“Tenor Madness” is the name of the only recording Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane made together. I thought I’d link them again because they’re both the subject of this entry and music service offerings.Sonny Rollins (see www.sonnyrollins.com to subscribe to his newsletter entitled “Newk’s Time”) is the subject of a new interview on MTV’s Urge network. In it, he discusses his new re
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I've been busy lately trying to get our bookstore put together (see the next paragraph). While Julie and I were putting together bookcases, I happened to hear a Sonny Rollins song on local radio station KKJZ that was new to me. The announcer confirmed what I had suspected; Sonny has a new CD out! It's entitled Sonny, Please. A couple of days later, I went to Tower Records and then Borders to f...
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Meanwhile, back at Metropolis Books, we decided to salute Black History month with a little bit of jazz. (Gee, what a stretch!)
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Sunshine Holiday:Take a tall glass.Fill about 1/2 way with OJ or sweet grapefruit juice.Add tonic, about a quarter glass.Squeeze in a lemon or lime wedge.Add ice and gin or vodka to your liking.Mix nicely and enjoy with a dash of Sonny Rollins.
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Three things woke me up this morning, a warm gentle breeze, sun streaming through the blinds, and the smell of brewing coffee.Things only got better when I heard the first notes of this Sonny Rollins tune, a take on the Johnny Mercer standard he cut in LA with Shelly Manne and Ray Brown in '57. It doesn't get much smoother.The next thing that hit my senses was the smell of bacon and within two ...
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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 jaz...
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Sonny Rollins frequently played cadenzas to end tunes. Here his opening cadenza visits "The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze", a calypso melody, and "I Can't Get Started" on the way to starting Miles Davis's "Four".His idea flow is never ending, his sound is ever-varying and he plays with great good humor. This rhythm section, pianist Kenny Drew, Niels Henning Oersted Pederson (NHOP for ...
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The audio play button will let you hear Sonny Rollins' first recording of "St. Thomas" from his 1957 album "Saxophone Colossus".The video clip will play a Rollins performance of "St. Thomas" from a 1965 European tour. This was apparently taken from a retrospective on Niels-Hennings career since there is a brief commentary by NHOP about Rollins (in Danish) in the middle. Rollins' parents emigrat...
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Here goes nothin...and here's what I've played so farSonny Rollins - Wagon WheelsShades of Joy - Flute in a QuarryRamsey Lewis trio - FelicidadDorothy Ashby - Valley of the DollsHopefully someone will show up with a camera so I can give you a visual...
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Mr. Rollins still got it! Catch him when he comes to your town.
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The scourge of heroin addiction among jazz musicians of the 1940s and 1950s is central to dozens of stories, novels, poems, plays and movies, most of them dreadful, overwrought clichés. Bad art aside, the monkey on the backs of musicians was real. It rode many of them to their graves. Unhorseing the habit required triumphing over more than the punishing chemical consequences of withdrawal. It m..
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I think as long as people can hear a record and hear people like Lester Young on a recording, there will always be a great inspiration for somebody to try to create jazz. - Sonny RollinsNo one is original. Everyone is derivative. -- Sonny RollinsThere was a period which I refer to as the 'Golden Age of Jazz,' which sort of encompasses the middle thirties through the sixties, we had a lot of gre...
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It is now called the JVC Jazz Festival, but it still takes place in Newport, Rhode Island. If the festival no longer has the jazz purity of its beginnings in the 1950s, at least it has survived. It continues to include major jazz artists among the tangential pop figures who attract the big crowds that pay the bills. In today's Boston Globe, Steve Greenlee summarizes the two days of Newport and ...
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--- - |- In an interview a few days before the Newport performance, Rollins told Rick Massimo of the Providence Journal why he has kept bassist Bob Cranshaw in his band for more than four decades... ...because he maintained the fixed portion of it, and that would allow me to extemporize freely and the song would still be maintained. It was a contrast; if he had the fixed part, then I could ...
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With a full-time nonmusical job, I don't have much time as I would like to devote to playing my saxes. As such, for every advance I make in my playing, I suffer setbacks through inactivity. A few weeks ago, my wife saw an article about the Los Angeles Music Center holding a workshop series tailor-made for someone in my position. It's called "Get Your Chops Back - Saxophone Ensemble ." It's fo...
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