JAZZ SPOTLIGHT : *** : JOSHUA REDMAN QUARTET : “Spirit of the Moment: Live at the Village Vanguard”

Joshua Redman, the much-praised young tenor saxophonist, has been carrying a heavy burden of expectancy for a player still in his 20s. The tendency to identify him as the next great saxophone hope after he won the Thelonious Monk International Jazz Competition in 1991 has tended to blur his very real accomplishments. It’s worth recalling that John Coltrane--at Redman’s present age of 26--had just begun to specialize on tenor saxophone and had made no recordings as a leader.

Which is not to say that Redman does not have a few problems, among them a tendency to utilize an excess of crowd-rousing gimmickry in his performances. And, as this live, two-CD set recorded last March makes clear, it is a tendency that has developed into a fairly habitual element in his work.

But Redman needs to be viewed in context. He has, for one thing, expressed a desire to create jazz that communicates directly with his listeners, and he clearly does so with the enthusiastic vanguard crowd.

Fortunately, however, although nearly every solo includes a middle section in which he employs the kind of repetitious, driving, blues-based figures that generate spontaneous listener reactions, Redman has a lot of other less obvious things to say as well.

One of them has to do with the articulate expression of musical ideas. On up-tempos such as “Slapstick,” “Herbs and Roots” and “Count Me Out” (all Redman originals) he rips off a series of choruses that manage to sustain melodic integrity through high- speed, horn-scouring improvisational passages.

He also displays remarkable maturity on the ballad “My One and Only Love,” playing with a focused brevity that only occasionally slips into showboating indulgence. On another original, “Dialogue,” he and his group--Peter Martin, piano; Christopher Thomas, bass, and Brian Blade, drums--dip into extended, avant-garde-style collective improvising. Perhaps most daring of all, he successfully risks comparison to Sonny Rollins with a 12-minute romp across the tropical rhythms of “St. Thomas.”

A pretty far-ranging array of performances from a player who was planning to study law at Harvard a few years ago. And, although his audience communication remains too heavily weighted toward give-’em-what-they-want rather than show-them-what-I-can-do, Redman is beginning to reveal signs that the initial accolades for his playing may not have been all that premature.