Joshua Redman Double Trio

A Single Jazz Band, by Way of Two Trios Joshua Redman walked onstage at the Highline Ballroom on Tuesday, tenor saxophone in hand, and flashed a smile. "Sure does feel like a different world, doesn't it?" he said simply, a moment before starting his opening tune. The afterglow of a presidential inauguration, and this one in particular, hardly required more acknowledgment than that. The opener was "Identity Thief," from Mr. Redman's superb new album, "Compass" (Nonesuch), and it set a distinctly exploratory tone. Its slow, snakelike melody involved just saxophone, bass and drums. And at first Mr. Redman dug in with the bassist Larry Grenadier and the drummer Brian Blade, both stationed to his right. Then, with the next phrase, the center shifted, and suddenly he was playing with the bassist Reuben Rogers and the drummer Gregory Hutchinson, to his left. This cross-fade repeated, back and forth and back again, before the two sides converged on a groove. Mr. Redman could hardly have come up with a more instructive curtain raiser for the group he calls his Double Trio, which also appears on "Compass." Tuesday's concert, the first half of a two-night run, was its first public appearance; so far there aren't many more on the calendar. "It's hard enough to get one of these guys on the phone," Mr. Redman quipped from the stage by way of explanation, "let alone all four of them in a room." Why two bassists? Why two drummers? The answer, for a bandleader as exacting as Mr. Redman, probably has more to do with flexibility than with density. After the opener, he featured his full cohort only a few more times: on a briskly roiling "Time of the Barracudas," by Gil Evans; in a pensive meditation on Beethoven's "Moonlight" sonata; and on the encore, a loping original called "Another Blues." In each case there were contrasts to consider — between, say, the washy sonorities of Mr. Blade's cymbals and the clattering brightness of Mr. Hutchinson's — but the bigger point was a spirit of looseness within the churn. In the same way that double exposure can produce a blurred photographic image, Mr. Redman uses the Double Trio to soften his own hard-lined clarity. In the process he's making some of the best music of his career. His meticulousness still expressed itself, partly in the structure of the show, which took on various configurations. As on the album, Mr. Redman worked often in a straightforward trio, wringing exuberant results out of a buoyant theme like "Far Away" (with Mr. Blade and Mr. Grenadier) or a feverish workout like "Insomnomaniac" (with Mr. Hutchinson and Mr. Rogers). But there were also some arresting moments of overlap, when both bassists soloed in tandem or the two drummers traded shots across the stage. Through it all Mr. Redman worked fast and fluid, never exhausting his options. On a coyly boppish tune called "Hutchhiker's Guide," he unfurled lines with loquacious ease, in the Sonny Rollins vein. He prefaced his next song with a row of hard, multiphonic squawks, sounding like a truck horn. Later, playing soprano saxophone on an elegiac "Ghost," he fluttered and flurried, embroidering the theme. At almost every turn he seemed intensely focused but unpressured and completely in command.