Ten years ago, the genial, articulate and admirably well-balanced Joshua Redman was poised for a lucrative life as a high-flying legal eagle - a brilliant scholastic career, with the Ivy League beckoning from the groves of academe and acceptances from Harvard Law School, Yale and Stanford for their creme de la creme student rolls. The world, it seemed, was his oyster. But there was a grain of sand in this one and it produced a pearl of an altogether different kind. He turned his back on law and embraced jazz.
"It was a big accumulation of things in a very short amount of time," he says. "It was moving to New York right after I graduated, thinking that I was going to be going to law school in a year, living with a bunch of musicians who are friends of mine, who were playing and practising every day, and getting the opportunity to play with many of the best jazz musicians in the New York area."
Word spread rapidly and established musicians such as Charlie Haden, Jack De-Johnette, Paul Motian and Pat Metheny, whom he idolised, began to call him for gigs. "There was a competition that I won," - he came from nowhere to carry off the prestigious Thelonious Monk International Jazz Saxophone Competition in 1991 - "four months after I moved to New York, which helped to get my name out even more".
On the face of it, there might have seemed a certain inevitability about his decision. His father is Dewey Redman, a top rank avant garde jazz saxophonist. But Joshua was raised by his mother, Renee Shedroff, a former dancer, in his native California, while New York-based Redman senior - with whom he gets on well - was an occasional visitor while he was growing up. With mother and son experiencing hard times, jazz can scarcely have seemed a good, or likely, life choice.
"I was very, very fortunate," he responds. "I can't really explain it. Obviously, I believe I have something to offer as a musician and that I have talent, but there are thousands of musicians out there who have something to offer and have great talent and, for whatever reasons, haven't had that intersection of circumstances that allowed me to do the things that I've been able to do. "I was very fortunate in that at the same time I was realising how much I loved music, I was also being afforded the opportunities to do it and support myself and make a decent living doing it. I mean, that's rare."
Nor, he agrees, is there anything elevating about being poor.
"Yeah," he says. "I actually grew up poor. There's nothing great about hardship. I think that every experience in your life contributes to your growth as a human being and there are things you can learn from everything. But there's this kind of myth that's developed around jazz, that in order to be a great jazz musician you have to have lived a life of incredible pain and suffering and hardship - that kind of glamourisation of indigence. Hardship is hard," he says with a wry laugh.
He was lucky, however, in that his mother has an eclectic taste in music. The sounds he grew up with included Led Zeppelin, The Beatles, gamelan concerts of Indonesian music, as well as great jazz tenors such as Sonny Rollins, John Coltrane, Dexter Gordon and Gene Ammons.
"I'd say that's an unequivocal advantage. I grew up hearing music as music, not as distinct competing styles. Obviously, as I developed an awareness and sensitivity, I was able to differentiate between different types of music. But I grew up experiencing all good music as communication and emotion through sound. "I love jazz. If I had to pick a favourite style of music it would be jazz, but I hear in my favourite rock musicians, in my favourite soul and funk and hip hop musicians the same passion, commitment and creativity that I hear in my favourite jazz musicians." Amazingly, he is largely self-taught. "Had I known I was going to be a musician, I think I would have been a lot more serious about music when I was growing up and I probably would have chosen to immediately go into studying music. I've always had a lot of discipline and focus when it comes to academics, and I've always had very little of it when it comes to music," he says, again with that wry laugh.
"Music, in many ways, has been the antidote to all the stress and neuroses and focus and discipline that I've had with my studies. For me, music was always about the release. It was about picking up the horn and playing and interacting with other people and connecting on a very intuitive and emotional level. Because of that, my studies of music have never been great."
He's by no means a musical illiterate, but what he does have is something that must have been recognised by the exceptional jazzmen such as Motian, Metheny, Haden and Jack De-Johnette, with whom Redman worked during his annus mirabilis, a kind of quality to his playing in the way that some actors have stage presence. I put the point to him.
"Thank you for the compliment," he says. "I would have to agree with that, without trying to sound conceited. It's like a musical charisma. Some musicians have something that goes beyond what it is they're playing. There's a feeling, a spirit, something that jumps out at you and grabs you and you can't explain it. If you took their solo and broke it apart, if you analysed their music, it wouldn't show up there. And, you know, I think I've always had some of that - even when I had no idea what I was doing." His tenor influences have been as diverse, in jazz terms, as the music he heard growing up - at one side such towering modernists as Rollins and Coltrane, on the other, such down-home groovers as Gene Ammons, Stanley Turrentine and Illinois Jacquet. But he has also been influenced by his own generation, including his great friend, Mark Turner, who has already achieved recognition, and another who, he feels, deserves to be much more widely known.
"There's a tenor player who I met in Boston around the same time as I met Mark Turner that very few people know. His name is Chris Cheek. Even more so than Mark, more than any other musician of my generation, he's been the biggest influence on me. He has a new record out. It's called Vine and it's on the Fresh Sound label. It's a beautiful record. Actually, Brad Mehldau's on it, and Kurt Rosenwinkel and Jorge Rossy." Rosenwinkel is one of the foremost young guitarists on the New York scene and Rossy is the drummer in Mehldau's remarkable trio.
Among Redman's ambitions is to make an album with a singer, preferably Cassandra Wilson with whom he recorded Days Of Wine And Roses for the soundtrack of Clint Eastwood's Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. He has backed singers before, especially in his early days in New York, and he has done things with Diana Krall and with non-jazz people such as the Rolling Stones. "I think it's a really important experience for any horn player, because it teaches you a type of musical humility that you might not already have. Any horn player, but especially a saxophonist or trumpet player, is used to playing the role of lead voice. You're playing the melody and then you're taking an improvisation in which you're out front. You're leading the band. The thing about playing with a vocalist is that you are playing a subordinate role. You are accompanying the singer in the same way that a pianist, or bassist or drummer may accompany you when you're taking a solo.
"I learned a lot about musical co-operation and integration through the experience I had with vocalists. It's really carried into my approach as a saxophonist in a band, because, even when I'm soloing and I'm providing the lead melodic voice, I'm always reacting to what the other members of the group are doing. And I don't consider myself the master when I'm taking a solo. I'm just one person contributing to the overall shape of the music and I try to interact with and leave myself open to anything that any of the other musicians play."
It's a virtual musical credo for the group he will have in Cork. The quartet, completed by Aaron Goldberg (piano), Reuben Rogers (bass) and Gregory Hutchinson (drums), is his working group. "We've been together for two years and we've made two albums together, one of which is now out called Beyond, and the other one which I just finished mixing in the studio a couple of days ago. That will be out some time next year.
"I was obviously very pleased with Beyond and we still play much of that music, and we'll probably play a lot of it when we're in Cork. But this next record is even a step beyond Beyond, I feel, just because we've been playing together that much longer. We know each other better. We trust each other more. The music is much more explorative and adventurous - but I'm talking about something that you can't listen to yet."
Joshua Redman and his quartet appear at the Everyman in Cork on Sunday, October 29th, as part of the Guinness Jazz Festival.