Joshua Redman Rollins Tribute Album Arrives in November with McBride, Potter and Salvant

There is something quietly deliberate about the title If Ever You Would Leave Us (we play for Rollins): the parenthetical reads less like a subtitle than a private vow. The Joshua Redman Rollins tribute album, announced for release on 20 November via Blue Note Records, will be Redman’s third for the label, built around 11 selections drawn from Sonny Rollins’ repertoire and recorded in New York within weeks of Rollins’ passing.

The project began, by Redman’s own account, as an almost involuntary response. ‘Sonny’s passing definitely hit me hard,’ he said. ‘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.’ He also described Rollins as having been present ‘for the totality of my life, and a lifetime before mine.’ That kind of grief does not sit still, and Redman moved quickly: after Rollins’ passing on 26 May, he began contacting friends and colleagues and organised studio sessions in New York within a couple of weeks.

A Cast Built Around Personal History with the Music

The album’s lead single, ‘Grand Street,’ introduces the project and carries an almost uncanny generational thread. The track first appeared on Rollins’ Sonny Rollins and the Big Brass, and on the new recording, drummer Marcus Gilmore plays the chair once occupied on that original session by his grandfather, Roy Haynes. Redman is joined on the single by guitarist Peter Bernstein and bassist Christian McBride, a pairing that gives the track both swing and weight without overdressing the material.

The wider cast across the album is extensive and carefully chosen. Pianist Kevin Hays, bassist Larry Grenadier, tenor saxophonist Chris Potter, and vocalists Cécile McLorin Salvant and Gabrielle Cavassa all appear. Hays and Bernstein are both former members of Rollins’ own band, which gives those particular pairings a biographical weight beyond mere taste or convenience. Rather than assembling a fixed ensemble and rotating the repertoire through it, Redman works with these musicians in several different configurations across the record, a structural choice that keeps each piece open to its own character and prevents the album from settling into a comfortable, uniform reverence.

The Joshua Redman Rollins Tribute and a Lifelong Influence

The personal stakes here run deep and stretch far back. Redman has described Rollins as his biggest influence as both an improviser and saxophonist, a relationship that began not in a club or a classroom but in a library. He recalled discovering Saxophone Colossus at the Berkeley Public Library when he was 10 or 11, around the time he started playing saxophone. Hearing that album, he said, showed him ‘the true power and potential of jazz improvisation’ and became a formative point in his development. ‘When I discovered Sonny Rollins,’ Redman said, ‘that was my gateway, and my North Star.’

That phrase, ‘North Star’, is worth sitting with. It suggests not just influence but orientation: a fixed point by which everything else was navigated. A tribute record made in that spirit risks either piety or mere reproduction, but the breadth of voices Redman has assembled here, from Salvant’s vocal presence to Potter’s tenor to Grenadier’s bass, suggests an intention to make the music breathe rather than simply to preserve its shape.

The album arrives on 20 November. ‘Grand Street’ is available to hear now, and it offers a clear sense of the tone Redman is pitching for: affectionate, unhurried, and entirely serious about what it means to carry a tradition forward.