Joshua Redman records Rollins’s Grand Street with Marcus Gilmore

An old recording once reached Joshua Redman through iTunes shuffle. Preparing Back East, released in 2007, he heard Sonny Rollins’s I’m an Old Cowhand again and “came up with my own arrangement”. His account describes changing harmonies, melodies and rhythms through non-Western influences he already knew.

That earlier example is useful now that Redman has recorded Grand Street for If Ever You Would Leave Us (we play for Rollins), due from Blue Note on 20 November. Peter Bernstein plays guitar, Christian McBride bass and Marcus Gilmore drums. Gilmore’s grandfather Roy Haynes played on Rollins’s recording of the tune.

The family connection is concrete; an obligation to reproduce the earlier performance does not follow from it. Nor must every tribute rearrange everything. Blue Note’s 9 October account of another advance track, God Bless the Child, describes a deliberate decision to retain Rollins’s harmonizations and form.

On that track, Gabrielle Cavassa carries the principal melody while Redman supports her. Keeping an arrangement and changing who sings its line can coexist. The older Back East account and this new example show different choices, not a single method that Redman must always follow.

Grand Street is linked below. Follow the guitar, bass and drums as well as the saxophone. The credits establish the Haynes-Gilmore connection; they cannot tell us how these four musicians will share the tune. That is something the performance still has to supply.