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A Conversation with Gary Giddins
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Village Voice writer Gary Giddins, winner of the National Book Critics
Circle Award, and who is the country's preeminent jazz critic, joins us in
an October 21, 2002 conversation about jazz legend Sonny Rollins.
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Right now, I just want to get away for awhile. I think I need a lot of things. One of them is time...time to study and finish some things I started a long time ago...I never seem to have time to work, study, and write. Everything becomes secondary to going to work every night and wondering how the band sounds and whether our appearances are okay.
- Sonny Rollins, 1958
Sonny Rollins
Listen to Rollins play
Blue 7
photo by
Jimmy
Katz
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JJM Why do you describe Sonny Rollins as jazz music's
most provocatively enigmatic man?
GG Because Sonny defies the expectations
of his audience and he always has. As I have explained at some length in
Visions
of Jazz, there always seems to be two Sonny Rollinses -- the recording
artist and the concert artist. For years, whenever I reviewed one of his
concerts in New York, I would get angry, impatient letters from readers around
the country who would question my sanity. They would point to some recent
Rollins record and ask how I could say how great he plays when clearly he
doesn't have an ounce of the genius that he evoked on his recordings from
the fifties. But, this is now a historical phenomenon that people recognize
and accept. When you see Sonny Rollins perform, you are hearing a very different
musician than the one who goes into the studio.
There is a collector's network of people who devote hours of their lives
to finding tapes of Sonny Rollins concerts. One of them is a fellow named
Carl Smith, who contacted me some months ago and sent me half a dozen CD's
of concerts precisely from the years reviewers and fans thought Sonny was
most off -- in the mid eighties. These performances are extraordinary. I
played them for skeptical friends whose jaws just hit the ground. Now, Ralph
Kaffel, President of Fantasy Records, has asked this particular collector
to hear a few. When listening you can't miss the fact that something magical
happens when he is on stage.
Another aspect of the enigma of Sonny Rollins is that he is such a thoughtful,
honest player. He can't just "run the changes." He can't play by remote control.
In the sixties, I once saw him play the theme of "Take the A Train" for thirty
or forty minutes. He just couldn't get out of the head. Then, a few years
ago, he did a concert at the Beacon Theatre in which the same thing happened
with "St. Thomas." Many in the audience couldn't believe that he just played
the head over and over again. Jackie McLean and other musicians were on stage,
trying to break through it, but Sonny was completely caught up. Of course,
there are other nights when he leaves the head and slides into permutations
that you simply can't believe, as he did at B.B. King's a few weeks ago.
JJM I assume they were unauthorized recordings?
Is Kaffel pondering releasing any of these?
GG Yes, they're unauthorized, made by fans,
stolen you could say for posterity, and well recorded. Kaffel wouldn't consider
releasing them unless he has the wholehearted support of Sonny and Lucille.
I think he was curious, and I imagine he'll send them to the Rollinses. I
hasted to add that Smith is a good guy, who told Kaffel he wouldn't take
a penny for them. He's just a huge Sonny fan who would like to see this music
released.
| JJM How do you suppose his early life
experiences of attending the Apollo Theatre concerts shaped his view of live
performance?
GG That is an interesting point. It's true
that in addition to loving Coleman Hawkins and a lot of the jazz greats,
he was always attracted to Louis Jordan and the R&B musicians who were
not only playing a more popular and visceral kind of music, but were also
entertainers. Jordan was an incredible entertainer. Almost every major number
he did had some kind of a comical, theatrical aspect to it. Thinking about
it now, Rollins certainly has that quality. For example, the way he appears
on stage. The first time I saw him in concert was at the famous "Titans of
the Tenor" concert at Philharmonic Hall in 1966, and I remember he was dressed
from head to toe in black. He was wearing black Keds, a black t-shirt, and
black jeans. Before that, he went through a period where he wore a mohawk,
and this was in the fifties!
The first time I actually saw him at all was at the Village Vanguard. He
started his set in the kitchen, which is in the rear of the club. I heard
a tenor player, looked around because there was nobody on stage, and he came
out, wended his way through the tables, playing all the while like a strolling
violinist in an Italian restaurant as he made his way on to the stage. At
B.B. King's a couple of weeks ago he wore these wonderfully hip dark glasses
- almost like goggles - and a white ascot. This on top of the fact that he
is an imposing looking man -- tall, muscular, and now with white hair and
a white beard. So, he is conscious of dressing for the event and having a
theatrical demeanor, and I think that does extend to the music.
