Joshua Redman didn’t see his new album coming. But Words Fall Short — the saxophonist’s second Blue Note release, set to arrive on June 20 — looks in retrospect like a logical next step, as well as the latest byproduct of a band-centered work ethic.
“It certainly wasn’t part of any sort of conscious plan that I had,” Redman tells WRTI. After making his Blue Note debut in 2023 with where are we, featuring the singer Gabrielle Cavassa and an all-star assembly of peers, he assembled a touring unit with several young rhythm section aces: Paul Cornish on piano, Philip Norris on bass, and Philadelphia’s own Nazir Ebo on drums. (This group, with Cavassa, was featured on an NPR Tiny Desk Concert last year.)
“There was a point in the summer of ‘24 where things were really clicking with the band,” Redman says of this personnel. “Whatever material I brought in, there was just a shared consensus — a kind of unity and creative spark that existed among us, and the sense that we knew each other well enough that there was the trust necessary for things to flow naturally.”
That flow takes center stage on an original composition titled “A Message to Unsend,” which begins in an air of luminous, Chopin-esque melancholy. Digitally released as a single today, it presents the first of two bookends on the album, the other being a song with vocals titled “Era’s End.”
“Era’s End” actually came first: it was composed during the unsettled quiet of the pandemic. “It was definitely a time where I found myself bouncing back and forth between feelings of longing for the past and apprehensiveness towards the future,” Redman reflects. “So there’s a sense of melancholy and longing, and maybe some sort of mourning. When I wrote the lyrics, it started as a wordplay game, but as it went on, I realized, ‘Wow these are some dark-ass lyrics.’”
He chuckles. “And there’s a line in those lyrics: ‘a message to unsend.’ On its face, the lyrics are about the end of a relationship, but they could also speak to different sorts of losses we might be experiencing now. But that line — there’s something universal about it, but there’s also something very current about it, because when we communicate with people these days by text or even sometimes by email, if we’re fast enough, we can unsend the message. I think we’ve all experienced times where we’ve said the wrong thing, or said the right thing in the wrong way, and wish we could have taken it back.”
There are of course no takebacks on a finished studio album, but that’s not a problem here. Redman, though a habitually modest self-critic, takes evident pride in the comportment of his quartet, especially on a composition that requires this level of nuance, and allows for such a dramatic build.
“There is a compositional technique that I’ve used — maybe grown a little too fond of over the years — of establishing a specific kind of single-note piano ostinato, and then varying that and putting a melody against it,” Redman explains. “This song is constructed like that, and it kind of unfolds meditatively and slowly and naturally. It’s in a strange time signature, kind of 7/8 and 7/4 at the same time. But this band knows how to make something like that feel very natural and flowing.”
He adds: “This is the kind of song, with all the information that’s packed into it, it would be really easy to overplay. And again, I think back to the strength of these musicians. It’s definitely a band that's able to generate a lot of intensity and energy and excitement; they’ve got that youthful spark and drive, so they can go there. But they don’t force anything, and I think the way that this particular song develops, it shows a certain restraint and maturity, a sense of how to do what’s right for the song.”
Words Fall Short will be released on Blue Note on June 20; preorder it here.
