JSngry

yeah, I keep forgetting about G-Man, definitely a highlight. The record is good enough, the film makes it complete. stand tall and strong, blow loud and long. That's an amazingly massively physical act right there, as well as a wonderful example of Sonny's meditative musical process. Just a kernel of a theme for a mantra to get started, then it turns into a long tone(s) as an "ommmm", then the "clear" state arrives and here come the ideas, when the light dims, go back to the mantra, get the "om" again, and wait for the light to start shining again, keep going through the process until it gets to where it feels like it should be. By the time its over, yeah, he went there and if you wanted to go along, there it was. If you didn't...shoulda stayed at home, right? It's so unlike what typical jazz improvisation's aims and methods are, especially in terms of what was rewarded in the jazz eco-system of the last 40-50 years, too bluntly physical to be marketed as meditation, too fundamentally "internal" to be sold as BEBOP THE MUSIC OF THE FUTURE, too much of anything except Sonny Rollins as he himself conducted his business. And yet he got the gigs and always had product on the shelves, old and new. A self kept hold of, indeed. I have no idea, There was a live "Cutting Edge"...there was a whole set of the footage that accompnaied the Milestone shows and Montreux that year. I'm sure they still exist, but they don't seem to be on You Tube anymore. Ok, there's this still up:

You know that gives us about four degrees of separation between Tom Wilson and Chaka Khan, right?

Ah, ok. Was wondering if you might have a green chimney to go with it...

Is it really green like that, or are that the color of some lightbulb? I like it!

The Bellboy A Bellhop Hop Sing

Driveways always work, but if you got three of them...

I like the notion of "playing changes" applying to societal evolution as well as navigating harmonic structures, but has Chinen ever written anything that is compelling me to read a book of it? Not that I can think of right off hand, but when I see it at a Half-Price in a couple years, I'll probably pick it up to confirm. One thing's for sure - the ecosystem of "jazz" that I grew up with is gone and not coming/can't come back. Still trying to determine whether or not this "new" one is a place I really want to be, but, as they say, no reasonable offer refused. Or at least, any reasonable offer will be considered.

His aim was to stand tall and strong, blow loud and long and...keep hold of himself.

And his first such project, iirc?

4 is the one, imo. Not really even close.

Can't see the birds for the Forrest.

Go for Road Shows 4.

They were thinking that Sonny needed to be able to walk around while he played. Probably so. And it didn't change HIS sound, it changed the MIKED sound. Fortunately, the technology kept evolving and eventually got pretty good. Follow it on youTube. As far as rhythm sections, the one of the Cutting Edge era was pretty solid, actually, the trio of David Lee (still probably my favorite Rollins drummer), Mtume, Bob Cranshaw got really locked in. And there have been other bands that the percussion gelled...it's a very specific feel/pocket, that Sonny Rollins vamp-feel, and no, not everybody got it all the time, but when they did, it was as distinct as the Trane/Elvin feel (and I'm not so sure that the original impetus of the Lee/Mtume thing wasn't to expand Elvin out to a multi-timbral tonal, Lee had SO many cymbal sounds + the kid, and Mtume was all up in there, between the two of them it sometimes felt like having Tony AND Elvin)). Some of the followups weren't that deeply seated, but there's definitely a model there to follow, and when that pocket hits, it's as real as it is good. It's fair to ask if "accessibility" was a factor, especially in the early 70s where that was , like, THE "jazz discussion" that EVERYBODY was having. But you also gotta look at how different people went about it. Eddie Harris just said fuck it and kept on keeping on, he was ok with whatever, just new ways to go about what he was already going about. Miles took that shit waaaay out, took several decades for people to start hearing that. And Sonny, he had a plan - hard grooves, deep pocket, and plenty of bouncing off the tonal and rhythmic pedals of the compositions. Didn't always work for him, but the plan was there. His aim was to stand tall and strong, blow loud and long and...keep hold of himself. I take it that he was smoking a lot of weed during that time, and that's not really the best way to go about executing a plan like that, but...he got there often enough to where a fail WAS a fail, and a win WAS a win...same as it ever was for him, really. Side One of The Cutting Edge...I wish there was a time machine to go back and record that gig with today's abilities. You shouldn't have to work that hard to hear what's really going on. but that shit is for real. Same thing with "Harlem Boys", I hate that I need to "translate" the sound of that record into what the real-time playing sounded like, but such is life.