Rollins tries things on stage. At the B.B. King show, in the middle of a
very slow ballad, he walked over and tried to get the conga player to trade
phrases with him, but the conga player was completely bewildered because
you don't usually do something like that on a ballad. After all, what can
you do with congas when the rhythm is practically stagnant? But, Sonny just
kept it up. As I said before, people who are skeptical and impatient might
find that to be a provocation. Certainly it is not something he could do
on records, but theatrically, at that moment, it was extremely effective
because the whole audience was sitting on the edge of its seats, wondering
what the hell was going on? Nobody knew. When he finished, we sort of relaxed,
sat back, as the set continued. So, even though musically it was a kind of
an impasse, visually it wasn't. In a way it served as a respite from his
very intense playing. My god, I clocked him playing "Sweet Leilani" for 25
minutes. It was just one chorus after another, and it was absolutely staggering.
The invention was limitless. This is true of many of these CD's that I have
heard of concerts taped around the world in the seventies, eighties and nineties.
I was listening to one the other day that was done in 2000 or 2001, and after
hearing it you don't wasnt to go back to the records for a while. On the
other hand, because I was reviewing this B.B. King's performance, I went
back to the most recent record, which I like a lot, to hear the way he recorded
Sweet Leilani, and it is a very powerful performance in its own right. When
he is in the studio, he thinks differently. He is more contained, more aware
of time, and there is more restraint and a veneer of professionalism that
is not necessarily to the benefit of his instinctive way of playing. |
New York's Apollo Theatre
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photo by Austin Hansen
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Louis Jordan
Choo Choo Ch'Boogie |
JJM When referring to a recording session
Rollins took part in, the critic Martin Williams wrote, "Most of the other
performers had had experience with big bands. Rollins had not. Big band work
can teach lessons of discipline and terseness in short solos, and lessons
of group precision and responsiveness. Rollins has learned some of these
lessons but he has surmounted not having learned others." Do you suppose
Rollins would have been a different player had he played in a big band?
St. Thomas
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painting by
Pashyanti
Carole Hand
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GG Of course the great thing about playing
in big bands is that you learned how to announce who you were in a measure.
You could tell a story in 16 measures or 32. You got a chorus, at best, if
you were lucky, and you had to have something to say in that very limited
time. Whereas a lot of contemporary musicians feel free to play chorus after
chorus just to find what they're after.
I am surprised at Martin's comment, though. I don't think I agree with it.
On the contrary, it seems to me that Sonny's strength, at least from the
time he was 25 and recorded the amazing Work Time album, is that he
had tremendous discipline. There isn't one solo on that album or the albums
that immediately follow that have wasted notes. You never feel that when
his playing is inspired he is playing choruses just to figure out what to
do next. The whole idea of Sonny and thematic improvisation is that he takes
a motif and works on it and continues the solo in a certain logical way.
But, you do remind me of something that I remember reading when I was a kid
that Martin Williams wrote. In a review of Sonny's album with the song from
Camelot, "If Ever I Should Leave You," he said that while the record was
fine, it couldn't compare with the performance he had done in a recent concert.
When I read that, I found it astonishing and I couldn't understand it. It
seemed to me that if the recorded performance wasn't as good, why didn't
they just do it again? I didn't understand the finances of this at the time.
Or, why didn't they just record him live? But as I grew older and started
to follow Sonny Rollins myself -- I don't think I have missed more than one
concert performance in New York in almost thirty years -- you begin to realize
that this is a constant. |
| For example, Sonny's repertoire is extraordinary. Nobody else plays as
many bizarre, off-the-wall, unexpected tunes as Sonny does, and he plays
them because he genuinely loves them. People may think it reflects a sardonic
sense of humor, but in fact it really reflects his incredibly diverse grounding
in music and his love of melody. In the seventies, he started playing, of
all things, Edward MacDowell's "To a Wild Rose," a piece I don't think any
jazz musician had ever performed. It became almost a signature tune in concert
after concert, and audiences began to listen for it. As soon as he played
the first couple of notes, the audience started cheering. So eventually,
Milestone put out a concert record that included "To a Wild Rose." It was
on okay performance, but the first thing all of us said was, hey, this isn't
as good as the ones we heard. When people finally get to hear some of these
private recordings, they will see that we were not exaggerating, that the
Sonny Rollins in concert is a very different artist and a very consistent
one.
