Joshua Redman – Brad Mehldau Duo // Globe Unity Orchestra // Myra Melford’s Snowy Egret

The friendship and collaboration between Joshua Redman and Brad Mehldau goes back to the early days of their professional careers in New York, and reached a new dimension in 2013 when Mehldau arranged and produced Redman’s album “Walking Shadows”, in which the saxophonist performed vintage and modern ballads with accompaniment from a conventional jazz rhythm section (including Mehldau) and a 15-piece string ensemble, plus flute and French horn. The “New York Times” described the result as “the most sublimely lyrical gesture” of Redman’s career. Born a year and a half apart, in 1969 and 1970 respectively, two of the great improvisers of their generation share an affinity that is rich and deep. In 2013 the “New York Times” critic Nate Chinen called Mehldau “the most influential jazz pianist of the last 20 years.” This tour represents their first outing as a duo in five years.
www.bradmehldau.com
www.joshuaredman.com

Fifty years ago this November the third edition of the Berliner Jazztage – as Jazzfest Berlin was originally known – featured a startling new ensemble, the Globe Unity Orchestra, with which the Berlin-born pianist and composer Alexander von Schlippenbach, then 28 years old, daringly attempted to apply the extended instrumental techniques and collective improvisation of free jazz to a larger format. His success with that original 10-piece group, and the album which followed a year later, not only gave additional momentum to the European free jazz movement but inspired musicians around the world. Ten years on from their last appearance at the festival, this jubilee performance features new music and, besides the leader, two other members of the original cast in the trumpeter Manfred Schoof and the saxophonist Gerd Dudek, alongside others who have been members for many years.
GlobeUnity Orchestra on Wikipedia

Raised outside Chicago in a house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, the pianist and composer Myra Melford has always shown an appreciation of structure. Her latest work, “Language of Dreams”, is a suite of pieces inspired by the writing of the Uruguayan journalist, essayist, fabulist and novelist Eduardo Galeano (1940-2015), and in particular by his monumental three-volume history of the Americas, “Memoria del Fuego” (Memory of Fire). From his great-grandparents, Galeano inherited Italian, Spanish, German and Welsh blood; in 1973 he was first imprisoned and then exiled by the military government before the reversion to democracy allowed him to return after 12 years in Argentina and Spain, where he wrote his magnum opus. With her quintet, Snowy Egret, formed in 2012, and the videographer David Szlasa, Melford explores the emotions and characters evoked by Galeano’s vivid prose.
www.myramelford.com