Business Blast
this week: three nights of trio with Thomas Morgan and Kush Abadey at Jazz Genius
Thinking about the late Sonny Rollins this morning. An end to an era! Mark Stryker’s comments on FB (“The Greatest Ever is Gone”) are notable.
Critic Doug Ramsey, saxophonist Gary Foster, and trombonist Ryan Porter also passed away last week.
Miles Davis would have turned exactly 100 today.
(I’m considering things I might post for Rollins and Davis, but don’t have them ready yet.)
Coming right up! Ethan Iverson trio with Thomas Morgan and Kush Abadey at new club Jazz Genius.
151 Essex St.
Thursday through Saturday, May 28 - 30, sets at 7 and 9 pm.
My dad pointed out the Rollins/Davis intersection to me, I hadn't noticed it. I was already thinking about them as two iconoclastic musicians who were extremely wary of being lulled into complacency by their past successes. Yet I think Rollins ultimately looked inward/upward for his journey in life and music, which made him less easily accessible as an "icon" but more vulnerable as a human and musician, in my mind. I was also thinking of Keith Jarrett -- like Rollins, unable to play his instrument due to physical limitations. I would have thought of Sonny Rollins as like that quote about Coltrane -- that he could have just played in a closet his whole life and still made all that music, because it was inwardly motivated. Yet Rollins seemed ultimately at peace with losing the saxophone, and spoke of music not as the goal of his life but just as one facet of his whole personhood -- the path doesn't stop with the music.
When my daughter was five years old she loved Sonny's records, especially "St. Thomas." She told me she wanted to write him a letter, but I couldn't promise he'd answer it. Imagine writing Mick Jagger or John Lennon: crickets. But she dictated a letter and drew Sonny a picture of herself, a little white girl dancing, and of Sonny, a black man with a mustache and goatee and a tenor sax. A month later an envelope arrived addressed to her containing a signed photo of Sonny, and a letter handwritten by him to her. Not only a great improviser, but also a true gentleman. He shall be missed.