Mark Masters' latest outing features the great Oliver Lake joining the Mark Masters Ensemble in paying tribute to the late Dewey Redman.

Mark Masters' latest outing features the great Oliver Lake joining the Mark Masters Ensemble in paying tribute to the late Dewey Redman. Masters honors Redman's creative spirit in his continuing series of recordings documenting great American jazz masters. His charts convey the sense of old and new and like Redman's music, explore the inner and outer boundaries of improvised music.

This album was supposed to be a collaboration between Dewey Redman (as composer and tenor saxophone soloist) and Mark Masters (as arranger for a 15-piece jazz ensemble). But it became a tribute album when Redman died on September 2, 2006. The project went forward, with Oliver Lake on alto saxophone filling Redman's vacant chair. The other featured soloist is trumpeter Tim Hagens.
Redman was, roughly speaking, an outcast, and therefore played mostly in small groups. Masters' achievement is to capture Redman's impulsive creative spirit in arrangements for big band. Tight, fierce Redman anthems like I-Pimp and Thren and Dewey's Tune are projected onto a large screen and given new weight and scale. But Masters knows that charts in praise of Redman must sound like they might go anywhere, moment to moment, then must set soloists free.
Oliver Lake's alto saxophone cuts through the surrounding ensemble fabric like a serrated knife. His volatility and edginess and eccentric lyricism are his own, and are brilliantly appropriate to honor Redman's aesthetic. Lake testifies in whoops and wild runs on Redman's blues Bloody, and screeches sweetly on Joie De Vivre.
The best piece is the only standard, My One and Only Love. Lake sings it in rasps and piercing cries while the orchestra's voice empathically murmurs and sometimes rises up, as if in response to Lake's naked feeling. Tim Hagens is also very strong, tonally less 'out' than Lake but no less startling in his ideas.
It is safe to say that Redman would have loved this record.
Thomas Conrad
Jazz Times April 2009

Track Listing

• Dewey's Tune
• I-Pimp
• Boody
• Le Clit
• Transits
• My One And Only Love
• Sitatunga
• Joie De Vivre
• Love Is
• Thren
• Adieu Mon Redman

Additional Details

Label: Capri Records

Genre: Jazz

Run Time: 70 mins

Region: 0

Release Date: 04/22/08

UPC: 054987408922