ghost of miles

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

Cueing this new purchase up for an afternoon viewing:

Pg 332: “Starting July 22 (1959), Sonny was booked for two weeks at the Sutherland Lounge in Chicago. He brought Freddie (Hubbard) and used a Chicago rhythm section: drummer Wilbur Campbell, pianist Jodie Christian, and his old friend Victor Sproles on bass. During one set, they played ‘Confirmation’ for 28 minutes before segueing into ‘I Can’t Get Started,’ with Sonny and Freddie soloing simultaneously. Sonny prohibited any bootleg recordings, but he made an exception in Chicago for a former Julliard student who had loaned Sonny his tenor in 1954 before Sonny went to Lexington. Sonny had pawned the loaner, but eventually returned it. Remembering this, Sonny allowed him to record the gig on his reel-to-reel recorder.” 😮 According to the online footnotes (chapter 22, fn 128), the recording resides in the Carl Smith Collection. Chapter 22’s footnotes also refer frequently to several oral history interviews that Freddie Hubbard did with David Weiss in 2004-2005. Would love to read those at some point… Levy thanks Weiss for access in the footnotes, so apparently they remain private for the moment. I’d also love to read a book about Freddie by David (who posts here).

To quote a late-period Bud Powell title, in the mood for a classic. Presumably this will be part of the forthcoming Mosaic set—I remember how thrilled I was when it was reissued in the Connoisseur series:

Thanks for the heads-up! Now on Dusty Groove’s notification list for it.

I love the account of the Way Out West date, especially how Sonny runs down the lyrics of “I’m an Old Cow-Hand” to Brown and Manne.

20th anniversary of the Great Organissimo Migration!

Revisiting this one this iced-in morning:

One of my earliest and still one of my favorites (along with the Andrew Hill 1963-66, which was my first Mosaic purchase):

It’s making me want to revisit the Elvin Jones Mosaic as well.

Glad to be finally putting my ears to this one:

Working on a show about Milt Jackson’s Riverside recordings. Some nice work on this album by Tadd Dameron and Ernie Wilkins:

Another spin prompted by Aidan Levy’s new Sonny Rollins bio—a pattern I foresee continuing throughout my reading of the book:

Pg 123-124 very interesting background on Chicago drummer Ike Day and his association with and influence on Sonny.

Terrible and maddening what happened to Sonny's father Walter, as described in this book. Several mentions as well of Andy Kirk Jr., one of the "Sugar Hill Gang" group of young jazz musicians that Sonny ran with the mid-1940s, and by all accounts a supremely talented saxophonist who was lost to the drug plague. (I remember first reading about him many years ago in the Jackie McLean section of A.B. Spellman's Four Lives In The Bebop Business.)

Another one off the shelf for a fresh listen, prompted by reading the new Sonny Rollins bio:

I'm thinking that I may just keep the PDF open on my cellphone while I'm reading the book. Doesn't match the permanence and convenience of having the notes in the book itself, but I can understand why they decided not to opt for a 1200-page volume. (Does anybody here besides guilty-as-charged-me happen to have the "extended special edition" of the first entry in Mark Lewisohn's in-progress Tune In Beatles bio? That's a "tome" so massive it had to be split into two books!) So glad your website was credited! More such references to come, I'm sure, given the wealth of jazz history that you pulled together there.

Dan, see pg 24 note 32 at the PDF link above. It includes Sonny’s quote about Percy from your website and your website’s address.

The only indexed mention of France comes in a passage on pg 48 right before my stopping point last night: ”Most of what Sonny learned about music at Franklin came from his peers, many of whom passed through the school. Among them were tenor saxophonist Percy France and drummer Sonny Payne; trumpeter Red DiStefano and pianist Elmo Hope attended earlier at the old Franklin building. Pianist Walter Bishop Jr had been a student there but, by the time Sonny arrived, had dropped out to join Buddy Brown’s band playing taxi dances. ‘I used to go to Gilly(Coggins)’ house after school and get him to teach me stuff,” Sonny recalled of the pianist, who was six years older. “He (didn’t) want to get into the… XYZ’s of music, but I got something from him anyway.’” The link listed on pg 727 doesn’t seem to be operative at the moment, but I found a link to the PDF (which can be downloaded) on Hachette’s website: Saxophone Colossus notes Robin D.G. Kelley’s Monk bio had a lot of interesting material in the footnotes, iirc. Just glanced at the book itself and Kelley’s notes take up exactly 100 pages. EDIT: Holy crap, I just looked at the PDF of Levy’s notes, and they run to 414 pages. 😯 That’s a whole other book!

It’s a good one! Beginning to revisit this landmark set, inspired by reading Aidan Levy’s new Rollins biography:

30 pages in and greatly enjoying it so far. I love Sonny’s expressions of admiration for Louis Jordan (pg 22-23), and there’s a hilarious story about Sonny interrupting a lengthy dinnertime grace. Also a sort of theatrical/cosmic screenplay description from Sonny of why and how he fell in love with the saxophone. For such a big book Levy narrates and writes with a brisk economical pace—he nicely evokes the world and culture of early-20th-century Harlem that shaped Sonny. A bit of a bummer that the footnotes can only be accessed online (since I’m the kind of nerdy reader who goes down footnote rabbit-holes), but no quibble if that move allowed Levy to keep more of the story in the book… even without them this thing’s a *tome*, as which board member was it who loved to say? Anyway, it’s engaging me much the same way Kelley’s Monk bio did a few years back.

Starting: