I don’t know what to say about the death of Sonny Rollins. He was one of the last people of his era of music, and his community of players, and it’s remarkable to me that he was a living man, to be still around, and then to die. Some players you can fully perceive as guys, human people who happen to be well known. People like Sonny are more beings from another plane to me.
It has to be personal with players like that, you can’t just have a list of “greats”, that are basically just names, rending your garments when they die, having really nothing invested in their music.
A friend of mine became religious after high school, and the one thing that stuck with me as he was trying to talk me into adopting his belief system, was that I had to have a personal relationship with his deity. That’s how I feel about musicians like Sonny Rollins, you have to find your own thing with them, enough to be kind of jealously defensive about it.
I don’t have anything real insightful to say about his playing. He had a lot of power, creative and otherwise, with what struck me as a Charlie Parker level and type of creativity. A very alert player. He and Coltrane were the two great power tenors of the 50s, Coltrane was the abstractionist, Sonny was the melodically inventive one, he was playing around with stuff. You hear Dexter Gordon and Coleman Hawkins in his playing, Coltrane seemed less precedented, a la Tony Williams when he started happening a little later. Sonny had this motivic thing happening that you want to pay some attention to— playing an idea, repeating it, and changing it. That becomes a major part of how you think.
He liked to pick some pretty dumb tunes to play— it seemed actually perverse, I felt there was a philosophical/formal reason for it, like, as an artist, you don’t just make paintings of things that were beautiful in the first place. There’s a thing of detaching from it emotionally, so you can work with the materials of it. Monet didn’t paint all the haystacks because they were so amazing to look at.
Of course he wrote a bunch of tunes everyone is supposed to know— I’m probably forgetting some, because they’re so obvious:
Doxy
St. Thomas
Oleo
Pent Up House
Airegin
Strode Rode
Valse Hot
Sonnymoon For Two
No Moe
For somebody getting into him, you’ll want to spend time with his records with Max Roach— that has been the bulk of my listening with him. I don’t know if there’s more than the one Stockholm live record with Pete La Roca on drums, but there are some videos from that tour, and that group is very significant.
Really you buy all of somebody’s records, whatever turns up— you can safely grab anything from the 50s and 60s. Grab whatever looks good and listen to it. These are my favorites:
Live at the Village Vanguard
Live In Stockholm
Newk’s Time
Tenor Madness
Plus 4
Sonny Boy
Plays For Bird
Saxophone Collosus
Tour de Force
Way Out West
The Bridge
Freedom Suite
East Broadway Run Down
Milestone Jazz Stars In Concert
And with other people:
Miles Davis – Dig, And Horns, Bags’ Groove
Thelonious Monk – Monk, Brilliant Corners
Clifford Brown and Max Roach
Max Roach +4
That’s a personal list, I didn’t have all his records— and I didn’t list a few things that aren’t my favorites.
His later career, from the 70s on, was kind of funny. There are a couple of records with Tony Williams on them that are difficult for me. A saxophonist friend saw him play later on, in the later 90s, and mentioned him playing very long, and not sounding real great. I don’t know how important that is, ultimately. As listeners we want to enjoy something, and learn from it, but jazz is a process as much as it is a musical result. Sonny is one of the great process guys, he’s about playing.
I am happy to help you with any of the materials on the site, and with anything else drumming related— contact me for private lessons, online world wide, or in person in Portland, Oregon. All levels of players, and all people, are welcome.
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