Joshua Redman and Brad Mehldau were featured on PBS NewsHour yesterday, the day they were nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Jazz Instrumental Album for their debut duo album, Nearness. The longtime friends, collaborators, and Nonesuch label mates spoke with NewsHour's Jeffrey Brown about making music together, or, as the show says, "how a passion for improvisation can make beautiful music." You can watch the interview and a performance of the album track "Old West" from the show here.
Joshua Redman and Brad Mehldau were featured on PBS NewsHour yesterday, the day they were nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Jazz Instrumental Album for their recently released debut duo album, Nearness. The longtime friends, collaborators, and Nonesuch Records label mates spoke with NewsHour's Jeffrey Brown about making music together, or, as the show says, "how a passion for improvisation can make beautiful music."
"Jazz is all about vulnerability," Redman tells Brown, "because we're improvising. We're not coming to the bandstand with a preconceived notion of what we're going to play. We have to be open and available, vulnerable, to really make that connection with ourselves, with the other musician."
"Even when I'm ostensibly accompanying him, and he's ostensibly taking the solo," Mehldau later adds, "we're still having this conversation. So it may mean, for instance, that he plays a melodic idea, and then I respond to it sort of in real time, and I might even give him something back, that then he responds to. And he's kind of waiting for it: 'What do you got?'"
You can watch the interview and below it a performance of the Mehldau-penned album track "Old West" from the show here, both via pbs.org.
To pick up a copy of Nearness, head to iTunes or the Nonesuch Store, where CD, LP, MP3, FLAC, and HD versions are all 15% off the everyday low prices listed on the site as part of the store's ongoing anniversary sale.
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