It's not always just a question of live vs. studio recordings, because sometimes
a live performance may not be his best. I will give you another example.
Sonny put out a live album recorded in San Francisco, released as a two record
set called Don't Stop the Carnival. That recording is a real treasure
for analysis, because on the one hand you have two of the most extraordinary
solos that Rollins has ever recorded, "Silver City" and my favorite "Autumn
Nocturne." I would rate these very high, maybe in the top ten of all Rollins
recordings. But the rest of the album is downright tedious - the dullest
of which is something called "President Hayes." I found out from subsequently
talking to him that they recorded it when it was brand new, and when the
band was just learning it. Months later, Ira Gitler, Stanley Crouch, myself
and some other writers were on a panel at Buffalo University, and there were
a number of bands that were playing at this festival, including Sonny's.
The highlight of his set was "President Hayes," and we were just completely
knocked out. The piece hadn't been, to use a phrase that he likes to use,
"road tested" when he recorded it, but this mediocre version is the one that
will exist forever. After four or five months of playing it every night,
the piece completely took off. It developed its personality, it clearly inspired
Rollins and the group in totally thrilling performance. Does such a performance
exist? Is there even a private recording of it? I don't know, but that is
part of the nature of jazz. Much of the best playing is not captured. |
The Cutting Edge
To A Wild Rose
Don't Stop the Carnival
Autumn Nocturne |
| JJM You have said that a comparison between
Louis Armstrong and Sonny Rollins is unavoidable. Why is that?
GG To me personally, it is unavoidable, and
I have made many comparisons over the years. Armstrong represents the jazz
dynamic at its greatest. I was brought up listening to classical music and
rock and roll of the late fifties and early sixties, and for many years I
thought that the greatest achievement in western civilization was Bach's
B Minor Mass, particularly "Kyrie eleison," the first movement. It
made me break into goose pimples all over when I played it. I never heard
anything remotely like that, with the emotional impact it had on me
until I heard Armstrong's 1928 recordings, which made the short hairs stand
up. It was a shock to me. I had no expectation because to me Louis Armstrong
was the guy from Ed Sullivan with the handkerchief and the sweat and "Blueberry
Hill" and "Mack the Knife." This was the year before he recorded "Hello Dolly."
When I heard those records it became a mission for me to know more about
the music and to hear everything. It made me want to understand how this
incredible art can exist in a context where I simply wasn't expecting to
find it.
In the course of listening I come across Sonny Rollins, and Sonny Rollins
to me has that kind of impact. He impresses me emotionally. Others might
choose John Coltrane, or they might say the same of Miles Davis or Charlie
Parker or anybody else. But to me, it's in Rollins' best work that I hear
this kind of inspiration, this kind of euphoria. The main thing is that there
is a sense of well being about him. Sonny is not a depressing player, he
is not a despairing player, which is something you can say often of Coltrane,
that he has devils in him that he tried to exorcise through his music. When
Rollins is at his best, there is a tremendous sense of magnanimity, which
I also associate with Armstrong -- a tremendous generosity. It's like he's
plugged into the best aspects of the cosmos, and that is what he is recycling
in his music. I never leave a great Rollins performance with anything less
than a feeling of euphoria. Few other musicians inspire me to the degree
of Armstrong and Rollins.
JJM When did he begin being thought of as
the most important tenor player of his generation?
GG I think that was fairly early. In the
first years when he was recording, he was always a side man, frequently with
Miles Davis. When he did recording sessions, they were with quintets, studio
groups where they would usually add a trumpet player to beef up the sound.
