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Don Redman

Don Redman is considered the first jazz composer/arranger by many. He was also the first musician with both the inspiration and academic knowledge for this style of music. In short, he invented jazz writing for the big band, not only writing separate parts for reed and brass "choirs", leaving room for hot solos, but putting sections in opposition which solved the problems of the new style, thus showing everyone else how to do it. His brother led a band in Cumberland, Maryland and his father was a noted music teacher and had performed in a brass band. His mother was a singer. Don began playing the trumpet at the age of three, joined his first band at 6 and by the age of 12 was proficient on all wind instruments including the oboe. Don studied music at Storer's College in Harper's Ferry and conservatories in Boston & Chicago. He joined Billy Paige's Broadway Syncopators and traveled to New York with them in 1923. Redman's first recording sessions were in 1923, with Fletcher Henderson, he joined Henderson's band in 1924, as a reed player and staff arranger and stayed with the unit until 1927. During the early twenties Redman also recorded with many other jazz and blues greats including Clarence Williams and Bessie Smith. In 1927, Don joined McKinney's Cotton Pickers in Detroit as the leader and musical director, remaining in that position for four years. This band at one point included such jazz legends as Coleman Hawkins, Benny Carter and Fats Waller. Always in demand as an arranger, Redman recorded some sessions with Louis Armstrong in 1928. Hoagy Carmichael was an admirer of the young Don Redman and legend has it that Redman gave Hoagy musical advice and may have written the introduction to "Stardust." Don was one of the first to record it as an instrumental, the words to that classic weren't added by Mitchell Parrish until a few years later. In 1931, Don formed his own band from the nucleus of the Cotton Pickers and musicians from Horace Henderson's band. They stayed together for nine years, performing regularly at Connie's Inn in Harlem. The band made numerable radio broadcasts and was the first to play a sponsored radio series for CHIPSO in 1932 as well as a film short in 1935. During this time Redman also arranged music during the Thirties for Paul Whiteman, Isham Jones, Ben Pollack and Bing Crosby.

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45
Under the Radar

Don Redman: Setting the Template

Read "Don Redman: Setting the Template" reviewed by Jim Gerard


As someone who came to jazz as a young man in the 1970s, I can attest that subsequent generations of both its chroniclers and, even sadder, its practitioners, have succumbed to the peculiarly and regrettable American disease of a-historicism. They've shoved jazz history through a sieve, reducing it from an epic tale of heroic evolution with a cast of hundreds--if not thousands--to a denuded sliver of text that could fit in a single tweet--one that might read like ...

247
Album Review

The Don Redman Orchestra: Geneva 1946

Read "Geneva 1946" reviewed by Jack Bowers


From an historical standpoint, it’s beneficial to have on compact disc this concert date by saxophonist Don Redman’s orchestra, recorded by Swiss Radio during a tour of Europe undertaken only one year after the end of World War II. Redman’s well–disciplined orchestra nimbly straddled the fence between two eras — swing and bop — and numbered in its ranks such acclaimed sidemen as Don Byas, Tyree Glenn, Quentin Jackson and a 25–year–old pianist named Billy Taylor. In other particulars the ...

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Recording

Don Redman All-Stars: 1957

Don Redman All-Stars: 1957

Source: JazzWax by Marc Myers

Don Redman today is a forgotten giant of the swing era. A saxophonist and percussionist who played with Fletcher Henderson's band and McKinney's Cotton Pickers in the 1920s, Redman's true genius rested in his sophisticated big-band arrangements, starting in the late 1920s. By the early 1930s, he was writing complex dance charts years before the music press began calling the music “swing." Listening to his arrangements from that period today, it's easy to hear how muscular, complex bands of the ...

2

Radio

Fletcher Henderson And Don Redman: The Birth Of The Big Band Reed Section

Fletcher Henderson And Don Redman: The Birth Of The Big Band Reed Section

Source: Don Mopsick

This week, Riverwalk Jazz presents “Fletcher Henderson and Don Redman: The Birth of the Big Band Reed Section" with arrangements adapted by the Jim Cullum Jazz Band’s clarinetist Ron Hockett from the classic Henderson scores from the 1920s. To bring to life this distinctive sound, clarinetists Allan Vaché and Kim Cusack join Jim Cullum and the Band. The program is distributed in the US by Public Radio International, on Sirius/XM satellite radio and can be streamed on-demand from the Riverwalk ...

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