ghost of miles

We recently re-aired Black Composers In Hollywood: Duke Ellington and John Lewis, 1959, and it remains archived for online listening.

About 50 pages into Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift, which is based on his friendship with the poet Delmore Schwartz and is part of this Library of America volume that arrived yesterday:

Listening right now to one of the “Blue Note Plays Bacharach” compilations. His music always seemed to be around when I was a kid. Another tough loss.

The Rollins bio inspired me to finally get around to reading this one (in addition to revisiting the Hawkins Mosaic):

Revisiting this beauty while also starting to take in the new Mosaic JATP set:

Lester’s solo on “Ghost of a Chance” on disc 1 is a thing of beauty. Hearing new (to me) Prez was good enough reason alone to pick up this set.

I was so happy to find that CD at Waterloo Records in Austin, Texas circa 1995, during my early years of Bud fandom. An excellent collection of his expatriate performances. Spinning a new one from Joe Chambers right now:

A member of the Songbirds listserv reports that singer Carol Sloane has passed away at the age of 85.

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: