Michael Fitzgerald

Tomorrow's news today - http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/30/arts/music/30sonn.html ==================== September 30, 2005 Sonny Rollins: A Free Spirit Steeped in Legends By BEN RATLIFF HIS face and neatly trimmed white beard shaded by a Filson hunting cap, Sonny Rollins arrived for our appointment straight from a visit to the dentist. The dentist is more or less the only reason for Mr. Rollins to make the two-and-a-half-hour trip to New York City now unless he's giving an infrequent concert. Now 75, the tenor saxophonist whom many call the greatest living improviser in jazz lives on a Columbia County farm in Germantown, N.Y., that he bought in 1972 with his wife, Lucille. Until recently they also kept an apartment in Lower Manhattan; after the World Trade Center, six blocks away, was attacked, they had to leave their home temporarily and then decided to let go of their pied-à-terre. His wife, who was also his manager and record producer, died last November. This is a period of transition for him. Mr. Rollins had agreed to my request that he choose some music for us to listen to together and discuss. In the elevator at The New York Times, I asked him how his big concert had gone at the Montreal Jazz Festival over the summer. "Well, I don't know," he answered in his froggy voice. "I look at all that from the inside, so you'd probably have to ask someone else." But on the subject of music other than his own, the basis of our meeting, he is more forthcoming. Mr. Rollins had chosen a short list of pieces for our session, the point being to listen through his sensibilities. He was careful to contextualize his responses, but essentially remained open to exploring any idea. And his responses were fairly fresh: he said, regretfully, that for 20 years he had not really listened much to music, to protect himself from too much information. "It's not healthy," he admitted. "I would like to be able to listen to CD's. I enjoy it, you know." What we did not discuss much was Mr. Rollins's new album, "Without a Song," released a month ago by Milestone/Fantasy. It is a recording of a Boston concert four days after the Sept. 11 attacks, and the first in a possible series of live Sonny Rollins releases. Carl Smith, a 66-year-old retired lawyer who also collects jazz recordings, has located (and in a few cases, including the Boston concert, surreptitiously recorded) more than 350 Rollins performances, going back to a tape of a three-minute solo on alto saxophone from 1948. Were these performances to be made available, they would be taken very seriously in the jazz world, especially because Mr. Rollins's studio records of the last 30 years - some would argue 40 - scarcely indicate the extent of his talent. Mr. Rollins is a powerful, grand-scale improviser who often needs half an hour or more to say what he wants on the horn and achieve his momentum. But he is also a paragon of structure as he improvises. Almost every modern jazz musician is fascinated by Sonny Rollins. Yet he says he has an aversion to listening to himself play. He had to force himself to listen closely to the tape of the Boston concert, a process that he described as "like Abu Ghraib." "It's possible for me to hear something I did and say, 'Yeah, I like that,' " Mr. Rollins admitted. "Although it would probably never be a whole thing. It might be a portion, a section of something, or a solo." Mr. Rollins was born in New York City in 1930, of parents who had immigrated from the Virgin Islands. He grew up in Harlem - first in the lowlands around 135th Street and Lenox Avenue, and then, from age 9, in the Sugar Hill neighborhood, a locus at the time for jazz musicians. He attended Benjamin Franklin High School in what was then an Italian section of East Harlem, and lived through an early New York experiment in bussing black students to white neighborhoods; he remembers people throwing objects at the bus windows. But it was such a high-profile case of school integration that Frank Sinatra and Nat King Cole gave concerts to the students in the school auditorium to promote race relations. Thinking of his childhood, Mr. Rollins wanted to hear Fats Waller's 1934 recording of "I'm Going to Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter." From the beginning of the song he looked as if he had just stepped into a warm bath. A clarinetist began playing counterpoint improvisations against Waller's piano and voice. "Who's the clarinet player?" Mr. Rollins asked, coming out of his reverie. It was Rudy Powell. "Isn't that something?" he said. "I went to school with Rudy Powell's son." Mr. Rollins and Rudy Powell didn't know each other, although they stood about three feet apart in Art Kane's famous "Great Day in Harlem" photograph from 1958. "I remember hearing that song around the house, and on the radio and everything," Mr. Rollins said. "Wow, I haven't heard that record in so many years. It's one of my earliest memories of jazz. I believe in things like reincarnation, and it struck a chord someplace in my back lives or something." It's very restful, I said, as we listened to the song again. It's not the other Fats Waller, the boisterous one. "Yeah," Mr. Rollins agreed. "He could be raucous, but this is very, very much - mmm." (Waller was singing: "I'm gonna write words oh so sweet/ they're gonna knock me off my feet/ a lot of kisses on the bottom/ I'll be glad I got 'em.") "Yeah," Mr. Rollins said, still impressed by Powell. "But the thing I want to stress is that this is evocative of the whole Harlem scene. Where I was born, when I was born. And his playing, that stride piano style, which of course comes from other people. It's overwhelming to me, really. When I hear him, to me it just says the whole thing. It encapsulates jazz, the spirit of jazz, what jazz is about. In a very overall way." Along Came Hawkins We moved on to Coleman Hawkins. If Waller represents Mr. Rollins's childhood, Hawkins represents his maturation. (An infatuation with Louis Jordan came in between.) When Mr. Rollins became really interested in the saxophone, as a teenager in the mid-1940's, Hawkins was especially hot. In late 1943 the yearlong ban imposed by the American Federation of Musicians, preventing commercial recordings, had just been lifted, and Hawkins, nearly 40 and very competitive, was making up for lost time, collaborating with the younger beboppers. (In 1963 Rollins would make a record with his idol, performing with a kind of brave, modern idiosyncrasy.) "The Man I Love," from December 1943, is one of the greatest performances in jazz, though overshadowed by Hawkins's much more famous recording of "Body and Soul." It was released on a 12-inch 78 r.p.m. record - a detail Mr. Rollins remembered - because Hawkins had too much to say and started a second chorus. It ended at 5:05, too long for the normal 10-inch format. We listened to Hawkins's two voluminous choruses, ambitious from the very opening phrase: an E natural chord jostling against an E flat. "You know, he's doing a lot of stuff in there, man," Mr. Rollins said. "Very far-reaching, too. Coleman was a guy that played chord changes in an up-and-down manner. He sort of played every change, let me put it that way. He had a phrase for every change that went by. So in that solo he was not only playing the changes, he was also playing the passing chords, which is another thing he was ahead of his time on. And still, he was getting the jazz intensity moving, so he was building and building and building." "It's a work of art," he concluded. When did he get around to Coleman Hawkins? "Well, 'Body and Soul' was ubiquitous in Harlem, on jukeboxes. They could have turned me on to him. But since I moved up on the hill, where so many of these guys lived, I even had a chance to see him driving around. He had an impressive Cadillac. He dressed well. And, you know, there were certain other people that acted more on the entertainment side. There was even a time in my life when I had a brief feeling about Louis Armstrong, that he was too minstrel-y and too smiley. That didn't last long. I was a young person at the time. But what impressed me about Coleman was that he carried himself with great dignity." A lot of Mr. Rollins's heroes lived in his neighborhood; the tricky part was getting their ear. "There was a great photographer named James J. Kriegsman, who used to make these pictures of musicians, and he made a beautiful picture of Coleman. So I had my 8-by-10, and I knew where he lived, up on 153rd street, and one day I knew when he was coming home. He signed my autograph. I was 13 or 14." "I was a real pest, as a young guy," he recalled. "It's sort of embarrassing to think about it now." Parker Cuts Loose Inevitably, Charlie Parker was on Mr. Rollins's list. But the piece, "Another Hair Do," from 1947, was an unusual choice. It is a 12-bar blues. At the beginning, Parker and a very young Miles Davis play a repeated line for the first four bars. But after that Parker cuts loose and improvises at double-speed for the next five, before the written part resumes and the theme-section ends. "Another Hair Do" is nothing canonical in jazz history, but for Mr. Rollins it was. "The thing about this song was that the form of it was revolutionary even for bop," he said. He backtracked a little. "First of all, this guy's rhythmic thing was definitely on another planet. You don't find people doing that, the way he was doubling up there. There was a lot of free improvisation in the melody there." (By melody, Mr. Rollins meant the opening 