Stuart Redd’s Dreams To Reality

A Dream Come True

Hi Everyone. I want to thank you for visiting the website and checking out my  Contemporary Jazz and Latin music project – “Dreams To Reality.” It is the result of a very personal journey and a dream come true. For many years, I carried the inner desire to create music that would represent what was playing in my head, although I was never able to fully document or express that music until this CD. So as a result of many pieces of the puzzle falling into place along with several miracles, I am happy to present to you, the listener, my CD of original compositions.

The Early Years

These songs represent glimpses into my past and are the cumulative effect of the music I heard early on in my life. While growing up in Mississippi, I got my first taste of Rhythm & Blues when my dad brought home a juke box for my seventh birthday. I remember hearing James Brown, “Little” Stevie Wonder, Booker T’s Green Onions and the like. Dad would take me with him when he serviced juke boxes in both upscale dinner clubs as well as blues halls and juke joints.

The First Band

At eleven, I picked up the guitar and first learned to play by playing Rock n’ Roll. At 19, I joined a band that toured the Northeast. Appearances included The Pontiac Silver Dome and the Top of the Marriott in New Orleans. At the Detroit Jazz Festival, the band opened for Buddy Rich and the Mercer Ellington Band and received major label interest from Philadelphia producers Gamble and Huff. It was in Detroit, that I heard jazz artists for the first time.

An Inspirational Musical Journey

When we got to Detroit and I discovered WJZZ, a 24-hour Jazz station, it was like the lights came on and the sky opened up. I heard so many things I had never heard before. So that music became the soundtrack to my daily life for years.

After our shows at the Renaissance Center in Detroit, I would go up to my room on the 70th floor, turn out all the lights, open the curtains and look across the Detroit River into Canada. The city lights were flickering and glimmering across the horizon while I listened to WJZZ. Man…the thoughts and dreams that would come into my head while hearing all of that great jazz music against that backdrop! Miles, Parker, Coltrane, Metheny, Hancock & Corea, etc. It was like looking back into the history of Jazz and visualizing all the clubs in New York, Chicago & Detroit where many of those great tunes I was hearing were recorded. I even witnessed the amazing Northern Lights for the first time. All of this created a myriad of audio and visual stimulus for me as I let my musical imagination run wild. It sparked more creativity in me than I could contain.

A Magical Era

Those magical years of unbridled creativity were part of an era that seemed to me to have no corporate boundaries whatsoever! The farther you could take a listening audience into uncharted musical territory was what rewarded you with true success. Exposure to this served as a window to imagining the vast possibilities in a wide musical universe. It inspired me to dream of the journey I wanted to take creating that quality of music myself. So the die was cast way back then. This CD reflects those musical moments that ignited my imagination and stayed with me all these years. I believe we are all a product of what we are exposed to and our surroundings. I am a product of the music I was exposed to during that magical era. On this contemporary jazz CD, I wanted to state my own case as well as pay homage to a few of those who influenced me. Some songs are extended and hearken back to that great era of Jazz Fusion exploration.