These originals of Redman’s are quite dark and brooding – it’s not the more fun devil-may-care side of the saxophonist at play so much. So approach the record with different ears even if you think you know the Redman sound.
The duelling with Aldana on ‘So It Goes’ works well because there’s a real heat to this piece generated aided by an arrangement that shapes a responsive band as if the other players form the outer ring of a concentric circle where the sax players can function wrapped in their rhythm.
Trumpeter Skylar Tang is on ‘Icarus’. A newcomer unused to the glare of such exposure on a big label release she’s a student in a joint Columbia University/Julliard School programme. According to Blue Note when Redman asked Tang to attend a soundcheck before a concert of his quartet’s in the Jazz at Lincoln Center complex the saxist texted her the sheet music the night before. “She came in the next day with the whole thing memorised […] Once again I heard how that melody benefited from the presence of another voice, and we recorded it with her a few weeks later.”
More broadly as an observation you look to Redman for great skill in interpreting ballads. And certainly the Cormac McCarthy inspired ‘Borrowed Eyes’ does not disappoint in that regard. There’s a passage in McCarthy classic The Road where the link is overt:
He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like ground-foxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.
Cormac McCarthy, The Road, 2006
The vocal of Gabrielle Cavassa ‘Era’s End’ is a wow moment found ere the jazz draws to a close. It has a stop-you-dead-in-your-tracks quality. And yet the main thrust of the album is in its instrumentals focus. But it’s a rarity to find a Redman piece for which he has also written words so again that’s a curiosity that invites further attention. Illuminatingly, on this song Redman has been quoted – again by the label – towards an explanation of the lyric: “Maybe the lyrics describe the end of a love affair […] Maybe they are a metaphor for another sort of loss or mourning or resolution.”
The album’s title track like several of the album tracks is literature inspired. It is taken from Yiyun Li’s Where Reasons End. That’s a harrowing 2019 novel structured as an imagined conversation between a mother and her teenage son who has died by suicide.
Redman’s soprano playing mines the more passionate, tense, regions of the album. And there’s some high wire playing given how complex chromatically some of the tunes are constructed.
A good deal of the more engrossing passages are delivered at ferocious velocity. I like this aspect of the album a good deal.
Words Fall Short I prefer to the earlier Blue Note recording which, while lighter in vein and a success in its own right – and who doesn’t love a bit of Sufjan Stevens? – emphasised vocals too much.
The balance in favour of instrumentals, Redman’s main stomping ground, is restored and yet he finds room for a nod in that powerful direction.
This latest release seems to me certainly another of 2025’s strongest jazz albums so far. And it is turning into a year when largely American saxophone players like Branford Marsalis, Jim Snidero, James Brandon Lewis, Eric Alexander, Vincent Herring and now Redman are leading the way.
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