Virtuoso tenor saxophonist-composer Joshua Redman, a household name in jazz since he launched his career in the mid-’90s, returns to The Detroit Jazz Festival with the Joshua Redman Group featuring Gabrielle Cavassa (August X, 2024). This new project marks the first time that Redman, an unsurpassed melodist, has collaborated with a vocalist. Cavassa is a New Orleans-based rising star, who, Redman says, “has an expressive quality and an intimacy and a vulnerability in her sound that is singularly captivating.” Performing material from his latest album where are we, his first on the venerable Blue Note label, the band marches across the United States, asking us to take a critical examination of what we find: “where are we is a meditation on the power and importance of place — the unique human beauty created when we locate ourselves in shared physical spaces together with others; the loss, anomie, and angst suffered when we divide ourselves unnaturally and unjustly apart”, says Redman. Selections include Coltrane’s “Alabama”, Betty Carter’s “New England”, and “Chicago Blues”, a nod to Count Basie and Jimmie Rushing’s classic “Goin’ to Chicago”, and the Redman original “After Minneapolis (face toward mo[u]rning)”.