12-bar theme section.) When Parker comes back to play the theme again, I said, he's not going to play that fast bit the same way. "No," Mr. Rollins said. "It's an open space. See, Miles is trying to do a little bit of it, too" - improvising in double-time over the steady pulse - "but he can't quite do it yet. But, you know, Miles was a genius. He was playing with Charlie Parker and not able to do some of the technical stuff, but yet making it sound like he's in the same ballpark." He whistled, and laughed, then went back to Parker's achievement. "It's not just the computer saying four notes against two notes. It's what Charlie Parker's doing within that thing. It's music that can't be written down. You have to feel that to make it come out. So what Charlie Parker accomplished was, he made an open-ended song which was not open-ended. It wasn't like playing anything you want. But within that there was so much freedom to play what you wanted to play. And still he made it to sound like a regular blues song." Mr. Rollins himself wrote some open-ended pieces, like "The Bridge." "Well, I probably got it from my idol there," he responded. "People playing jazz have to try to understand where he was coming from, what that was, and emulate it and absorb it. This is what jazz is: jazz is freedom. I don't think you always have to play in time. But there's two different ways of playing. There's a way of playing where you can play with no time. Or, you can have a fixed time and play against it. That's what I feel is heaven - being able to be that free, spiritual, musical. I would say that's an ideal which is underappreciated." Here he seemed to sense that he was getting into rough waters. "I mean playing free without any kind of time strictures - there's nothing wrong with that either. I'm not saying that's inferior. But I guess I'm getting older now, so I'm getting to be a person that's steeping myself in the tradition of Fats Waller and all of these people we're listening to today, who are playing time music. I'm probably going to be dissing myself to the new guys coming up somewhere, but a lot of our audiences still relate to time. I'm still in the era of time being an important component of jazz. I'm still there, O.K.? So kill me." The Storyteller Finally, we got to Lester Young. "Afternoon of a Basie-ite" was recorded in 1943 - five days after Hawkins's "Man I Love" session - with a quartet including Johnny Guarnieri on piano, Slam Stewart on bass and Sid Catlett on drums. It is almost lotus-eater music, light and gorgeous, geared toward dancing. "Boy, I'm telling you," said Mr. Rollins, smiling. "That's the Savoy ballroom there." "It sounds very free and easy," Mr. Rollins said. "But we know it's not, because what he's saying is deep as the ocean. There was a beginning and an end. He was storytelling all the way through. So when I first heard that, I mean, this cat was talking." When you talk about improvised storytelling, I asked him, what are you really talking about? "Well, I guess it's making sense," he replied. "It's like talking gibberish and making sense. That's on the very basic level. Then beyond that, of course, it's a beautiful story. It's uplifting. It's emotional." He wanted to illustrate it further with an observation a writer once made about his own playing, but then he stopped himself. "I don't want this to sound self-aggrandizing," he said. "In my later years I've become very self-effacing. I have decided that I know what greatness is, and I don't want to put myself in that category." Understood. "Anyway," he continued, "somebody wrote that what I was doing in a certain song was asking a question and then answering the question. I think he was talking about harmonic resolutions. So that would be sort of what I think telling a story might be: resolving a thought." I asked if there were any of his own recorded performances he felt comfortable with, that didn't pain him with thoughts of how it should have been better. "It's hard to say, because I haven't listened to any of my stuff in a long time," he said. "Unless it's on the radio, and I can't leave the room. But I seem to like 'Sonnymoon for Two,' with Elvin Jones and Wilbur Ware." (It can be found on Mr. Rollins's 1957 album "A Night at the Village Vanguard.") I asked if the increasing self-effacement had any musical implications. Does it come out in his work? Mr. Rollins looked embarrassed and tickled by the idea; he started smiling and looking at the corners of the room, as if wondering whether there was an escape hatch. "Wow. Well, I hope that it's going to be expressed in my work. But I don't know how. These things come out, you know." His hands flew up to his face, and he twisted the white strands of beard around his mouth, grinning. ================== Mike

