"bluu-hes"

Dewey Redman has died. I didn't know that. Bummer. I never met him, but I remember a fantastic interview my colleague Morten did with him when we worked in the student radio. He waxed poetic about John Coltrane, and talked about his own playing. At one point he talked about the different things he played, "whether you're playing free, or ballads, or up-tempo or..." and he put in this very slight, completely unself-conscious pause, and said "blues." And the way he said it, with this raspy, whisky-and-40-cigarettes-a-day-for-twenty-years voice, that bore every mark of his life in it, and the slight, lilting tremor on a sustained U: "bluu-hes". It sounded so close to being a parody of a blues singer, but at the same time hit this note of complete sincerity, and of having every right in the world to utter that word in that way.

The funny thing is that I'm probably going to remember that one word better than anything I ever heard him play.