Players:

Joshua Redman (saxophones), Aaron Goldberg (piano), Reuben Rogers (bass),Gregory Hutchinson (drums)

Passage Of Time

Ten years in the life of an artist. A convenient marker. An opportunity to survey. What's been lost? What's been gained? It's a telling exercise, taking personal inventory, though not without contradiction: it requires being in the moment and outside the moment at the same time. Existential?

You bet.

Just as a photograph freezes time, inviting us to imagine everything about the subject, including the actions preceding and following the captured flash point, a sound recording does much the same. It offers an irrefutable glimpse of now, while it flaunts genetic information illuminating the arc of a career.

Not that Joshua Redman has been openly thinking about this. Or has he? Four of the eight albums he's recorded for Warner Bros. Records, the only label he's known since winning the Thelonious Monk Institute saxophone competition ten years ago, feature these titles: Wish, Spirit Of The Moment, Timeless Tales (for Changing Times), Beyond. Sound thoughtful? Coupled with Freedom In The Groove, MoodSwing, and his eponymous debut, one can almost hear the sound of introspection.

But thankfully there's a lot more to ponder than mere album titles. For what Joshua has done involves guts and conviction. Not only in terms of personal triumph, as in achieving generational primacy among his musical peers, but in reversing the prevailing rant that acoustic jazz is dead, that it lacks currency.

Joshua's work, covering ten years and now eight albums, gives chase to those gloomy ideological pronouncements. One need only pick up his albums to know that there's a search going on, animated and spiritual, affirmed fully in the grooves. Music, these works say, is its own reward.

So, given this anniversary of sorts, an occasion for both summary and anticipation, it's not surprising that Joshua now gives us Passage Of Time. It is a long-form work, clearly his most ambitious undertaking as a composer and bandleader, and it finds him in classic reflex mode - peering back, looking forward.

"One of my goals as a jazz musician, - the 32-year-old Harvard alumnus confides, "is to construct a meaningful narrative. Not a literal or analytical narrative, but an emotional narrative of sound. That's how I would describe Passage Of Time: a piece of music that says something from start to finish. It tells a story. It has themes and motifs that become topics for group discussion. It's a long story comprised of smaller ones, discovered and articulated during the music-making process. The band speaks through conversations, and our dialogues give the music feeling, purpose and direction."

"The other key metaphor that comes to mind is travel. I see this piece as a journey that takes place in the moment, unfolding in real time. The pre-written parts constitute a map. We know as a band where we're going - the starting point, the ending point, the stops we need to make in the middle. What we don't know - and where the real inspiration and beauty of the music comes from - is what we're going to do along the way. That's the improvisation. Be it time or space, that's the journey."

Travelogue that it is, Passage Of Time is a seven- or eight-part cycle (depending on how you count) that addresses the universal theme of communication - the flow of it, the process by which it occurs. Born from the interplay among Joshua and group members, Aaron Goldberg (piano), Reuben Rogers (bass), and Gregory Hutchinson (drums) - all of whom graced Beyond, his last record - it is a culminating statement, punctuating a year's worth of travel and performance spent in the service of investigating communion.

The time together obviously paid off. The album features spontaneous, uncompromising exchanges in which each of the musicians, in tandem with various others, get into the act of storytelling: two-, three-, and four-way conversations, with the players talking to, with, over, and under one another. The effect for listeners? An opportunity to eavesdrop on the intimacy of creation.

This is not to say that Passage Of Time is the furtive work of an anarchist. On the contrary, the themes and motifs running through the individual tracks (including one unifying three-note figure, the tail of a descending minor scale), provide an improvisational blueprint for the group's artful constructions.

Transformational moments (and associative images) abound: the opening-bell spiritualism of Joshua's lone saxophone on "Before"; the compelling urgency of "Free Speech"; the '50's impressionism, French cineast-style (surely unintended) of "Our Minuet"; the quicksilver excursions heard throughout "Bronze"; the wistfulness of autumns long gone (replete with a shifting 11/4 time signature) in "Time"; the simmer-to-burn intensity of "Enemies Within"; and the final evocation of "After," bookending the work with a reiterated (though now disguised) melody from the album's opener.

It's a heady work, not least because Joshua asks that his mates rise to the heights of high-order empathy only heard in the best working bands. Passage Of Time owes everything to the illustrative process of these four minds pursuing one common goal.

"That's where much of the inspiration and value of the music lies," the tenorist explains. "Not just in the compositions, not in the songs themselves, or in the individual solos or statements. But in the way we converse and communicate in the moment. As a band, how we improvise collectively - always listening, always reacting, working together to create something. It's about flow, about the experience of time, of being in it."

"As I was writing this piece, I kept hearing new beginnings instead of endings. It wasn't until I had written half the music that I realized that this was an extended suite or song cycle. Working it through on the road allowed us to recognize what we were after - freedom from time as a segmented, strictly linear experience, freedom to be in the moment. Our goal was to feel that, to communicate that."

Whether or not Joshua consciously set out to take stock with this project, Passage Of Time tackles one large subject. The rumination alone, as artistic enterprise in the forum of popular culture, attests to his boldness and inquisitive nature. That it succeeds as art and entertainment only reinforces what insiders predicted when they first heard him those ten years ago: it was just a matter of time.

Still is.