The Hyde Park Jazz Festival maintains twenty-twenty vision in its 20th year
The fest’s biggest-ever crowd came out for a dazzling roster whose wide-ranging talents brought us two days of music with open borders.
October 8, 2026
No one was quite prepared for what Joshua Redman laid on a packed Rockefeller Chapel as the grand finale to Saturday’s festivities. Compared to New York City’s impossibly reverberant Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, where I’d witnessed ten saxophones blowing simultaneous tribute to late jazz icon Sonny Rollins the week before, Rockefeller has much kinder acoustics.
On solo tenor, Redman paid homage to several of his saxophone heroes. He honored Rollins with an epic reevaluation of the calypso “St. Thomas,” after an opening nod to Rollins’s own idol Coleman Hawkins with “Body and Soul.” Between a herculean, peripatetic expansion of Monk’s “’Round Midnight,” during which Redman paraded the aisles of the nave, and a brilliant dissection of Lester Young’s “Lester Leaps In,” Redman did something even more extraordinary. He braved John Coltrane’s “Alabama,” which commemorates the 1963 bombing of a Birmingham church by the Ku Klux Klan. Coltrane based its melody on the cadences of Martin Luther King Jr.’s funeral eulogy for the four schoolgirls killed.
Throughout his threnody, Redman used circular breathing to keep the airflow stable, from the bell notes of his instrument up into its altissimo register, and he maintained an unassailable logic and powerful emotional resonance with a stream of fresh ideas. Bear in mind when I say this that I wrote one of the first cover stories on Redman when he released his debut album in 1993 and know well what he’s capable of: This was one of the greatest feats of musical virtuosity I have ever witnessed. Think Paganini or Liszt, if you were alive then.
The correct thing to do, in response to this astonishing moment in the history of an already amazing festival, was remove critic’s cap, stand up, applaud, and shout “Amazing!” Duly I did.