Thirty-four years ago, on a cold Saturday night, in a church about
thirty miles north of Chicago, tenor saxophonist Von Freeman played this, unaccompanied, at our wedding.
Sonny Rollins (tenor saxophone) with The Modern Jazz Quartet (John Lewis, piano; Milt Jackson, vibraphone; Percy Heath, bass; Kenny Clarke, drums), “In A Sentimental Mood” (Duke Ellington), 1953
Vodpod videos no longer available.Happy Birthday, Max!
No drummer is more clear, more precise, more melodic.
Max Roach, January 10, 1924-August 16, 2007
“The Third Eye,” live
Vodpod videos no longer available.***
“The Drum Also Waltzes” (Drums Unlimited), 1966
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With Sonny Rollins (saxophone), “St. Thomas” (Saxophone Colossus), 1956
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With Clifford Brown (trumpet), “Sweet Clifford” (Brown and Roach Incorporated), 1955
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With Dizzy Gillespie (trumpet), Charlie Parker (saxophone), Bud Powell (piano), Charles Mingus (bass), “Salt Peanuts,” live, 1953
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lagniappe
musical thoughts
In this music, you have to find out who you are, what you feel, what you want to say. That’s one of the reasons that it’s so American. You have to be yourself.
That’s also one way jazz is different from classical music. In classical music, you learn to study and come up with the finest interpretation of a work that you can. That’s a different way of expressing your personality. You have to learn to use what’s written already to express yourself. In jazz, you have to learn to be who you are, and create the music from that.
—Max Roach (in Gene Santoro, Highway 61 Revisited [2004])
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radio
Today it’s all Max all day at WKCR-FM (broadcasting from Columbia University).
Happy Birthday, Brownie!
Clifford Brown, October 30, 1930-June 26, 1956
“Oh, Lady Be Good,” “Memories of You,” live (TV broadcast [Soupy’s On, Detroit]), 1955
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Clifford Brown/Max Roach Quintet (Clifford Brown, trumpet; Max Roach, drums; Sonny Rollins, tenor saxophone; Richie Powell, piano; George Morrow, bass)
Live, “Get Happy”
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Live, Virginia (Norfolk, Continental Restaurant), 6/18/1956 (Last Concert)
“You Go To My Head”
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“What’s New”
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lagniappe
Don’t take a trumpet player, man. You won’t need one after you hear this young cat, Clifford Brown.
—Charlie Parker (to Art Blakey, when he was going to work in Philadelphia in the early 1950s)
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Out in California, we had a house, and we had a piano and vibes as well as trumpet and drums. Brownie could play all these instruments, you know. I would go out of the house and come back, and he would be practicing on anything, drums, vibes, anything. He loved music.
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He was so well-rounded in all music. He liked Miles, Trane—who was very young then—and Louis Armstrong, and Lee Morgan, who spent alot of time with Clifford in Philly. Eric Dolphy was another good friend of ours. Music was his first love; I was his second, and math was his third. He was a wizard with figures and numbers; he used to play all kinds of mathematical games. . . .
There was only one time I didn’t travel with him. Our child, Clifford Jr., had been born, and I hadn’t taken him home yet to see the family. So Clifford said okay, and he put us on the plane; and of course that was when he was in the car accident and was killed. It was our second wedding anniversary and my 22nd birthday.
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Without Brownie, it would be hard to imagine the existence of Lee Morgan or Freddie Hubbard or Booker Little or Woody Shaw or Wynton Marsalis.
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radio
Today, at WKCR-FM (broadcasting from Columbia University), it’s all Brownie, (almost) all day. (This birthday celebration will be interrupted in the middle of the day for coverage of the Columbia/Yale football game.)
Some performances are so full of energy and ideas and feeling—so full of life—you wish they’d never end.
Sonny Rollins (with Alan Dawson, drums; Niels-Henning Orsted Pedersen, bass); “Oleo” (excerpt), live, Denmark (Copenhagen), 1965
Often, as here, the heart of a jazz performance can be found in the interplay between horn and drums. Listen, for instance, to the way these two play off one another at :44-58.
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lagniappe
More from the same performance (featuring drummer Alan Dawson).
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Where did Tony Williams come from?
He began taking lessons from Alan Dawson, in Boston, when he was eleven years old.
At seventeen, he was playing with Miles Davis.
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Happy (80th) Birthday, Sonny!
Sonny Rollins (with Jim Hall, guitar; Bob Crenshaw, bass; Ben Riley, drums), live (TV broadcast), 1962
Part 1 (“The Bridge”)
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Part 2 (“God Bless the Child”)
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Part 3 (“If Ever I Would Leave You”)
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lagniappe
The great tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins turns 80 on Tuesday, awash in more than the usual veneration. The MacDowell Colony last month awarded him its Edward MacDowell Medal. This week Abrams is publishing “Saxophone Colossus: A Portrait of Sonny Rollins,” a handsome art book featuring photographs by John Abbott, with an essay by Bob Blumenthal. And Friday night Mr. Rollins will walk onstage at the Beacon Theater.
It won’t be just another Sonny Rollins concert, if there even is such a thing. In addition to his working band, Mr. Rollins has reached out to several guests. The guitarist Jim Hall is the most eagerly anticipated: at 79, he is indisputable jazz royalty himself, and a trusted partner from one of the most celebrated stretches of Mr. Rollins’s career. (Consult the ageless 1962 album “The Bridge.”) Mr. Hall sat in with Mr. Rollins in New England one night this summer. Before that they hadn’t played together since 1991, in a Carnegie Hall concert that also included the gifted young trumpeter Roy Hargrove, now 40, who will rejoin them here.
—Nate Chinen, New York Times, 9/1/10
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Interview (2009) (encountering W.E.B. DuBois as a child in Harlem, playing with Bud Powell at nineteen, using drugs, studying yoga in India, aging, etc.)
recipe
1. Take a singer whose range includes about as many notes as he has fingers (on one hand).
2. Add a saxophonist who’s renowned for his melodic and harmonic inventiveness.
3. Mix?
Leonard Cohen with Sonny Rollins, “Who By Fire,” live (TV broadcast), 1989
These two mostly sound (to these ears) like, well, what they are: two distinctive artists whose musical worlds couldn’t be more different. But when Sonny finally leaves his world and enters Leonard’s—a world where melodic invention counts for nothing and subtle changes in inflection count for everything—the results are breathtaking (5:47 and following).
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lagniappe
Salam Richard!
Thanks for the post! How did you find me?
Have you check my personal website: http://www.sohrab.info?
Do you know about my music on-line mag Doo Bee Doo Be Doo (which is looking for writers. What about you?)? Please visit http://www.doobeedoobeedoo.info
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Hope that sometime I will play in your city to have a chance to meet you.
Greetings!
—Sohrab Saadat Ladjevardi [2/18/10]
music clip of the day 