It wasn't until 1955 that he made his first LP as a leader, and showed what
he could do. Work Time is maybe the greatest debut LP ever made in
jazz. I can't think of anything to quite match it. He was 25 years old and
he sounds completely matured, as though he just, to use the old cliché,
popped out of the forehead of Zeus fully formed. "There Are Such Things"
is one of the greatest ballad performances I know of in jazz. I think I know
it by heart at this point. Every aspect, from the opening cadenza to the
closing passage, the entire statement and theme, the way it develops
improvisationally is an amazingly dramatic, perfect piece of musical
prestidigitation. He takes a great tune and plays the hell out of it. He
is faithful to it and he also makes it something more than it was. With a
recording like that and the immediate recordings that followed - the ones
with Clifford Brown and Saxophone Colossus, which became such a benchmark
of the fifties - he emerges in a way that no other contemporary has. |
|
Dexter Gordon
Three O'Clock In The Morning
Stan Getz
Body And Soul
John Coltrane
My Shining Hour
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photos by Lee
Tanner
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The only two rivals for the audience among modern saxophonists, were
Dexter Gordon and Stan Getz. But Gordon was more closely associated with
the bebop generation of players, and his career in the fifties was falling
apart from personal problems. For a while, he was basically no longer on
the map. Getz was associated with the cooler school so he already had an
established audience, but he represents something that people already knew
and understood. But Sonny comes along at the height of the hard bop
thing and he clearly is the most conspicuous virtuoso among the young tenor
players. He doesn't sound like anybody else. Most of the other tenor players,
like Stan and like Dexter, started out coming out of Lester Young. You really
don't hear Lester Young in Sonny's style, and more profoundly, you don't
hear Coleman Hawkins, although he was clearly a major influence on him. He
doesn't arpeggiate every chord in the Hawkins tradition, nor doe he play
gruff, expressive embellishments the way Ben Webster did. Rollins has his
own sound, he has his own way of dealing with improvisation, which is chiefly
melodic and thematic, using the actual material at hand. He plays throughout
the registers of the instrument, but he clearly favors the low register,
which was very unusual at that time, especially with Getz and the other cool
players preferring the middle and higher registers.
At that time, nobody was really taking Coltrane too seriously. Coltrane is
older than Rollins, but he had more personal problems getting his life and
his career started. So until 1956 when he joined Miles Davis, nobody was
paying much attention to him. Even then, Rollins had made such an impact
that if you go back and look at old Downbeat magazines you will see
people dismissing Coltrane as a Rollins imitator, which is preposterous!
The first person to recognize how preposterous that was was Sonny Rollins,
who invited Coltrane to record Tenor Madness. People forget that when
Tenor Madness was made, this was not a convocation between two great
tenor stars, this was Sonny Rollins inviting a virtual unknown to share the
recording with him. Few people knew who Coltrane was. He had made a couple
of records with Miles, and before that was practically unknown. He had been
a sideman with Johnny Hodges, and was hardly ever given a chance to solo,
and never given a chance to solo on a recording.
So, Coltrane comes along and he is the first one to really challenge Rollins,
and they do become the twin figures of the late fifties, much as Hawkins
and Young had been in the thirties. But again, Coltrane also prefers the
middle and the high registers. His sound could not be more different than
Stan Getz's but he still likes the higher register. Since Sonny plays down
in the cellar range, his sound remains unique. Then, Sonny leaves the scene
for two very important years, during which time Coltrane completely takes
over and Getz has that amazing personal revival with Jazz Samba. Suddenly,
Getz and Coltrane are the rulers of the roost. Then, Rollins comes back and
he does amazing things. His style changes frequently. His sound is changing
almost constantly. He makes many great recordings, and in many ways I think
he becomes an even greater and greater player but he never really quite gets
back to being at the very pinnacle of the instrument as he had been in the
fifties.
JJM Did an artistic rivalry between Coltrane
and Rollins exist?
GG I don't know if it was a real rivalry,
although I think the way Coltrane played was such a powerful approach, and
it was so different from anything Rollins ever considered, that it must have
given him serious thought. I don't think that Sonny is the type of individual
who is concerned with rivalry in the sense of a professional jealousy because
someone else is doing better or getting more attention. I think to the degree
that there was a rivalry, it was a musical one. Coltrane gave everyone
something to think about, and Rollins had to rethink where he and his music
were going. He didn't want to spend the rest of his life playing bebop changes
and in the style he had already mastered. It's Sonny's nature to keep
moving forward. Coltrane suggested one way to do that, Rollins another.
It's an example of how ingenuous Rollins is that in the early sixties,
he made a record with Ornette Coleman's quartet, and it's a great record! |
JJM This is Our Man in Jazz?
