{"id":793,"date":"2023-05-09T13:30:00","date_gmt":"2023-05-09T13:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dev.nysmusic.com\/2023\/2023\/05\/09\/author-aidan-levy-creates-a-new-jazz-standard-with-sonny-rollins-biography\/"},"modified":"2023-05-09T13:30:00","modified_gmt":"2023-05-09T13:30:00","slug":"author-aidan-levy-creates-a-new-jazz-standard-with-sonny-rollins-biography","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dev.nysmusic.com\/2023\/2023\/05\/09\/author-aidan-levy-creates-a-new-jazz-standard-with-sonny-rollins-biography\/","title":{"rendered":"Author Aidan Levy Creates a New Jazz Standard with Sonny Rollins Biography"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In his new book, Saxophone Colossus: The Life and Music of Sonny Rollins,<\/a> author Aidan Levy has created a work nearly as sprawling and monumental as the seven-decades of sounds crafted by a man widely considered \u201cjazz\u2019s greatest living improviser.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Levy devoted seven years to the task of capturing Rollins \u2013 the musician, the myth, the civil rights activist, environmentalist and wandering spiritualist \u2013 in a whopping 750 very readable pages.  The book is based on more than 200 interviews with Rollins, his family members, friends and collaborators, as well as the artist\u2019s personal archive of letters, journals, photos and press clippings accrued over a career in which he has taken a few notable sabbaticals and sharp stylistic turns.  It pretty much traces every recording session and gig that the Saxophone Colossus participated in. The depth of Levy\u2019s astounding research is furthered by the more than 400 pages of footnotes available only online (including my story for NYSMusic<\/a> on his legendary concert at Opus 40 in Saugerties). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m a pretty fast reader but I spent close to three months with Levy\u2019s book. It was devoted to toggling between deep reading and deeper listening to the many corners of Rollins\u2019 60 solo and live albums, and the multitude of classics on which he guested with Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Clifford Brown and the like.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rollins was a child of the Harlem Renaissance. Inspired by his Sugar Hill neighbor, tenor great Louis Jordan, he picked up the sax at 8 and landed, beginning as a teenager, on the bandstand and in the recording studio with greats like Bud Powell, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie. His youthful exposure to the Calypso music of his familial roots in the West Indies and love of classic Hollywood movies would bear fruit later in his career in respective classics like \u201cSt. Thomas\u201d and \u201cI\u2019m An Old Cowhand.\u201d  With drawn-on moustaches, he and his original band formed while attending Franklin High, the Counts of Bop featuring Art Taylor, Walter Bishop, Jackie McLean and Kenny Drew, would head to Minton\u2019s or the phalanx of jazz clubs on 52nd<\/sup> St to watch and hopefully be invited to sit-in with idols like Coleman Hawkins. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Sonny
Sonny Rollins with Don Cherry and Henry Grimes at the Stockholm Concert Hall, January 17, 1963. Not pictured: Billy Higgins. Ove Alstro\u0308m. Courtesy of The Centre for Swedish Folk Music and Jazz Research and Inger Stjerna<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Sonny\u2019s passion for civil rights and justice was shaped by two early events. The first was his military-lifer father\u2019s court martial and jailing for the crime of \u201cteaching a white woman to dance\u201d at an officer\u2019s party he was managing, an event that made national headlines.  The second was his own experiences in the criminal justice system. This latter was the result of his and his musician pals\u2019 heroin addictions, something plied in a Harlem park they called \u201cGoof Square.\u201d Rollins would do two stretches on Riker\u2019s Island for pickpocketing and a gun charge. It was during a stint at that jail in 1954, while playing in the Protestant chapel band, that Rollins penned three of his much-covered classics, \u201cAiregin,\u201d \u201cDoxy\u201d and \u201cOleo.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1955, Rollins turns his life around by starting to kick junk after a stay in Lexington, the famous prison\/rehab facility, and a move to Chicago and legendary collaboration with the Max Roach\/Clifford Jordan.  He would stay clean working day jobs as a porter, door-to-door salesman and janitor in Chicago. It\u2019s also the city where he would meet his second wife and manager Lucille.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1956, Rollins begins what may be one of the most critically acclaimed and productive runs in jazz history, waxing ten astounding classic albums, six as leader including his twin masterworks, \u201cTenor Madness\u201d and \u201cSaxophone Colossus.\u201d  He would conjure nine additional solo classics in 1957 and 1958 including \u201cWay Out West,\u201d \u201cNewk\u2019s Time\u201d and \u201cFreedom Suite.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For these and the dozens of albums that followed, Levy gives a blow-by-blow on the sessions. He details the careful selection of sidemen and the sometimes dozen-plus takes Rollins would record before hitting on something that met, maybe, his insanely perfectionist standards.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While by this time he was finally being accorded the acclaim he deserved, the revelation in Levy\u2019s book is how savagely he was treated by critics like Leonard Feather in earlier solo discs and in sessions with Miles Davis and others. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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