Old and New Dreams

Old and New Dreams was an American jazz group that was active from 1976 to 1987. The group was composed of tenor saxophone player Dewey Redman (doubling on musette), bassist Charlie Haden, trumpeter Don Cherry and drummer Ed Blackwell. All of the members were former sidemen of free jazz progenitor and alto saxophonist Ornette Coleman, and the group played a mix of Coleman's compositions and originals by the band members. The members of Old and New Dreams had deep personal and musical ties to Coleman. Dewey Redman attended high school in Fort Worth, Texas, where his classmates and bandmates were Coleman, Charles Moffett, and Prince Lasha. He was featured on a number of Coleman's albums, beginning with New York Is Now! and Love Call, both recorded in the spring of 1968. Ed Blackwell met Coleman in New Orleans in 1949, and the two later shared a house in Los Angeles. Blackwell joined Coleman's band in 1959 during a gig at the Five Spot, replacing Billy Higgins, who lost his cabaret card. He made his first recorded appearance with Coleman in 1960 on This Is Our Music. Don Cherry met Coleman in the mid 1950s while playing in a band called the Jazz Messiahs, and, after joining his band, was featured on over a dozen albums with Coleman, beginning with the saxophonist's 1958 debut recording Something Else!!!!. Charlie Haden met Coleman shortly after the 1958 recording session, and at the time was playing with Paul Bley. In the fall of 1958, Coleman, Cherry, Haden, and Higgins joined Bley for a six week job at the Hilcrest Club in Los Angeles, recording the material released in the 1970s on Live at the Hilcrest Club 1958 and Coleman Classics Volume 1, after which the four continued as a quartet, with Blackwell later replacing Higgins. Cherry, Haden, and Blackwell appeared with John Coltrane on the album The Avant Garde, recorded in 1960 and featuring three Coleman compositions, and continued to record extensively with Coleman through the 1960s and 1970s. In the early 1970s, Redman and Haden, along with drummer Paul Motian, joined Keith Jarrett's band, while Cherry and Blackwell toured and recorded together. The four also appeared together on the Coleman albums Science Fiction and Broken Shadows, recorded in 1971. In 1975, Coleman formed his electric band Prime Time, and shortly afterward, Jarrett's group disbanded. He continued: "Some people still think that we just get up and start improvising but our playing has its own structure. Instead of following a regular chord pattern, we use the melodies of the compositions as a guide and create new chord structures every time we play them. That's why playing really challenging compositions, Ornette's and our own, is so important to us. The group toured intermittently over a period of roughly eleven years, Cherry and Blackwell later appeared (without Redman) on Haden's 1989 album The Montreal Tapes: with Don Cherry and Ed Blackwell, and the entire group reunited for the last time in 1991 at Alice Tully Hall for an event called "Dewey's Circle", where they were joined by pianist Geri Allen. Blackwell died in 1992, Cherry in 1995, Redman in 2006, and Haden in 2014. In 2017, Dewey Redman's son, saxophonist Joshua Redman, recorded Still Dreaming as a tribute to Old and New Dreams.

Reviewer Scott Yanow called Old and New Dreams "one of the late '80s finest groups", and stated that "they joined The Mingus Dynasty, Sphere, and Dameronia as bands that weren't simply repertory units, but evolving groups using a great composer's material as a starting point for their own peerless interpretations." Robert Palmer stated: "The band's style is as broadly eclectic as the players' disparate personalities and experiences. But Old and New Dreams is also a kind of floating conservatory that keeps the music of the early Coleman quartets the original 'free jazz' alive and before the public."