Sonny Rollins
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Sonny Rollins, the saxophone colossus, visited Hanover, NH last week. He'd been scheduled to play there in October but got the flu (he's 77 or 78, something like that). We held our tickets, fingers crossed, that he wouldn't slip away like so many of his generation. Then last night, Mother's Day, by coincidence, the concert went off. My husband, Bill, who is much more knowledgeable about jazz than I am, said in the car on the way up, "I've been wanting to see Sonny Rollins for my whole life."We got there in time for an informal lecture by NYT critic Ben Raitliff, who wrote a long piece about Rollins a few months ago in the paper of record. Bill said he was a little underwhelmed, but for me, along for the ride, it was pretty interesting stuff. Raitliff talked about how Rollins and Coltrane had traded a 1940s book about Indian meditation back and forth, and evolved a theory about how process was all, more so than even results, and how perfection, while maybe not a real thing, was a "useful concept" in the journey towards it. He touched on Rollins two-year sabbatical in which the late-20s artist simply stopped performing in public because he felt that he was not good enough, then re-emerged in 1961 with a whole different style. There was a question about Coltrane, asking whether Rollins had ever reached the same spiritual plane as A Love Supreme, and Raitliff talked about the thing that Rollins had the Coltrane didn't, a sense of humor, a willingness to quote cheesy movie ballads and popular songs in the midst of his most difficult solos. And then he fielded a somewhat awkward question about how Rollins in his 70s compared with Rollins in his 30s, whether he had lost the technical chops ("his speed was almost like a parlor trick"), with the observation "You can't say better or worse. It's just....different." Rollins was travelling with a four-person band, Clifton Anderson on trombone, Bobby Broom on guitar, Bob Cranshaw playin bass and an African-style hand-drummer who was, according to the program, either Kimati Dinizulu or Kobie Watkinst. They took the stage a few seconds before he did, casually, there was a collective intake of breath when Rollins entered from stage left. He was stylish, as always, grey hair swept back, wraparound shades, suit, still powerfully built and with a palpable aura of command. They launched into a fairly playful first song, an original composition, Rollins said. It was really a series of extended solos, Rollins, the great improviser taking the lead first, then Anderson, then Broom. Except for a brief introduction, you almost never had the two wind players together. And, while no one could object to Rollins meditating on a single theme for 15 minutes, or his lovely-toned trombone player, the guitar solo seemed all skill and little heart...a sort of Stanley Jordan thing. Moreover, the main problem of the evening emerged during a shapeless vamp at the beginning. The drummer was always busy, but rarely right on the groove...he could have just locked onto the bass player, who was excellent, but no, he was too eager for attention, thwacking the congas and (infinitely worse), tinkling a series of hanging chimes. The chimes -- which produce exactly the same sound as when a sitcom character (Gilligan?) falls asleep mid-show -- started as annoyance and became absolutely painful, but the drummer could not seem to let them go. They nearly ruined a wonderful, meditative, late-set cut, where Anderson plied his trombone in melancholy flourishes, nearly everyone of them accented by glitter dust chimes or, ooh, now we're full of tension, maraca fills. By the end of the solo, I had deep nail marks in my arms and had whispered to my son, sitting beside me, "I want to kill the drummer."The set list was considerably more pop than I was expecting (out of ignorance, my husband says that Rollins has always favored lighter, boppier pieces, and that he sometimes fits the playlist to the audience, who were mostly grey-haired.) The highlights were a long "calypso", a nod to Rollins' West Indian heritage, and clearly among the set's most joyful, untrammeled moments. There was, towards, the end a really beautiful ballad piece, including the set's only bass solo (Cranshaw was wonderfully understated and funky, somehow eliciting a very stand-up bass sound from his electric). And, of course, the saxophone solos were wonderful, technically proficient and soulful, full of wit and humor (two compositions ended with a "Shave and a Haircut" flourish). Near the end, the whole band stopped dead, and Rollins simply played on, blowing rapid-fire abstractions and playful riffs on popular songs. The audience chuckled as his dipped into the melody from "Funiculi Funicula" and one other song that I couldn't place, but they could, but mostly they hung on every note. And then Rollins waved and thanked the crowd and wished us all a happy mother's day, in his late 1970s still as hale and vital as ever, and still engaged on his unending spiritual quest...I just hope he finds another drummer somewhere along the way.
Comments (24)
That was an amazing exchange that I didn't see coming. Wow!