Explorations: Will Redman’s Book

Again, this is after the fact, but I still wanted to put out my good thoughts on Will Redman’s music, some of which you can hear at the bottom of this post.

Will Redman hails from Baltimore, MD, where he is active as both a composer and percussionist.  His principal teachers were Michael Finnissy, Stuart Smith, and Jeff Stadelman.  His music has been performed Internationally, and he is a percussionist in a number ensembles, including Microkingdom, the Open Music Ensemble, and All Coda.  His music has also been recently published in the anthology Notations 21, which celebrates new musical notation and written music as a form of visual art (website)
Redman’s music explores as he describes, “the Avant and the Garde.”  Leaning towards avant garde jazz in the pieces I played, the rhythms are open and prickly.  All from a series entitled Book which is a set of graphical notated pieces offering lots of interpretive freedom, the musical ideas float between sounding entirely composed and very free.  This grey area is a beautiful place for music, to me, with sounds feeling both free and purposeful.  Below you can hear an example of this, Gberja.  Of course, the making of the music is just as much a product of the performers as the composer, who are Jeff Arnal, Evan Rapport, and Gordon Beeferman.