Joshua Redman brought the complete Double Trio he had assembled for his latest Nonesuch release, Compass, out for a short live run last week for shows from New York City to Boston to Albany. After a two-night run at New York's Highline Ballroom that, according to the New York Times, featured "some of the best music of his career," Redman, along with drummers Brian Blade and Greg Hutchinson, and bassists Larry Grenadier and Reuben Rogers, played Boston's Berklee Performance Center on Thursday and Albany's The Egg on Friday.

Echoing the sentiment of the Times, the Boston Globe's Steve Greenlee says Redman "put on the show of his life" at Berklee. "Redman has always been an entertaining musician, but Thursday he played more confidently and powerfully than ever."

While the set featured various permutations among the musicians, Greenlee says that bringing all five musicians on stage at once "made for a wild symbiosis," making the full double trio "the star of the show." He looks to Redman for having "fueled them all with insistent, dramatic solos and seat-shaking two-note phrases."

Greenlee also credits Redman's choice of Beethoven's "Moonlight" Sonata, from the new album, as the encore as "the evening's surprise ... What confidence it must have taken not only to turn that piece into jazz but to close a show with it."

Read the review at boston.com.

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The Boston Herald's Bob Young says Redman, who "ranks with the top saxophonists in the world," proved with the double-trio line-up that "he’s still taking the road less traveled," and it paid off.

First citing the other band members as "four of the best rhythm section players in the business," Young goes on to say that "Redman navigated a constantly changing rhythmscape with the serene intensity that has marked his career."

He calls attention to two songs in particular to which Redman's playing gave "a mood-altering ethereal shimmer" and imagines as well that "his frequent forays to outer edges would have had Ornette Coleman, Archie Shepp and his father [the late saxophonist Dewey Redman] smiling wide."

Young concurs with Greenlee when he writes:

Redman served as the ignition for a fire that grew hotter as the night progressed. The hottest moments—jaw-dropping exchanges between Blade and Hutchinson, Grenadier and Rogers and even all four—were as musical as they were inspired. This quintet was clearly having a blast ... Intense? For sure. And fun to witness, too.

Read the review at news.bostonherald.com.

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Based halfway between Boston and the group's next stop, Albany, The Republican, out of Springfield, Massachusetts, gives the album Compass 3.5 stars. Reviewer Kevin O'Hare says "it's fun to hear when the troupe gets rolling, like when Redman turns in some virtuoso work against plenty of percussion in 'Identity Thief,' or when they go the melancholy route with a radical re-working of Beethoven's 'Moonlight' Sonata." Read the album review at blog.masslive.com.

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The Compass performers' final tour date as the complete Double Trio took place on Friday night at The Egg in Albany, which the Schenectady Daily Gazette's Michael Hochanadel describes as "an alchemical musical multiplication ... There were straight-ahead runs, backstreet funk, anxious bebop and beautiful lyricism—each with its own internal logic and relationship to what followed."

Hochanadel sums the set up as "50 minutes that encapsulated the history of post-Sonny Rollins jazz. (Rollins invented the sax-drums-bass trio format, and in his combined mastery of hushed lyricism and raucous swagger, Redman is becoming a soloist of similar magnitude.)"

He concludes: "A stately, subdued 'Moonlight' let the capacity crowd down gently, from heights only the best jazz bands can reach."

Read the concert review at dailygazette.com.