GG Yes, the Our Man
in Jazz album for RCA, which was maybe the first Sonny Rollins
album I ever heard. It was a very scary record that included a 25 minute
version of "Oleo" and a very funny version of "Dearly Beloved" by Jerome
Kern, which turned into a military march at one point. He is not afraid for
people to say whatever they want. He just goes out there with Ornette's group
and shows his way of dealing with that kind of music. He is not going to
play quarter-tone pitch like Ornette. He is not going to play a lot of free
music, or squealing in the hidden register like Coltrane and the musicians
who were directly influenced by Coltrane. He is going to do it his own way.
He is playing melodically, he is playing thematically, playing it in the
lower and mid-to-lower register, but he is showing he likes this new freedom
and is willing to explore it on his own terms.
JJM You call that recording one of the most
entertaining benchmarks in the entire free jazz movement. It is listenable,
it is fun…
| GG That's right, yet he is taking advantage
of all the things that these musicians are giving him. He gives Don Cherry
a lot of space, he clearly loves the rhythm section, and he is in clover
for that session. But that doesn't mean that is where he is going to go,
because then he bounces back and makes an album with Coleman Hawkins, which,
incidentally, is very interesting psychologically and musically, because
Hawkins wins that session. If there is a rivalry there, Sonny is very gracious
to Coleman Hawkins, and I think Hawkins is inspired by the fact that
Rollins probably plays more out on that than he did with Ornette Coleman's
men. He is very eccentric on that record, whereas bouncing off of him, Hawkins
seems to genuinely enjoy the material. It turns out to be one of the better
Hawkins recordings from a period in his life when he was in decline.
Then, Sonny comes back with things like one of my favorite albums, Sonny
Rollins on Impulse! This is another record which tells a lot about Rollins.
It begins with a long "Green Dolphin Street" that sounds almost like a warmup.
It's fine, but there isn't a lot happening. But the album gets stronger
and stronger. You turn it over and side two begins with this unbelievable
cadenza on a new calypso, "Hold em Joe," and then at the very last track,
an absolute unquestionable Rollins masterpiece, "Three Little Words" -- which
is another one that I would put on my short-list of his greatest performances
on record -- he plays a startling intro and one of the greatest closing cadenzas
he ever recorded. He hardly ever bothers to state the melody on this. It
is a very different kind of performance, where he sets his own melody, one
which had a tremendous velocity -- it's five or six minutes of perfection. |
Sonny Rollins on Impulse!
Three Little Words
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JJM How did Sonny Rollins connect with John
Lewis and what was Lewis' intent for Rollins?
GG They admired each other greatly. For John,
Sonny was a major new talent in jazz. Again, you have to remember that
Sonny was recording at age nineteen, so he goes back. He is on records with
Bud Powell and Babs Gonsalves and others in 1949. Lewis' career really begins
with Dizzy Gillespie's band, and only a few years earlier, but in jazz,
sometimes, those few years lead to a father/son type of thing. Sonny comes
along at a time when John Lewis has been to the mountaintop, having played
with Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, and participated in the revolution
in jazz. Of all the young players coming up, Rollins was somebody who really,
in a way, was after John's own heart, because John sees that Sonny has a
respect for melody, which for John was so important. A gift for melody is
the the rarest of musical qualities. A lot of great jazz musicians don't
really have that. John recognized that in Sonny. So, when they did that recording
together up at Lennox, this gave them a chance to have a meeting of the minds.
I think they just enjoyed working together.
| JJM How do you rate Rollins as a composer?
GG Sonny is a wonderful composer. I am amazed
at how few attempts there have been by other musicians to develop a Sonny
Rollins songbook. I am aware of only a few people recording albums of just
Sonny's music. The most recent is David S. Ware's Freedom Suite. A
few of Sonny's pieces became instant standards. Everybody in the fifties
and sixties knew and played "Oleo," and "Doxy." "Strode Rode" is not done
as often as it should be. "Airegin" is a piece that Miles Davis and a number
of others have recorded, so many of these tunes immediately won the affection
and admiration of musicians, because they are very soundly structured, and
they all have memorable melodies. Once you hear these tunes you tend to know
them and audiences respond to them. "Oleo" is one of those magical springboards
for improvisation, so musicians love to play it. Everybody talks about
Freedom Suite in terms of its political implications and the fact
that it is a trio performance that went on for nineteen minutes, but there
are four wonderful melodies in it, some of the hookiest tunes that Sonny
ever wrote. That is what keeps the record so strong. Again, talking about
the eccentricities of Sonny, it has always amazed me that he put out the
Freedom Suite on the same album with some of the most sentimental
of Tin Pan Alley melodies. Noel Coward's "Some Day I'll Find You," and "Shadow
Waltz" are tunes that most jazz musicians give a very wide berth and wouldn't
know how to deal with. |
Miles Davis plays
Airegin
*
photo by Lee
Tanner |
JJM He caught a lot of flak for that recording
too.