Arild Andersen, perhaps?

Indeed we do. I kind of took Sonny deeply to heart when I got into college, where he was considered, at best, an older style player and at worst, a useless anachronism. This didn't seem right to me, because The Cutting Edge had just come out, and Side One of that record sounded and felt to me like a guy playing the motherfucking BEJEEBERS out of the tenor, just the sheer physicality of the playing knocked me on my ass, because, you know, I got a tenor, how do I even begin to get THAT SOUND out of it? But no, in the world I was in at the time, "hip" shit began with Coltrane and ended with the Liebman/Grossman/etc. bag. That was all good, but you know, I did not want a sound like that out of my instrument, and I did not want a rhythmic flow like that. Nothing wrong with it, just not what I wanted. I wanted a Sonny type flow (and flow it is) going out of me and into, and then out of, the horn. Nobody, and I mean nobody, around me wanted that, and it wasn't until I began connecting with African-American players outside of the school environment that I began to be around other people who wanted that same flow. So...I put up with the records and stopped listening to them as "Sonny Rollins Records" far less than I did lessons in how to get shit out of the tenor. There was THAT on most all of the records, and then, somewhere along the lines, the records actually started getting good again. And jeeeeesus, that sound. perhaps people who don't spend a lot of time blowing air into a tenor can fully appreciate how BIG that sound is, all over the range of the instrument, and how big it stays during all the dodges and darts of one of his dodgings and dartings, except when he wants to shade them, and even THAT'S always controlled. That picture of him on the back of Nucleus, I looked at that and say, ok, skinny and scrawny ain't gonna it you to where you want to get, here's even MORE work to do. I fell short on that (and many other things as well), but truth is still truth even if you yourself fall short. At some point I looked back over the life, the records, and the playing and it dawned on me that the TRUE "message" of Sonny Rollins is to, as the song says, keep hold of yourself. Keep hold of you head, keep hold of your mind, keep hold of your soul, keep hold of your career, your destiny, and above all else, as he demonstrated on 9/11 quite literally, keep hold of your horn. You do it for yourself, because ain't nobody else going to do it, nor should they. It's up to you to know who you want to be, and it's up to you to make it work. So yeah, I get that people who like one type of Sonny Rollins Music might feel some combination of betrayed and abandoned by the latter part of the arc (but really, at 40+ years, isn't it most of the arc?), but I am not one of them. Not even a little.

Yeah, I still don't know. What was that guy who made the car they made the movie about, Forrest Tucker? Musk has obviously gained a lot more traction that that guy, but still...we'll see how all this plays out. I hope it goes well, at least the car part. The rocket part, eh...don't get me started on that.

Red got Trane the Miles gig, iirc.

I'm not disappointed when it is gets fully unfurled. When it does, I find it just as involving as anything Rollins ever played, sometime even moreso. I'm still on record as advocating this most recent Road Shows album (Vol. 4) as one of the essential Sonny Rollins albums. It's pretty much unfurled from beginning to end. I had gone through most all the 50s Rollins and much of the 60s stuff by, say, 1983 or so. I mean gone through it inside out. So, I know what that music was and still is. And I know that what came after is not that. But it is Sonny Rollins, and even with all the quirks and eccentricies that got layered between Sonny Rollins Product and Sonny Rollins Music, I could hear what it was and not be concerned that it was not that older thing (how could it be, what part of the jazz ecosystem was left that could have "supported" that?). And once the live shows started eking out, then the YTube vids, and later this last Road Shows thing, it became apparent to me, that the man did indeed keep hold of himself and probably can levitate.

Keep Hold Of Yourself. That.

wow, how the hell did they get that URL so wrong???? I just assumed that I would always live in the same world as Aretha Franklin, retired or old and feeble, but always alive. Never dead. But you can't kill Aretha. Remember this house.

https://www.axios.com/prostate-cancer-killed-aretha-franklin-b60c687b-7311-4caa-b5d3-46f071354981.html