What I object to is the idea that if one person likes one of three things and someone else likes all three - the second person is called "open-minded" as if that's some kind of praise. And the first person is called "closed-minded" when it could be that the first person has the wisdom to discern between the three, rather than thinking all three are great. I'm not saying that's *necessarily* true, but when you consider the background and experience of the people, that should tell you something. Just because one likes MORE stuff doesn't mean anything. What are the standards of evaluation? How are the judgments being made? Mike

More open? I would say instead "less discriminating" - listeners who have decades of background have "been around the block" and have wisdom to see what is substantial and what isn't. Someone who is new to - food, let's say - thinks everything is wonderful. It's only after years of development that one can discern the subtle differences and discriminate between what is mediocre, good, excellent, and superb. Of course, some people never get there and they still eat at the Olive Garden and they still like it and think it's fine Italian. Mike

Negative, ditched the hood for beautiful North Carolina a few months back. PBS on UNC-TV out of Chapel Hill - I guess they frown on fucking in the chapel. Mike

Joan's language was absolutely gratuitous. But unfortunately, that's what she said and how she said it. If someone asked her to make her point without those words, yes, I think it could be easily done. But no one did and dealing with this *after* the fact just doesn't work. The bleeping got to be so intrusive I could barely tell what she was saying - three or four in a sentence. As for Allen's comment on her singing - actually, I'm not a very big fan of Baez, but the stuff in the film was *more* appealing to me than what was in my memory and made me want to dig out what I've got and buy more! Mike

It was more gratuitous adjectivial usage and generic object reference. Mike

Hopefully all of Joan's foul language! Mike

Well, not any more than any other of this kind of thing - Blue Note cleared the hurdles with that Miles Davis 1951 CD, Baldwin Street Music is able to deal with this too. Throw enough money at the right people and anything is possible. Mike

The interview could be the August Blume one from Jazz Review. Done in 1958. Trane talks about a lot of people he worked with - I don't recall Jimmy Smith, but it wouldn't surprise me. Mike

OK, I can agree with that. I remember noticing last night how on one of the solos it seemed just wheezing in and out, absolutely no regard for the chords. It was to the point where it was not a harmonic or melodic instrument, it was more like a cuica, a rhythmic instrument with some ability to create colors and shadings. On the whole, I'd rather hear John Mayall. Mike

By when?

I have the LP, it's a good big band record. I'd say not a masterpiece, but I find something interesting in most every Nelson record. I guess we won't be seeing any additional material from the gig, which is a shame. They recorded three nights. Mike

The Boris Rose collection went to a college - can't recall which. But Doug Pomeroy is the engineer in charge of it, so it's in good hands. Some material is slowly being issued. Mike

Man, you really missed the boat on this - go to the Mosaic webpage and click on "wedding registry" - all your family and friends could have been adding to your collection. Now you'll probably get blenders and plates when the platters you really desire aren't Wedgewood or Lenox..... Mike

I don't hear "accidents" in the harmonica playing, I just hear massive limitations. But it serves its purpose. Mike

Turns out she's *into* being tied up..... Likes sport, eh? Whoa, eh!

It was Carter who gave them the dope (remember, a good Georgia farmer) - it just kicked in during Reagan's term. Mike

I ain't looking to steal your song, put you down, or do you wrong All I really wanna do is baby, be friends with you!

Related to this discarding of people, it was interesting to hear Joan talk about not being invited onstage, and to get Dylan's input too. Also, Joan-related - "Percy's Song" is one of my absolute favorite Fairport Convention tunes. Just stunning in Sandy's delivery, the vocal harmonies, and the simple accompaniment. Did FC get the privilege of having the premiere issue of that piece? Baez never recorded it and Dylan's version went unreleased until Biograph, right? Mike

It is standard practice in discographies NOT to list everything. This is something I disagree with. Just look at the Blue Note listings - you'll see tk 3 then tk 9 - so where are 4 through 8? If I can get the information from the producer or the session logs, I list it. See for example the entries for the Impulse records Henry Grimes plays on (Roy Haynes: Out Of The Afternoon & McCoy Tyner: Reaching Fourth). Mike

I agree - I was surprised to learn that the very revealing interview wasn't done specifically by Scorsese. It didn't seem like he had involvement in that aspect and he was just some guy who came in after the fact. I mean, he's certainly well-qualified and I think he did a good job. I really didn't pay attention to the preliminary hype, so I also didn't know it was going to be such a small scope. I was all set to make accusations about glossing over 35 years or whatever, but I'm glad for the limitation. I'd rather have this than something that tries to do the entire life and career and fails. Mike

