ghost of miles

Would be great to have a Classic Argo Jazz Sessions Mosaic or some such. Who owns the catalogue now? Ah, I see it's Universal. The only two Mosaics I can think of off the top of my head with Argo material are the Ahmad Jamal and Jazztet collections.

Alert the jazz detectives! 🧐 Unfortunately there are several accounts in the book of supposedly amazing concerts, followed by Levy's remark that "No recordings were made." (A bit of a periodic riff on Sonny's reluctance to document himself, I think) But ya never know... wonder if we'll hear any more from the Carl Smith stash at some point. Also, this bio has set me on the trail of Complete Live In Japan, which I gather from past threads has champions here including yourself. The only early-to-mid 70s Sonny that I currently have is whatever's on the Silver City compilation (I noticed your comment in one thread that a couple of the tracks from Nucleus should have made that anthology; and Cook and Morton in the Penguin guide suggest that a third disc would have been justified for it).

About halfway through Lakecia Benjamin's new one Phoenix and really digging it so far. In the same neo-spiritual neighborhood as Kamasi Washington, but a little more judiciously compressed and musically interesting to me than some of Kamasi's stuff.... she's distilled the influences in a more engaging way:

Pg 606-612 a nicely-detailed account of how Sonny came to record for the Stones on Tattoo You and his subsequent ambivalence about doing so, as well as the Stones’ attempts to get him to perform live with them. No surprise that Charlie Watts figures prominently in this section, although Jagger was the one who made the approach.

Me as well—thanks, John!

I continue to enjoy this biography—particularly the observations from musicians and others who crossed paths with Sonny over the years. (On pg 539 Max Gordon claims that “Albert Dailey was the only pianist Sonny never fired.”) But there are too-frequent travelogue-like passages to slog through sometimes like this one on pg 604: ”On the summer festival circuit, Sonny played Milwaukee Summerfest, Chicago Fest, the Jazz City festival in Edmonton, and an appearance in Vancouver. On September 7, he turned 50 years old, but Sonny was hardly slowing down. That month, he played the Great American Music Hall and the Long Beach festival in California, then returned to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. That October, Sonny embarked on a European tour with Soskin, Harris and Al Foster organized by Alexander Zivkovic, a London-based Serbian journalist turned jazz promoter. On October 18, they played a sold-out concert at London’s Royal Festival Hall, on October 22 at Groningen Cultural Center in the Netherlands, on October 23 in Warsaw at Sala Kongresowa, on October 25 in Sweden at Umea Dragon Skol, on October 27 in Lyon, on October 29 in Munich at Circus Krone, on October 31 at the Theatre de la Ville in Paris, on November 1 at the Zurich Folkhaus, and on November 2 in Belgrade at the Dom Sindikata.” Whew. The next several paragraphs tack in a much better direction, with comments from Jerome Harris about what it was like to play behind the Iron Curtain in Poland just as the Solidarity movement was on the rise, but good Lord, those two preceding paragraphs. As valuable a book as this is in many ways, at times it seems to me that a little more judicious editing would have served it well.

Enjoying Hicks’ choice of repertoire for his entry in the Maybeck series:

Another revisitation inspired by reading the new Sonny Rollins biography:

A friend who's looking to release an upcoming project on vinyl as well as CD told me recently that it's generally a six-month wait now to get LPs produced because of the manufacturing-capacity shortage. Still glad I never hopped on the vinyl-revival train. The CD is the best physical unit for music that I've experienced in my lifetime; as Ken said, they sound better, they last longer, they contain more music, and they take up less space. Plus they're generally much cheaper these days than vinyl versions.

I always thought Warren Beatty’s 1980 Reds had been the last relatively modern film to have an intermission—didn’t realize that Gandhi had one as well.

I love this album as well!

We re-aired Dear Martin, P.S. this past week, and it remains archived for online listening.

Completely agree! Renewed appreciation for it, especially in that regard.

More revisitations inspired by Aidan Levy’s new Rollins biography:

Gotta say the execution of this concept is not working for me at all, mostly because of the vocals--though the arrangements aren't really offering much to write home about either. Bowie himself famously plugged into jazz at the end of his career with Maria Schneider and Donny McCaslin, and I greatly enjoyed those recordings... but this sounds too much in the neighborhood of Bill Murray's old SNL lounge-singer schtick. YMMV:

Twenty-five years on come this September and it still hits like a masterpiece of broken-hearted pop, a beautiful balance between the intimacy of his preceding Kill Rock Stars albums and the baroque polish of Figure 8 that followed this one. And you hear his influence a lot these days, especially in artists such as Phoebe Bridgers (who’s even written a song about him, “Punisher”):

I did this quite a lot when I was much younger, seemingly a lot less for some middle-aged years, and then in recent times doing it more often again. I enjoy the passionate intensity of engaging with an album repeatedly over the course of a week or two (did this not long ago with Love’s Forever Changes), but also am increasingly aware that time spent in such a way comes at the expense of time to explore recordings (or books—I have a similar conflict with the desire to reread) that I haven’t already heard. Still, there’s a marvelous joy to staying with what’s enrapturing you.

Up for Nichols' birthday today: Herbie Nichols' Third World

Pg 438, in the midst of 1964: >>(Grachan) Moncur asked for more music, but Sonny demurred. “I said, ‘Sonny, why don’t you bring me some chords sometime or a lead sheet of some of the stuff you want to play?’ He said, ‘Uh, no, Grachan, I think I like the way you play when you don’t know the changes.’ “ So Moncur just kept the mouthpiece at his lips and hung on for dear life. “For me to last ten days like that was a miracle,” Moncur said, “‘cause he was known to knock cats out if he didn’t like how they played.” In musician circles, Mingus was known for this, but so was Sonny.<< Pg 439: >>Two weeks later, Sonny hired (Beaver) Harris and pianist Freddie Redd for two weeks at Basin Street West in San Francisco, followed by Shelly’s Manne-Hole in Los Angeles. He planned to find a bassist in San Francisco. When Sonny picked them up to go to the airport, Redd had a tenor saxophone with him. ”What do you have there, Mr. Redd?” Sonny said. ”Well man, a friend gave me this tenor saxophone, man, a Selmer,” said Redd, “and you know, I just thought I’d come out and practice.” ”Well, yes, you can come out and practice,” said Sonny with a touch of irony. “But don’t bring it on the gig.”<<. 😄

Like so much of my recent listening, a Sonny Rollins revisitation prompted by reading Aidan Levy’s new biography:

I’ve seen that set highly recommended elsewhere. This one finally landed at my local record store: