September 15, 2026
Saxophonist Joshua Redman celebrates Sonny Rollins with the Nov. 20 release of his 3rd Blue Note album, If Ever You Would Leave Us (we play for Rollins), a remarkable paean to the indelible impact of the Saxophone Colossus. It features 11 inspired selections from Rollins’ repertoire performed in a range of configurations by a nonpareil collective of musicians including drummer Marcus Gilmore, bassists Christian McBride and Larry Grenadier, Rollins band alums Kevin Hays on piano and Peter Bernstein on guitar, fellow tenor virtuoso Chris Potter, and two of jazz’s finest vocalists, Cécile McLorin Salvant and Gabrielle Cavassa. The album is introduced with the hard-swinging lead single “Grand Street,” a lesser-known Rollins jewel from Sonny Rollins And The Big Brass, performed by Redman, Bernstein, McBride, and Gilmore, whose grandfather Roy Haynes played drums on the original recording.
When Redman woke up on the day following Rollins’ passing on May 26, he felt a cathartic need to do something for Sonny, but he didn’t quite know what. So he started making calls to friends and colleagues, and a loose coterie of great players readily made themselves available for studio sessions in New York that were assembled within a couple weeks.
“Sonny’s passing definitely hit me hard,” Redman says. “It felt not unlike the passing of a parent. He certainly felt like a musical father, grandfather and godfather, all rolled into one, for me and I think for all of us.”
It’s difficult to assess Redman’s career and not think of him in one way or another as one of Rollins’ most devoted and accomplished disciples. He is, after all, a prodigious saxophonist who continues to prove that jazz’s “golden age” is always upon us. He exists in a small, elite class of active musicians who can uphold all of modern jazz’s ideals in a single performance: the immaculately contoured improvisations; the room-filling sound, at once mellifluous and diamond-sharp; the gracefully confident bandleading; the impeccably balanced repertoire, which combines probing originals with arrangements of standards that honor both tradition and jazz’s ethic of personalization. It’s no wonder that Redman has long considered Rollins his “number one.”
“He’s my biggest influence as an improviser and as a saxophonist,” Redman says. “He was with us forever — for the totality of my life, and a lifetime before mine. He was somebody who felt like he would never leave us.” And, of course, thanks to Rollins’ abiding influence, he never will.
To trace Redman’s journey with Rollins’ music is to trace his trajectory as a musician. “I discovered Sonny Rollins right around the time I picked up the saxophone, at age 10 or 11,” he recalls. “I remember going to the Berkeley Public Library and browsing through the bins, I saw this album, Saxophone Colossus. And I thought, ‘Hey, that’s a pretty bold title.’ [laughs] That was my eureka moment. I remember putting it on, and hearing Sonny made me understand: It awakened me to the true power and potential of jazz improvisation. When I discovered Sonny Rollins, that was my gateway, and my North Star.”
