[Prairie Pup]

'Dewey Baby' remained fond of Fort Worth

By BUD KENNEDY
Star-Telegram Staff Writer

A soft morning rain fell Monday on the Evans Avenue plaza, and south Fort Worth wept for yet another lost jazz hero.

Only a week ago, saxophonist Dewey Redman had led off the annual Charlie Parker Jazz Festival in New York.

He came down sick Wednesday at his Brooklyn apartment, a brother-in-law said, and died Saturday at 75.

On a plaque in the new Evans plaza, he is remembered as one of a remarkable generation of jazz musicians who all grew up in the same Fort Worth neighborhood. Clarinetist John Carter was two years older, the future "King Curtis" Ousley two years younger. In the band hall at the old I.M. Terrell High School, Carter and Redman met up with a pretty good saxophone player from downtown, a kid named Ornette Coleman.

From a family of Fort Worth schoolteachers, Redman set out for college and a career as a high school band director. In his mid-30s, he left Texas to try his luck as a musician in California and New York, where he caught on with Coleman's avant-garde band. He stayed.

At his death, Redman had not lived in Fort Worth for 40 years, and had only recently started coming back to play major music festivals.

Yet he died owning a Texas driver's license that bore his late mother's last address on East Jessamine Street, about a mile from the 1920s frame house on East Leuda Street where he grew up.

He was planning to play a charity benefit in Fort Worth, said his brother-in-law, music producer Velibor Pedevski.

On his hospital bed, Redman told Pedevski that he was coming home to help raise money for a new jazz history archive at the Fort Worth Public Library: "I must make those concerts."

Redman's son, saxophone star Joshua Redman, was by his side, Pedevski said by phone from New York. Funeral arrangements are pending.

In 1994, Redman told Star-Telegram writer Christopher Evans about growing up on Leuda Street at the corner of Tennessee Street, across from a small jazz club where he could hear the music of Duke Ellington, Fats Waller or Louis Jordan.

"To me, then, it was just music," he said then. "But sometimes, when I'm playing today, it's those little tunes I heard right here that come out."

He talked about the then-busy corner of Evans Avenue and Rosedale Street, five blocks from home and now at the edge of the Evans plaza.

"That place was where it all began," he said. "A pool hall right there, a juke joint over there. Beauty shops, barber shops, little-bitty grocery stores, barbecue, liquor stores. ... And these little juke joints were all around this area. It was where your mama told you not to go, but it was the first place I wanted to go."

Redman's mother managed the cafeteria at the old Guinn school on Rosedale, said local jazz historian Marjorie Crenshaw. Crenshaw and Redman went to Sunday school together at St. Andrew's United Methodist Church, and Redman started learning clarinet from a music teacher named Goodman who held lessons in Mount Olive Baptist Church.

Redman has said it was Goodman who steered him away from the trumpet to the clarinet. Then, according to Crenshaw, Redman saw a high school classmate playing the clarinet "and that's when he decided that he'd better switch to saxophone," she said.

Two colleges, one degree, an Army stint and two teaching stops later in Plainview and Bastrop, he wound up leaving for California and a music career. He once told how he played one night for a San Francisco club audience that included John Coltrane.

"I had four or five sessions with him after that, where we'd talk about the saxophone," Redman said in the 1994 Star-Telegram interview. "When he left the last time ... the last thing he told me was 'Practice!'

"Later, I realized he wasn't just talking about practicing a little here and there. What he meant was to really make good music, you have to dig down in yourself, pull out that stuff that's there from the earlier years, stuff that's in your soul."

When Redman finally decided to try New York, Coleman told him, "Bring your horn over."

That led to stardom in Coleman's "free jazz" band and Charlie Haden's Liberation Orchestra, and the combination group Old and New Dreams.

Redman was the subject of a 2001 Canadian documentary film, Dewey Time.

When Branford Marsalis takes the stage here Sept. 15 at the Jazz by the Boulevard festival, I imagine he'll play his tribute: Dewey Baby.

Pedevski, the brother of Redman's wife, Lidja, said Redman enjoyed trips home to Texas, even after his mother died. He stopped by both her old home, which he kept, and his family's former home on Leuda.

"He was really proud of Fort Worth," Pedevski said. "We're all proud of what Fort Worth has done. There is no other city like Fort Worth that has given so much to music."

Pedevski named off even more local jazz stars: Coleman, Julius Hemphill, Charles Moffett, Ronald Shannon Jackson, Prince Lasha. Not to mention two older white musicians who often crossed the color line in segregation-era Fort Worth, future Glenn Miller Orchestra bandleaders Tex Beneke and Ray McKinley.

"It's almost kind of scary to think that they were all right there," Pedevski said.

Redman's spirit will be right there every time a boy picks up a sax along Evans Avenue.


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Bud Kennedy's column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. 817-390-7538 bud@budkennedy.com

[safly]

Nice article. I'll have to check out that Evans Avenue PLAZA, once I map it. Like I've been saying, FW has sooo much to give in the music scene. Especially with it's rich past.

"He was really proud of Fort Worth," Pedevski said. "We're all proud of what Fort Worth has done. There is no other city like Fort Worth that has given so much to music."

Pedevski named off even more local jazz stars: Coleman, Julius Hemphill, Charles Moffett, Ronald Shannon Jackson, Prince Lasha. Not to mention two older white musicians who often crossed the color line in segregation-era Fort Worth, future Glenn Miller Orchestra bandleaders Tex Beneke and Ray McKinley.

Powerful stuff. Can't wait for Jazz by the Blvd.

The man performed sessions with COLTRANE!

I am a bit surprised that DIS did not start this post.