GG Yes, and the company got some flak because
it was reissued as Shadow Waltz, and they were being accused of some
sort of political cowardice, but that wasn't true. The album originally came
out with the "Suite" in the title and I don't think there was ever a conscious
attempt to play that down.
JJM He made some sort of social statement
in the liner notes that may have ruffled the feathers of some people during
that era.
GG Well, it was a strange period. I remember
when a Downbeat reviewer referred to Abbey Lincoln as a "professional
negro," so there was a lot of that stuff going on then. Everybody was rooting
for Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, but Malcolm X came along and scared
the hell out of people, and many of those who thought of themselves as
good-hearted, leftist, integrationist types were terrified and didn't want
to see politics expressed in art. They didn't like the idea of musicians
making a claim. But, God bless Sonny Rollins, he really was the first to
do so, even preceeding Max Roach's We Insitst!--Freedom Now Suite.
Freedom Suite
*
photo by Lee
Tanner |
JJM When referring to critics, Rollins
told the biographer Eric Nisenson, "I am never going to have everybody liking
me, so the hell with them." Do critics expect too much of Sonny Rollins?
GG I will answer that by telling you a Sonny
Rollins story. The first time I ever met him was in about 1973 or 1974. It
was at the Half Note, when it had moved uptown to 54th Street in midtown.
I was there with Ira Gitler. Ira, of course, had known Sonny since the beginning.
I had just started at the Village Voice. I don't think I had written
more than ten or twelve reviews for them. When Sonny finished this set, he
came over to join Ira, and Ira introduced us. He told Sonny that I was now
writing for the Village Voice. When Sonny heard this he said that
he was quite upset about a review that had been written by another writer
in the Voice. The review was a rave that went on and on about how
great his new band was. Sonny's complaint was that in fact, it was a terrible
performance. The band was new and unrehearsed, and he and the guys were
embarrassed by how badly it had gone. Then he reads this rave review in the
Voice. Sonny told me, and I will never forget this, "If you can't
trust them when they say you're playing good, why should you believe them
when they say you're not." So, he is not looking for critics who just want
to slap him on the back every time and tell him how great he is. I sure as
hell haven't. |
Readers of the Voice expect my annual or bi-annual Sonny Rollins column
to be worshipful, or that's what I hear, and I won't argue. But I have
also given him some very tough reviews. When he did that Beacon Theatre thing,
I went chapter and verse into how ridiculous it was at times. Some of my
reviews of the seventies records he did for Milestone during his fusion period
were very negative. I know that Sonny doesn't think of me as someone who
gives him a gold star every time he walks out on the stage. We get along
very well. Sonny likes people, even reviewers. He wants people to respect
him and he respects them in return. But, that doesn't mean that he expects
you to just fall over everything he does, because he doesn't.
I learned a long time ago that really serious artists don't expect to be
praised for everything they do. They are much more respectful of reviewers
who can distinguish between when they are playing well and not. A lot of
jazz musicians, especially in the generation that Sonny came up with, in
the fifties, when there were a lot of drugs and the record labels were like
plantations, where musicians would just go in there to make a record for
a nice piece of change, never really expecting a royalty. They made so many
records. One of the reasons Sonny said he quit is because he made too many
records, and he did. He was in the studio practically every other week for
a period in the late fifties.
JJM Yes, he even refers to it as his promiscuous
recording period.
GG Yes. I later learned that a lot of these
guys simply expected serious listeners to be able to tell the difference
between when they were really playing something and when they were just looking
for a three hour handout. Most of the critics can, that's why they are critics.
