Joshua Redman once had the whole world in front of him. In 1991, he graduated summa cum laude from Harvard University with a degree in Social Studies and had already been accepted to Yale University Law School. Then something struck him, and he quickly became immersed in the New York jazz scene. The young tenor saxophonist never looked back and now has 14 albums and more than two decades of performing under his belt. Redman's latest project, the collective James Farm, may be the most innovative and influential band in the jazz world today.

JustArts: How would you characterize your relationship with Berklee and Boston?

Joshua Redman: I went to school in Boston; not Berklee, but Harvard. I made some very strong musical connections and friendships with people at Berklee and the New England Conservatory. I learned to play by hanging out with these musicians—Mark Turner, Kurt Rosenwinkel, Jorge Rossy, Jim Black, Antonio Hart. That was a very formative time for me. I'm very grateful to have gone to school in Boston. Had I not, I don't know if I'd be playing music today.

JA: What's interesting to me about James Farm is that it's a collective instead of something like the Joshua Redman Quartet. Was it a conscious decision on your part to be in a collective?

JR: From the beginning when the band was formed, we viewed it as a collaborative project, and we've kept it that way. The way we approach our music, develop our sound and come up with our repertoire are really collective decisions. Each of [our] musicians is a strong composer and a visionary bandleader in his own right. We wanted to put this band together and organize it as a band, not as a leader and some sidemen. The music would have a different character than it would if it were any one of our bands.

JA: Musically, what is your role in James Farm when you're composing and improvising?

JR: When I'm writing music for the band, there's an experimental side of me where I don't know what I'm going for, but I have some ideas and some inspiration, and I kind of try to work with those ideas and flesh them out. Compositionally, I don't always know where I'm going. It's kind of like improvisation, I just go forward and see what emerges. With this band, I definitely have everyone's sound and their approach in mind. Also, these musicians are incredibly flexible and accomplished. You can put anything in front of them, and if there's any musical sense to be made out of it, they'll make it. With this band, we're interested in finding ways to not rely on the model of playing the melody, and everyone takes a solo and we play the melody in the end. There's more of a big-picture approach. We're interested in how we can remain pure and spontaneous improvisers but have those improvisations serve a larger goal of telling a story with the song.

JA: Do you usually compose something then present it to the group, or do you bounce ideas off of each other while you're together?

JR: The way it's worked so far is we each write independently and bring the song to the group. But when we bring it to the group, it's often not fully formed. We're constantly adjusting the songs and relying on everyone else's intuition and musical intelligence and instincts to make the songs work for the band. None of the songs I've written for the band have had a clear conception of how I thought the music should sound. I had some ideas, and I put them down. But so much of bringing a song to life takes place after the composition process. We breathe life into the music through the human elements of us conversing as a band.

JA: Did your approach to your compositions come from a specific inspiration?

JR: No, I think we all listen to a lot of music that falls outside of whatever the strict boundaries of jazz might be. We definitely have influences of electronica and modern rock and singer-songwriter music and maybe even some classical music. We each have our strong individual inclinations, and I think one of the strengths of the groups is how these unique personalities come together and how we find common ground as a band.

JA: Do you ever go back to the old Coltrane and Miles albums?

JR: I don't consider it going back. I mean, do I listen to Coltrane and Miles? Sure. I don't consider it like ‘Oh, let me go back and check out music, that I used to listen or that was once important.' The great music of the masters of jazz— Coltrane, Miles, Ornette Coleman, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Thelonius Monk—their music to me lives in the present. That music affirms universal truth and that music continues to sound so hip and modern to me.

                                                                                                                       —Wei-Huan Chen