If there ain't a Sonny Rollins thread yet, this could be one

My breathing seems to be O.K. My main problem is that I can’t blow my horn anymore. I’m surviving, but my problem is I can’t blow my horn.

How does it feel not to be able to blow your horn?

[Laughs] Well, that’s where living in the spirit world comes in. It felt pretty bad. I had a rough time getting through it, because I like blowing my horn. When I had to stop, it was quite a traumatic deal for me. From New Yorker interview

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/sonny-rollins-on-the-pandemic-protests-and-music

90 today.

90 today.

hb big ledge!

a couple of years back i was buzzing when he followed me on twitter, until i started getting suspicious dm's, sort of in character from the living legend asking for financial help and it turned out to be a fake phishing account that was promptly closed down, lol.

https://jazztimes.com/features/interviews/sonny-rollins-bright-moments/

Another good interview with Sonny.

Whew---one of those threads where every revive becomes a bit more worrisome---but thanks for the link.
We should add one to unperson's coverage of this
Sonny Rollins - Rollins In Holland (Resonance)
in his Stereogum column:
https://www.stereogum.com/2107860/the-month-in-jazz-november-2020/columns/ugly-beauty/

He can't play his horn any more---doctor's orders, reportedly---but maybe keyboards? Enough to direct other horn players? Wonder if he can write charts.

Also, this kind of crossover is my fascination (as I meant re xpost "coexistence" of free and hard bop, a new progressive mainstream confluence)---play it again, unperson:
A few critics have claimed that Rollins and Cherry were incompatible, that they weren’t capable of deep communication. But I think what was really going on was, people were used to hearing Cherry next to Coleman, whose style was built around extrapolations of a song’s melody. And Cherry could do that really, really well; there’s almost a giddiness to their interplay on albums like This Is Our Music and The Shape of Jazz to Come, like you’re listening to two little kids making up a song together. Rollins, though, was on the surface a more traditional jazz player, who improvised (and still does) by building on the chord structure of a tune, occasionally (okay, frequently) throwing in apposite quotes from other songs, sometimes as punctuation, other times seemingly as filler to allow him to gather his thoughts. The fuller, heavier sound of the tenor saxophone is the ideal tool for this job, just as the alto’s lighter, floatier tone is great for loose, wandering melodies.
Yeah, the Rollins way is itself a confluence, which may incl. something he heard Marlene Dietrich sing in an old movie on The Late Show, or on the radio of a passing car, whatever comes back to him in the now (though he may have actually plotted at least some of this out, but seems spontaneous)---also, whenever I think of Hal Willner, I think of Rollins w Leonard Cohen, on Night Music, which Willner later said was the performance that seemed to establish the credibility of his approach on there---I don't trust ilx to let me post it, but no doubt somewhere on the 'Tube.

The Complete Village Gate set from a few years back gives a MUCH better picture of the Rollins / Cherry collab than Our Man In Jazz imo — it's amazing.

https://www.discogs.com/Sonny-Rollins-Quartet-With-Don-Cherry-Complete-Live-At-The-Village-Gate-1962/release/7008770

Yeah, and I was quoting from unperson's take on it, upthread---still gotta get that box!

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2022/jan/21/i-was-so-close-to-the-sky-it-was-spiritual-sonny-rollins-on-jazz-landmark-the-bridge-at-60

Rollins disappeared from the radar and stayed off it for the next two years – instead playing the saxophone on the bridge day and night, rain or shine, in solitary sessions of sometimes 15 hours

I'd read about this before but didn't realise he'd gone to such extremes!

The Bridge is one of the best.

i've been listening to the bridge nonstop lately, great to have this piece about it

I appreciated yr Jim Hall revive other day as well, Brad

Held my breath as I opened this thread. Feel so privileged to have seen him live.

Me too. Jim Hall actually played with him at one of the shows I attended (the 80th birthday gig with Ornette). Hall looked about 150 years old that night.

There's an excerpt from Aidan Levy's massive Rollins biography on The Wire's website. (I reviewed the book itself in the current issue.) It's all about the formation of the band that recorded Our Man In Jazz:

https://www.thewire.co.uk/in-writing/book-extracts/read-an-extract-from-saxophone-colossus-the-life-music-of-sonny-rollins-by-aidan-levy

wow! thanks for this. can't wait to pick up a copy.

new bio is terrific — about halfway done with it.