Most fans can, I think. On the other hand, a couple of years ago in the wrap-up
of the year in the Voice, I quoted from a column that appeared in
Oakland, a critic who wrote that Sonny Rollins had the worst tone of any
saxophone player, that he was inept, that he couldn't play, and that he was
boring. I just find that hilarious. Also, I think it is to Sonny's credit
that, along with Cecil Taylor and Ornette Coleman, he is one of the most
controversial musicians on the scene. That's wonderful, I think. Here
is a man in his seventies, who basically is an inside player who comes out
of bebop, who is almost always playing the changes, and who can start that
kind of controversy that you associate with the outer fringe of the avante-garde
-- that says a lot about the creative edge in his music.
| JJM I read your most recent review in
the Voice, and I thought it was amazing how wonderful you were describing
the performance of this man who is now 71 years old! The way you describe
his performance it is almost as if he is playing better now than he ever
has before.
GG I started to say this before, and this
is a minority opinion, but I think Sonny's work of the last 20 - 25 years
contains many of his greatest performances. As a recording artist, there
was greater consistency in the fifties and in the sixties than later. But
as a player, he has kept growing -- his sound is so much more powerful and
interesting now. And he's made many great records. Cabin in
the Sky is a remarkable performance, and the new album, This Is What
I Do, is tremendous. I wouldn't miss a Rollins concert. I don't
understand how anybody who professes to love this music would dare to miss
a Rollins concert because you never know when it is going to be his last.
They are incredibly dramatic, whether they are great or not, and usually
they are great. He only comes to New York every other year or so, and you
never know what he is going to play or what he is going to pull out of his
bag of tricks, and he is an emotionally encompassing musician. He just gives
you so much. You walk out on air. |
Sonny Rollins
Cabin In The Sky
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painting by
Judy
Levy |
JJM Are these heavily attended concerts?
GG Yes, he sells out no matter where he plays.
B.B. King's, of course, was an easy one to sell out, but when he played at
the Plaza at Lincoln Center, there were thousands of people there. I know
a lot of press people who couldn't get anywhere near enough to hear. When
he used to do the Carnegie Hall series they were always sold out. The audience
is there for him, yes. His name is such that he may have crossed over, although
I don't think his record sales are that phenomenal. A lot of rock people
know about him, and they know that it is an experience to go see him. He
has that charisma as soon as he walks out on stage, like a rock star. The
sound is so huge and brawny that it just brings you right in.
JJM People forget that he played with the
Stones in 1980…
GG I will tell you something funny about
that. A not very good rock critic in Stereo Review reviewed that album,
Tattoo You, where Sonny solos on three tracks. Sonny is not mentioned
anywhere on the label, which is an outrage. This reviewer said there was
a "rumor" that Sonny Rollins was performing on this album but he couldn't
hear him! What can you say?
The Bridge
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photo by
Fred
McDarrah |
JJM The thing that even casual fans of
jazz seem to know about Sonny Rollins is this kind of romantic notion of
him going into semi-retirement and dragging his saxophone on to the Williamsburg
Bridge, even though this was forty years ago...
GG There is something so visually enticing
about a musician, alone at night on a Manhattan bridge, wailing at the stars.
Much has been made of that, but Sonny actually took three sabbaticals, and
I think that was the briefest of them. The one that nobody seems to talk
about is the one in the late sixties when he disappeared after Coltrane died.
He didn't record for about five years until the Sonny Rollins' Next
Album came out. This album, by the way, is yet another example of what
we were talking about concerning the inconsistencies of his recording. Next
Album had a riffy sort of track on it called "Playin' in the Yard." I
listened to that and wondered why they released it? Yet it was on that
same album that included "The Everywhere Calypso" and "Skylark," yet another
Rollins masterpiece. He is a hard guy to pin down. You started this discussion
by asking me about him as a provocateur, and the more you look at him the
more you see indications of that. |
JJM Anything else you wish to share about
Sonny Rollins?
GG Only that when Sonny Rollins puts down
his saxophone and stops playing, for me, a large measure of what makes music
great will disappear. That will be a terrible, terrible moment -- a moment
I don't care to even think about.
_______________________________
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This interview took place on October 21, 2002
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If you enjoyed this interview, you may want to read our interview with Sonny Rollins biographer Eric Nisenson.
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