The thing that you have to understand about jazz, maybe in difference to thirty or forty years ago is that there is no sense of a clear linear stylistic evolution. There’s a time earlier in the history of jazz where it was clear. You know, ‘New Orleans’ led to ‘swing’, which led to ‘be bop’, which led to ‘cool’, so it was clear, this was the next step. Now, I think people are stepping in all different directions. There’s been a lot of interesting things done with the relationship between jazz and whatever you want to call it, ‘hip hop music’ and Latin too. Some of those I like, some I don’t, but that’s a very interesting direction.

What was the artistic ambition behind your latest release of ‘Beyond’?

JR: Simply, the same ambition as a set of compositions that allow us as a band to enter a certain original and creative improvisational territory, and to try to capture those compositions, and the performances in those compositions at moments in time, on a record, hopefully in an inspired way. And that’s the same as any record I’ve done. Now, there really is a sense that I have with this music and this record that I’m starting to find something which is much more personal and original than some of the earlier stuff I have done. So to me, right now, it seems to signal a new stage, just in terms of feeling like the music is more ours than previous records that I have done. And there are conceptual elements that really maybe go beyond some of the traditional elements of jazz. There are things that we are doing with time signatures that are really different, and really hard in some ways (chuckles), but I don’t focus on those too much because those aren’t ends in themselves. You know, I could go through the tunes and tell you how one is in thirteen, one is in nine and one is in ten, but I don’t do that to prove that we can do it, it’s just that I’ve started to hear music that’s not in the traditional kind of four-four swing time. And I find that a lot of those songs allow us to get to a different type of feeling than the traditional four-four swing does.

‘Beyond’ out on WEA Records.