Phew, feared the worst when I saw the Rolling Obituary thread near the top of the page.

thanks for the recommendation!

must be Aidan Levy ? is his Lou Reed bio also good?

I need to read this. to me he seems a bit harder to get a handle on (outside of his playing) than monk/coltrane/miles/mingus, maybe because he's relatively less mythologised as a character (and not dead) - I'd love get a better sense of who he is

seeing him not long before his retirement was probably my best ever concert experience (tied with ornette) and he still had more energy on stage than pretty much any young musician I've seen

xp i wasn't crazy about Levy's Lou bio — the DeCurtis one was better.

The book gives you a really good sense of who he is, and he's a fascinatingly weird dude — constantly taking up yoga, going on some spiritual pilgrimage, trying out a new diet, etc., etc. Also a shockingly deep thinker on a wide range of subjects. There's much more to it than just a recitation of recording sessions and live dates.

yeah you get the sense that he's a genuine oddball, but not in a cliche way — just this very unique individual. Total refusal to fit into any box. Just his experiences in the 1950s would make for an incredible book.

I've been listening to the 1965 album on impulse! a lot and I don't know why it isn't generally counted among his classics, it's pretty much perfect. I'm also fascinated by his his playing on the 63 coleman hawkins collab which is so freaky and singular for him - I can only guess his motivations but hawkins rises to the challenge impressively

I'm sold on the book

Green Dolphin Street is a right cut!

I've been listening to the 1965 album on impulse! a lot and I don't know why it isn't generally counted among his classics

I feel like part of Sonny's problem is that he's so critical of his own stuff — he was completely disparaging of those Impulse albums (even though yeah, they're great to my ears). Eventually that attitude rubs off on the audience/critics, I think.

I've always felt like On Impulse was the weakest of his three studio albums for that label — the Alfie soundtrack was really good, with a larger band than he usually used, and East Broadway Run Down was as close as he ever got to real "fire music"-style free jazz, but On Impulse was "just" a collection of five standards. But maybe I should revisit it.

He's supposedly not super into studio recording, so the uneasy feeling of a session seems to color his feelings about the end result, regardless of how great it is. But yeah, he's always been fairly self-critical. There's a story that someone taped a set of his in a club, transcribed a few solos, and showed the transcriptions to Sonny the next night. Sonny looked them over and said, "Oh no, man, I can't play that."

His discography is tricky since he changed bands so much back then — if he had one or two "classic" groups that stayed together for an extended period (like Miles or Coltrane), there would be an era to focus in on. But that was definitely not his MO.

I have the vague memory of some academic doing an effusive analysis of his solo on three little words from on impulse as like the best solo ever or something but I can't find it (schuller or someone like that? I know he did something similar for blue 7)

it's a shame he seems so self critical* (but maybe it's partly why he became so good) - does he consider his semi-engagement with the avant garde a failure? it clearly wasn't it from my pov, it gave a real frisson to his playing afterwards even on smoother work (tenor madness on road shows vol. 1 is just mindblowing, the rest of the band kind of stays on the ground as a launching/landing pad while he's off in space a lot of the time)

*in london I remember him telling himself out loud to get it together in the middle of a solo - I couldn't hear what it was about his playing on that number that wasn't good enough but clearly he did

I love the stuff he recorded after his self-exile period, like The Bridge and What's New, can never get bored of them

yeah, that's what I reach for the most — Jim Hall sounds so good on those records.

His discography is tricky since he changed bands so much back then — if he had one or two "classic" groups that stayed together for an extended period (like Miles or Coltrane), there would be an era to focus in on. But that was definitely not his MO.

FWIW, the quintet with Clifford Brown was amazing - I loved that group, even before Rollins joined. Brown was one of the most immeasurable losses in jazz - as great as he was, given his age and abilities, he seemed like someone who could develop even further as a player.

yeah that Brown / Roach band is fantastic. What's crazy is that Rollins was in that band for less than a year (though he continued playing with Roach after Brown and Powell died).

