OK, is this the worst piece of music writing ever?

That's actually pretty funny, particularly once it gets to the Dexter Gordon and Miles Davis parts.

With not-too-much tweaking, some of those Rollins quotes could be legitimate. Leading up to his mid-70s hiatus, Miles pretty much did what "Rollins" describes.

And if the joke about him wanting to be an accountant is "haha, because of COURSE Sonny Rollins has been happily making tons of money as a musician for years!" that's pretty fucked up, considering how many decades of scuffling he and his contemporaries had to endure.

Particularly Onion-worthy:

People take turns noodling around, and once they run out of ideas and have to stop, the audience claps. I’m getting angry just thinking about it.

Sometimes we would run through the same song over and over again to see if anybody noticed. If someone did, I don’t care.

Can't seem to open link, excerpts don't seem particularly clever.

And if the joke about him wanting to be an accountant

Believe at least one cat actually did leave jazz for a while to study to be an accountant- Ray Drummond, maybe.

No, not quite. He went to Stanford business school to work on an MBA then dropped out after one year to play bass full time.

http://jazztimes.com/articles/14542-ray-drummond

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYt8B2RkqrM#t=249

<3 sonny

i really don't get why people are piss and vinegar'd about this

seconded

It was fucked because they didn't mention it was satire + Sonny Rollins isn't enough of a public figure to telegraph the joke.

i mean it was in the humor section with a large-font byline that clearly wasn't sonny rollins

and sure sonny rollins isn't paris hilton--but isn't 'playing to people who get it' kind of the NYers whole reason for being?

artwork choice helped the perception too; using a photo and not an illustration made it seem more like a legitimate story.

i worked out it was a joke by reading it. also it was v. funny.

i didn't think it was that funny! i'm just befuddled by the outrage.

who knew jazz fans could be humourless, cranky?

who knew the New Yorker humor section could be a terrible non-funny, pseudo intellectual version of the Daily Currant?

not outraged, didn't really think it was that funny though. i don't know, rollins has been known to be in somewhat poor health recently, would be a weird thing to publish and then have him (god forbid) pass away the next week or something.

i mean rollins himself in that video just said "well at first i thought it was just some dumb Mad Magazine thing but not as funny but then people started believing it and attributing it to me so I got pretty annoyed that ppl would think i was disparaging jazz or discouraging young jazz players" which is p understandable

who knew the New Yorker humor section could be a terrible non-funny, pseudo intellectual version of the Daily Currant?

― sinister porpoise (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Tuesday, August 5, 2014 10:54 AM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

hehehehe

important info to me from this whole debacle is that rollins never let his sub to Mad Magazine lapse; that's devotion

what really should be remembered out of all of this is that rollins is and always has been a delightfully weird dude

with a large-font byline that clearly wasn't sonny rollins

― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Tuesday, August 5, 2014 10:45 AM (20 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

You say this like no one on the internet has ever aggregated existing content and put their byline on it.

Taking this occasion to say Whiney otm, HOOS not

You say this like no one on the internet has ever aggregated existing content and put their byline on it.

― dilligaf escape plan (Whiney G. Weingarten), Tuesday, August 5, 2014 3:07 PM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

fair

You say this like no one on the internet has ever aggregated existing content and put their byline on it.
Whiney Kurt Vonnegut

Editor’s note: This article, which is part of our Shouts & Murmurs humor blog, is a work of satire.

Django Gold is a senior writer for The Onion.

How is this not on the Onion thread yet? Or is it?
James ReddBob Marley

the satire note was added after the uproar

they also tweeted about it like this:
“If I could do it all over again, I’d probably be an accountant.” Sonny Rollins: In His Own Words http://nyr.kr/1tD6165 @tnyshouts
[tagged with the humor account, but if you didn't know that ...]

not that funny, but so obviously satire! And it had a byline (in the NYer) that wasn't Sonny Rollins.

The other day I trying to count the jazz musicians who'd become tailors and I came up with Walter Davis, Jr., Lil Hardin, and Jutta Hipp (well, seamstress). All pianists!

Still not sure what this is actually "satirizing." More like dumb "inversion," substituting all the artistry with struggles overcoming with po mouth complaining baout stuff. It's as if someone "satirized" Einstein by having him complaining about having to tune his violin and comb his hair.

To cleanse your palate with something that is actually funny and shows a genuine appreciation of music and a keen eye for detail, read this- billed as a parody, not a satire- if you can get behind paywall: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1975/06/23/the-bloomsbury-group-live-at-the-apollo

Still not sure what this is actually "satirizing." More like dumb "inversion,"

right i read the joke here as 'isn't it absurd to imagine this guy who publicly has taken such joy in this music for decades to have actually been truly miserable all along'

the tone deafness there being that of course, there was a lot of misery along the way

Exactly. HOOS otm again!

I didn't read it as being "about" Sonny Rollins at all. I read it as using an interview with Sonny Rollins to point out the futility and pain that are the life of an artist in capitalist society. It's very much of a piece with a bunch of recent Onion stuff that's had people saying, "Wow, that's not funny, that's just depressing."

You, sir, are an idiot, and I do not know what your curvy Colombian wife sees in you, unless it is something in that ideogram.

Sorry, I didn't mean that, I was just satirizing a certain posting style to demonstrate the depressing futility of even posting at all.

I also took the piece to be about "artistic futility." whether or not you find it funny is up to taste but for me the premise of the "joke" seemed to depend on already having a high regard for Rollins/jazz as meaningful, etc.

precisely

it definitely didn't have a disclaimer in the print mag, right? i'd get my lawyers dewey, cheatham, and howe on the phone right away. mental anguish!

It wasn't even in the print magazine - it was online-only. That's what's even more amazing about the response. Who knew all these old crybaby jazz fucks had even heard of the internet?

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-TwniIS2_C2w/TaK13AOntiI/AAAAAAAACmA/cOIfUqesS1I/s1600/Thing.jpg
It's Flag-Postin' Time!

lol

So is this Django Gold the same kid who wrote the Ten Jazz Records You Must Own thing in the Voice a little while back, and now he is already senior editor at Teh Onion? Cream really rises to the top faster and faster in this best of all possible worlds we live in.

Whiney are you even serious here

this to you seems "fucked"? like I get that you'd die before reading the New Yorker but anybody who's read two issues of it knows Shouts & Murmurs is a humor column

You couldn't imagine a scenario where a piece of "humor" could mean aggregating funny quotes from a colorful personality who's not exactly famous?

He is famous, you're just not into jazz. My entire week has been jazzers lolling about that piece

Well it's a good thing this was published in a niche publication like Jazz Times and not a national general interest magazine like the New Yorker with a 1M+ circulation. Dodged a bullet there!