On Compass, Joshua Redman takes the concept of "playing trio" in surprisingnew directions. The title of his third Nonesuch disc evokes navigation, travel,a desire to find one's bearings and is his first recording with an acoustic trio. With a 'ready-for-anything' group of collaborators as intrepid as he is-bassistsLarry Grenadier and Rueben Rogers, and drummers Brian Blade andGregory Hutchinson - Redman literally and figuratively stretches the shapeof the trio approach; on the most audacious of these tunes, he performs withthe entire lineup in a double-trio setting. Redman and James Farber, the engineer, placed the musicians in the albummix exactly as the were positioned in the studio, with one drummer on the farleft, another on the far right and the two bassists closer to the middle.