The Brown & Roach band were amazing, but (and I know this is sort of sacrilegious to say) I'm not actually sure how much farther Brown would have developed as a player. Like, he was virtuosic in a bebop/hard bop context, but I can't think of a single moment on any of those albums that shows that he had the capacity to break out of that. I don't know if he could have had a career like Freddie Hubbard, who did the virtuosic-hard-bopper thing but was also the only musician to appear on both John Coltrane's Ascension and Ornette Coleman's Free Jazz, and then made his slick fusion move with CTI in the early 70s...I feel like Brown would have stayed traditional, to his detriment.

I think I agree — though if Miles Davis had died in 1956, I don't know if we'd be able to really predict, say, Agharta.

but I can't think of a single moment on any of those albums that shows that he had the capacity to break out of that.

I can think of many, including (but not limited to) his phrasing in general, but especially his repeated stabs at a phrase in his solo on "What Is This Thing Called Love" (at 2:00 in the song) -- in its way, it's a foreshadowing of Coltrane's use of repeated figures some years later, really digging in and working certain phrases into the ground. And anyway, people said the same about Coltrane up to, and including, Giant Steps -- where could he even go after all that? That's just it -- we don't know what Brown would have done, and what he was doing wasn't seen or thought of as "traditional" when he was doing it.

Freddie Hubbard, who did the virtuosic-hard-bopper thing but was also the only musician to appear on both John Coltrane's Ascension and Ornette Coleman's Free Jazz, and then made his slick fusion move with CTI in the early 70s...

Except Freddie sounded hapless and out-of-his-depth on Free Jazz, and exponentially moreso on Ascension -- he adds nothing to those records (though he works well enough on Ole). If Freddie hadn't appeared on either of those records his career (and the overall curve of the music) would be unaltered.

seems as though Brown and Max Roach were pretty well-aligned and Roach ended up having a fairly adventurous career over the years ... but again, who knows? He was just 25 when he died!

Yeah, Roach never stopped taking risks. Can you imagine? -- Brown and Braxton! Brown with Cecil Taylor! (As it happened, Brown and Eric Dolphy played together informally in the mid-'50s.)

But also, while we don't know what he might have done, we similarly don't know the effect he would have continued to have on the music. Would Miles have risen to prominence the way he did if Brown had lived? Would Brown being straight-edge (though it obviously wasn't called that at the time) have inspired more musicians to get clean?

is the story about roach punching / otherwise assaulting ornette coleman true? if so did he have a change of heart about the avant garde later on or was it something specific about ornette's approach or personality that pissed him off?

I think Roach had an anger/ violence problem in his younger years. I remember reading he abused Abbey Lincoln when they were together.

I never heard that story, and I knew a couple of musicians who were personally acquainted with both Roach and Ornette -- if it was true, I feel like I would have heard it many times by now. That said, Miles's autobiography has a story or two about how Max struggled with alcoholism after Brown's (and later, Booker Little's) death, and would act unpredictably and, in at least one instance, scary and threatening (when he tried to physically break down the door of Miles's house -- Miles was out, but Frances was home and extremely frightened). So it's not impossible, but if it did happen, I doubt it was because of Max's feelings about the new music (and Max played with Eric Dolphy -- I can't imagine he would have dislike Ornette's work much, certainly not enough to assault him).

xp

There was a story in Spin in the 80s about Roach throwing a writer — who had shown up accompanied by Fab Five Freddy — out of his house for being insufficiently accepting of the musical relationship between jazz and hip-hop. I don't think he ever lost his temper. But he was definitely open to new sounds; he played duos with Braxton, with Shepp, with Cecil; he made albums with string quartets joining his band; he founded M'Boom; he did a whole lot of really adventurous shit that I haven't dug into nearly as deeply as I should.

I remember that piece. The writer mentioned Zeppelin samples in hip-hop. Max said, "Hip-hop swings. I never heard Led Zeppelin swing."

some may disagree but he's right

Found it -- not sure if the link will work, but it's on page 60 of the October, 1988 issue of Spin:

https://books.google.com/books?id=ozV_Wa_c470C&lpg=PA60&dq=%22Max%20Roach%22&pg=PA60#v=onepage&q=%22Max%20Roach%22&f=false