Sonny rollins saxophone colossus7/4/2023 We’re also with Rollins as his heroin addiction slowly consumes him - as it did so many other jazz greats - culminating in a half-baked 1950 armed-robbery plot that never gets off the ground but still lands him on New York’s Rikers Island for 10 months. These are the artists whose aggressive improvisation, rhythmic thrust and fiery soloing put hard bop on the map. We’re with Rollins as he looks up to fellow sax players Coleman Hawkins and Charlie Parker, both of whom he will come to emulate, and as he starts to jam and record with the rising stars of his own generation, including Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk, both of whom leap to life in these pages. Throughout “Saxophone Colossus,” he weds his extensive research to a feel for detail and narrative the book is certainly long, but it has too much great reporting to be dry. Levy, whose previous work includes “ Dirty Blvd.: The Life and Music of Lou Reed,” paints a vivid picture of this milieu, its buzzing nightlife and its varieties of temptation waiting behind what seems every door. It’s got a rock ‘n’ roll tone, for better and worse, but it still manages to bring Berry into sharp focus. (Rollins is still kicking at 92, in defiance of actuarial charts for golden age jazz musicians in particular.) RJ Smith’s “ Chuck Berry: An American Life” is roughly half as long and twice as rollicking, befitting its subject. Now they are the subjects of major new biographies - one of them definitive, the other just a lot of fun.Īidan Levy’s “ Saxophone Colossus: The Life and Music of Sonny Rollins” is a whopper, nearly 800 pages of deep-dive research that follow the man known as “Newk” from before the beginning, with his family’s origins on the West Indian island of St. It’s hard to imagine the last 75 years of music without Sonny Rollins and Chuck Berry. Louis, who blended hillbilly music and rhythm and blues to pioneer a nascent genre called rock ‘n’ roll. Among the trailblazers were a perpetually practicing jazz saxophonist from Harlem whose mastery of harmony and rhythm put him on the ground floor of what would come to be known as hard bop and a wild young man from St. The middle of the 20th century was a remarkably fertile period for musical innovation, much of it fueled by Black artists contending with a country unwilling to relinquish its racist power structure. If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from, whose fees support independent bookstores. And his always formidable musical intelligence is constantly evident.Saxophone Colossus: The Life and Music of Sonny Rollins Rollins' tone had matured and become more rounded, and at times, he seems to stimulate the great Max Roach rhythmically as much as he is stimulated by him. Together they made a masterpiece in which the melodic exploration is equal to the harmonic analysis that was typical of hard bop. SPELLMAN: Rollins is joined here with three men you call "musicians' musicians." The subtle and sensitive master Tommy Flanagan is the pianist Doug Watkins is the bassist and the sublime Max Roach is the drummer. Thomas," the calypso in which Sonny Rollins declared his West Indian roots. It is in perfect balance with a calypso, ballad, straight-ahead hard bop number, Kurt Weill classic, and a blues. SPELLMAN, National Endowment for the Arts: Oh, I definitely think this is the record in which Sonny Rollins came out as a master. And a lot of critics have called this his breakthrough record. But in 1956, in his mid-20s, he recorded this album, Saxophone Colossus. MURRAY HORWITZ, American Film Institute: Sonny Rollins was a jazz prodigy who had recorded with Bud Powell and Art Blakey before he was even 20 years old.
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