Description
While touring in support of his 2007 Nonesuch release, Back East, his first studio recording in an acoustic trio setting, Joshua Redman decided he wanted to continue exploring the sax/bass/drums trio format and started to compose new material with that often challenging configuration in mind. The saxophonist had played with three separate but equally stellar rhythm sections in the studio and subsequently collaborated with various bassists and drummers on the road, and that got him to thinking in a radical new way about how to play trio. The result is Compass, a disc that Redman describes as a journey for me... an expansion on, and an extension of, Back East. With a group of collaborators as intrepid as he is bassists Larry Grenadier and Rueben Rogers and drummers Brian Blade and Gregory Hutchinson Redman literally and figuratively stretches the shape, as well as the very idea, of the trio; on the most audacious of these tunes, he performs with the entire lineup in a double-trio setting.