Rob Reddy's music is truly American: confident without being arrogant, brash but not swaggering, and celebratory to the point of boisterousness and joyous unrestraint.
--Allen Huotari, All About Jazz
Some of the musicians that have performed and/or recorded Reddy's Music -----
Jef Lee Johnson, Dom Richards, Pheeroan akLaff, Reggie Workman, Brandon Ross, EJ Allen, Josh Roseman, Charlie Burnham, Guillermo E. Brown, Mino Cinelu, Michael Cain, Mark Taylor, Rufus Cappadocia, Jon Margulies, JT Lewis, Hearn Gadbois, Mauro Refosco, Tim Otto, Calvin Weston, David Gilmore, John Carlson, David Fiuczynski, Vincent Chancey, Tom Rainey, Mary Wooten, Bob Scarpulla, Charles Baldwin, Jerome Harris, Steven Bernstein, Melvin Gibbs, Ravi Best, Pete Drungle, Reggie Nicholson, Alfred Petterson, Rasul Siddik, Gerry Hemmingway, Gene Lake, Douglas Yates, Shahzad Ismaily, Avram Feffer, Craig Rivers, Steve Blum, Lisa Parrott, Oscar Noriega, Steve Elson, Cochemea Gastelum, Lis Rubard, Curtis Hasselbring, Sarah Bernstein, Marlene Rice, Tomas Fujiwara..
Influences
The musicians who play my music, Ornette Coleman, Sidney Bechet, Duke Ellington, Charles Mingus, Henry Threadgill, Ronald Shannon Jackson, Charles Ives, Wayne Shorter, Oliver Lake, Albert Ayler, Louis Armstrong, Aaron Copland, Miles Davis, Stevie Wonder, Muhal Richard Abrams, Igor Stravinsky, Reggie Workman, Thelonius Monk, Alan Hovhanness, John Coltrane, Arthur Blythe, Jimi Hendrix, John Adams, Keith Jarrett, Lester Bowie, Joni Mitchell, Charlie Haden, Frank Zappa, Bjork, Makanda Ken McIntyre, Herbie Hancock, Steve Reich, Eric Dolphy, Gil Evans, Julius Hemphill, Sly Stone, Sun Ra, Cecil Taylor, Staple Singers, Jaco Pastorius, Carla Bley, Art Ensemble Of Chicago, Ranny Reeve, Bill Dixon, Giya Kancheli, Lou Harrison, Bela Bartok, Sonny Rollins, The Beatles, Chick Corea, Thomas A. Dorsey, Dave Liebman, Butch Morris, Chris Whitley, Olivier Messiaen, lots of Music recorded by Alan Lomax, Arvo Part, Steve Lacy, Brian Eno, Henryk Gorecki, Charles Lloyd, Leos Janacek, Alex Bradford, Henry Cowell, Terry Riley, John Philip Sousa, Witold Lutoslawski.....Sam Harris, William Carlos Williams, Milan Kundera, Richard Dawkins, Octavio Paz, Ralph Ellison, Noam Chomsky, Tomas Transtromer, Samuel Beckett, Anne Carson, Herman Hesse, Langston Hughes, Gore Vidal, Walt Whitman, Thomas Paine..
Sounds Like
Rob Reddy follows his own muse and is not conventional by any means. More interested in sonorities than in straightforward Jazz, Reddy is uncompromising and yet humble, the totality of the concepts more important than individualism. Listeners who enjoy Jazz out of the mainstream would do well to check out Reddys merging of musical expression with religious feeling.
--Don Williamson, 52nd Street Reviews
Since forming his first band in 1989, a trio featuring legendary bassist Reggie Workman and drummer Pheeroan akLaff, Rob Reddy has worked almost exclusively as a leader, with the exception of brief stints with Workman's ensemble and Ronald Shannon Jackson's Decoding Society in the early 90's. For the rest of that decade, Reddy would helm a prototypical sextet called Rob Reddy's Honor System, documented on his first two recordings, 1996's Post-War Euphoria (Songlines Recordings) and 1999's Songs That You Can Trust (Koch Jazz).
Two other CDs, 2000's However Humble (Koch Jazz) and 2001's Seeing By The Light Of My Own Candle (Knitting Factory Records), would follow early in the new millennium, demonstrating Reddy's expanding palette, as well as a growing roster of notable collaborators, including bassist Dom Richards, drummer Guillermo E. Brown, violinist Charles Burnham, cellist Rufus Cappadocia, and trumpeter John Carlson among others.
In October 2006, he founded the Reddy Music label, and released his first recording in five years, A Hundred Jumping Devils, featuring a new sextet called Rob Reddy's Gift Horse, featuring Burnham, Richards, French hornist Mark Taylor, guitarist Brandon Ross and percussionist Mino Cinelu. The CD received critical praise and earned Reddy a commission from Chamber Music America to write new music for the band, which he will premiere in late 2007.
His second Reddy Music release, September 2007's The Book of the Storm, features an all-star 19-piece group he calls Rob Reddy's Small Town performing the hour-long title piece live at the Tribeca Performing Arts Center (TPAC) in March 2007. This large-scale work was commissioned by the New York State Council on the Arts and the Jerome Foundation.
In the spring of 2007, Reddy expanded his label's presence by creating the Reddy Music Concert Series, a monthly series presenting double-bill concerts at Brooklyn's Jalopy Theater. Other upcoming projects include recording a new CD with his working quintet, unveiling a new ten-piece ensemble called Rob Reddy's Tenfold in October 2007, and a collaboration with choreographers Andrew Palermo and Taye Diggs to be premiered at TPAC in October 2008.