In terms of major musicians of the time who were subjected to press conferences, I have to compare Dylan and The Beatles - and while totally irreverant, The Beatles ended up being seen more as "lovable" rather than being seen as "narcissistic" etc. Obviously there are differences - they had the benefit of four of them who could joke and juggle between themselves, etc. But The Beatles didn't turn the spotlight back on the interviewer the way Dylan did. "What do *you* think?" - I heard Dylan ask last night. When the interviewer said, "Well, actually I've never listened to your music. This is just my job." - I mean, Jesus Christ!!!!! Mike

I suggest a separate guitar thread (we've had to have done this here before, too), but yes, most all of your list I enjoy. Add McLaughlin, Peter Bernstein, Ben Monder, Tom Dempsey, John Dirac, etc. Mike

Since you asked...... www.valairballroom.com/history.html ========================== The Val Air Ballroom opened June, 1939 - the builder & operated was Tom Archer who arrived in Des Moines in 1936. Archer (1895-1963) was a pioneer in the ballroom business. Archer was one of the first entrepreneurs to bring the Big Bands from New York to the Midwest. With his ballrooms in Iowa, South Dakota, Nebraska & Missouri, Archer became the nation's leading ballroom operator, responsible for helping famous band leaders, such as Lawrence Welk & Jan Garber get their start. The Val Air was truly an open-air ballroom, a perfect example of the concept. All on one level, with a roof only over the hardwood dance floor, the stage & service areas such as the checkroom, bars & restrooms. All the rest was covered by big 'drop' sides which were lowered to keep out rain, but were raised for summer evenings of dancing & entertainment. At the west end of the maple dance floor was a polished concrete dance floor which enabled everyone to 'dance under the stars.' Everyone could begin dancing on the 8,000 square foot hardwood dance floor & swing right outside on the concrete dance floor. June 6, 1939 was opening night for the Val Air Ballroom. Admission prices were 85 cents for gentlemen & 25 cents for ladies. Attendance was estimated at 2,500. The opening act was Ted Lewis & his dance band. The remainder of the season was filled with such big names as Doc Lawson, Hal Leonard, Art Kassell, Ted Weems, Duke Ellington, Tiny Hill, Blue Barron, Eddy Duchin, Sammy Kaye, Wayne King, Shep Fields, Phil Harris & many others. The Val Air Ballroom was named in a public contest held in May of 1939. With more than 2,000 entries, the winning entry combined Val for Valley Junction & Air for open-air ballroom. A cash prize of $25 was awarded to W.D. Graham & Maurice Ward. In 1961, there was a tragic fire at the Val Air. The damage was estimated at $100,000. Archer rebuilt the Val Air, better than ever. A new maple dance floor was laid & other improvements were made. The ballroom continued to offer Big Band entertainment on most Saturday nights, booking all the big bands that were still touring the nation. The 50's brought new music to everyone - Rock 'N Roll. As tastes changed, so did the offerings at the Val Air. The Ballroom began to book the present rising stars of Rock 'N Roll on Thursday nights. The concerts were so popular that the Val Air would sell out on many occasions. Bobby Vee, Tommy Roe, Lou Christie, Jan & Dean & many other stars performed at the Val Air in the 50's. There have been many changes for the Val Air Ballroom over these many years - from Big Band music to Rock 'N Roll to Country to Hip Hop and in addition, the Val Air also specializes in all types of private parties - wedding receptions, proms, fund raising dances, annual meetings, luncheons, fashion shows, Christmas parties, political rallies & much more. With it's special art deco atmosphere & individualized service, The Val Air Ballroom has become on the most popular places in Central Iowa to hold parties for groups of 300 - 3,000 people. ====================== Mike

In this case, I was just identifying a period - I could have said "Revelations and Soliloquy". My point was that the late 1980s is not McCoy Tyner's finest period, in my view. But now that you bring it up, yes, I dislike just about every Scofield album that I have heard. I think "Quiet" is rather good. I could tolerate him as a sideman in the early days, but his Gramavision and Blue Note records - I cannot bear to listen to them. his tone, style, ideas, tunes - everything is just dead, flat, boring to me. And if he's on a record (past the early 1980s), I'm likely to give it a pass. Mike