Inside Sonny Rollins’s Jazz Archive, Headed Home to Harlem

[Hardbopjazz]

Nice article. 

');doc.close();})(); Inside Sonny Rollins’s Jazz Archive, Headed Home to Harlem - NYTimes.com

Inside Sonny Rollins’s Jazz Archive, Headed Home to Harlem

 

');doc.close();})(); Inside Sonny Rollins’s Jazz Archive, Headed Home to Harlem - NYTimes.com

 

By GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO

May 29, 2017

The saxophonist Sonny Rollins, perhaps jazz’s most respected living improviser, is also one of its most relentless seekers. But that’s well known; what’s not as widely recognized is the diversity — and the depth — of his inquiry.

Yes, there’s his herculean practice regimen (upward of eight hours a day, even into middle age) and the yearslong sabbaticals he took from performing to hone his craft. But Mr. Rollins, 86, has also maintained a vigorous, syncretic spiritual practice, and he has written hundreds of pages of personal notes over the years — reflecting on music technique and the music business and expressing social laments. He even started writing an instructional saxophone book but dropped that project.

These are among the insights to be gleaned from Mr. Rollins’s personal archive, which the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, part of the New York Public Library, has acquired. The center will process the archive and eventually make it accessible to the public.

“I felt that if any young musicians or people were interested in my life and my career, this should be available,” Mr. Rollins said in a recent telephone interview. “I’m an introspective person,” he added. “I always liked to improve myself, and I always liked to learn.”

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[GA Russell]

Schomburg Center 

For Research in Black Culture
Acquires Jazz Legend Sonny Rollins's
Personal Archive 

  

Collection to Offer Extensive Insight
Into the Prolific Creative Life and Career of
One of Music's Greatest Minds
 

May 30, 2017

The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at The New York Public Library today announced the acquisition of American tenor saxophonist and jazz legend Sonny Rollins's personal archive. The robust collection includes more than 150 linear feet of material that document Rollins's life and career from the 1950s to the present.

 

This acquisition also marks the Harlem native's "return" to the neighborhood of his youth. Rollins was profoundly influenced and inspired by the sights and sounds of the Harlem Renaissance and its pioneers, including Duke Ellington and Louis Jordan, who shaped modern music and Rollins's creative life.

 

"Well, I'm home again," Rollins said. "Home, where I absorbed the rich culture which was all around me. Where, on 137th Street, two blocks from the Schomburg, I was born in 1930. This archive reveals my life in music, how someone principally self-taught became taught. How the spiritual light of jazz protected and fed me, as it does to this day."

 

Spanning a 60-year career and more than 80 albums, the Rollins archive is rich with texture, offering an intimate look into the creativity, curiosity, and organization that led to the artist's creative process and practice. Archive items range from audio reels and cassettes of unheard music and practice sessions, personal photographs from Rollins's travels abroad, sheet music with margin notes, personal writing, practice diaries, and handwritten letters between Rollins and his wife and partner of more than 45 years, Lucille Pearson Rollins.

 

The archive also offers insight into Rollins's social and professional network of musicians through detailed notes from recorded sessions, letters, and snapshots from touring over the decades.

 

To be primarily housed within the Schomburg Center's Moving Image and Recorded Sound Division, the Rollins archive joins a robust collection of jazz-related materials across the institution's divisions, including the A Great Day in Harlem Documentary collection, the Louis Armstrong Jazz Oral History project, the Don Redman papers, the Billy Taylor collection, the Ron Carter collection, and the Duke Ellington Society collection.

 

This acquisition also adds significant weight to the New York Public Library's collection of jazz-related items including the George Avakian and Anahid Ajemian papers, which include letters from Rollins to Avakian and several unreleased live and studio recordings from Rollins's time at RCA; the Ivan Black papers that include promotional and performance photographs of Rollins; along with the Sy Oliver, Phoebe Jacobs, and Benny Goodman collections.

 

"Rollins had a measure of professional and personal stability that allowed him to collect the artifacts of his life from original manuscripts and compositions to his business records, unlike many of his peers. In this sense, his archive is unique," said Shola Lynch, curator of the Schomburg's Moving Image and Recorded Sound division."He has also been aware of keeping the flame. As Rollins said recently of his peers and mentors: 'They're not here now so I feel like I'm sort of representing all of them, all of the guys. Remember, I'm one of the last guys left, as I'm constantly being told, so I feel a holy obligation sometimes to evoke these people.' As in life, Rollins's archive will undoubtedly evoke them and their musical relationships, and through it, will add granularity to a swath of black history. For the first time, Rollins has opened the doors to studying his music, life, and work as a giant of jazz."

 

"Famous for his reinventions, Sonny Rollins and his archive reveal the profound nature of jazz, America's classical music. Drafts, notes on composition, extensive correspondence, the entire spirit and scope of the Rollins archive show his sophisticated, sustained, and spiritual creative process up close in a way that may best be called literary," said Kevin Young, noted author and Director of the Schomburg Center. "Having the archive of Sonny Rollins come home here, just blocks from where he was born and grew into one of our finest artists, provides a connection to the geniuses who made Harlem and whose legacies, like those of James Baldwin and Maya Angelou, also are housed at the Schomburg."

 

Highlights from the Sonny Rollins Archive include:

 

● Personal papers, diaries, notes, and drawings illuminating Rollins's private thoughts and creative process sporadically through the decades

● Recordings of practice sessions as well as recording takes from as early as the 1960s

● Snapshots and photos from life on the road with his fellow musicians from as early as the 1960s

● Personal correspondence between Rollins and his wife and manager, Lucille Pearson, over the decades that range the gamut from love notes to unfiltered thoughts related to colleagues, bandmates, and business

 

The Sonny Rollins archive will be processed over the next year at NYPL's Library Services Center in Long Island City, and will be made available for research at the Schomburg Center.

 

 

About the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture

The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a research unit of The New York Public Library, is generally recognized as one of the leading institutions of its kind in the world. For over 90 years the Center has collected, preserved, and provided access to materials documenting black life, and promoted the study and interpretation of the history and culture of peoples of African descent. Educational and Cultural Programs at the Schomburg Center complement its research services and interpret its collections. Seminars, forums, workshops, staged readings, film screenings, performing arts programs, and special events are presented year-round. More information about Schomburg's collections and programs can be found at schomburgcenter.org.

 

About the New York Public Library

The New York Public Library is a free provider of education and information for the people of New York and beyond. With 92 locations-including research and branch libraries-throughout the Bronx, Manhattan, and Staten Island, the Library offers free materials, computer access, classes, exhibitions, programming, and more to everyone from toddlers to scholars, and has seen record numbers of attendance and circulation in recent years. The New York Public Library serves more than 18 million patrons who come through its doors annually and millions more around the globe who use its resources at www.nypl.org. To offer this wide array of free programming, The New York Public Library relies on both public and private funding. Learn more about how to support the Library at nypl.org/support.

 

 

 

Photo of Sonny Rollins by John Abbott.  

 

 

Web Sites: sonnyrollins.com, schomburgcenter.org

Read the New York Times piece about the archive acquisition (by Giovanni Russonello)