Joshua Redman, bassist Reuben Rogers, and drummer Greg Hutchinson, one of two trios featured on Redman's recent Nonesuch release, Compass, play the first of two nights at the Dakota Jazz club in Minneapolis tonight. The sets are the trio's last dates in the US before the start of an extensive European tour that gets under way at the Blue Note Milan on Thursday.

"Joshua Redman has made some fine albums in the past," says All About Jazz reviewer Doug Collette, "but he's never recorded one with such clarity of purpose as the self-produced Compass. In keeping with the dual meaning of the title word ... the saxophonist leads two different trios into unfamiliar terrain with authority and aplomb."

Collette finds that the album's "music bristles with vigor throughout," and writes of the five double trio artists it features, "[T]hese musicians pirouette around each other ever so gracefully, with nary a misstep on a melody line when not interlocking on a rhythmic phrase." Compass, he says, shows "a strength and certainty all around."

Redman serves a number of roles on the record, from songwriter to sax man to producer to the leader of two separate trios and a double trio. "His staunch presence in the role of the bandleader is as crucial to the success of the individual tracks as to the end result of Compass in total," asserts Collette. And with this success, "there's the palpable sense that the Redman has opened himself up to all manner of possibilities for future musical endeavors, proceeding directly from the cathartic self-renewal that is Compass."

Read the review at allaboutjazz.com.

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For upcoming European tour dates, visit nonesuch.com/on-tour.