Jazz for aficionados
@pjw81563 sez: "Woody Shaw's first album as a leader (possibly his best studio album?). JFA thoughts? I have all of his studio albums and live recordings on CDs" Blackstone Legacy! Agree. I have the OG, marvelous, not so easy to find, recall it was reissued a few years ago, think this is the one that said Kevin cut it in adverts but it was Bernie G? Great, varied compositions, pushing the performance envelope. |
...'Sonny Rollins was the best tenor saxophone player alive, and in 1959 he quit. No farewell tour, no last record, no explanation the public ever got to hear. He was 28, famous, well paid, and he had quietly decided he was not yet good enough. If you rode the J train across the East River in the summer of 1959, you might have seen him and never known what you were looking at. A man folded into the steel of the Williamsburg Bridge, alone, a saxophone in his hands. He was not a busker, and he was not lost. His name was Sonny Rollins. He was the most acclaimed tenor saxophonist in America, and he had just walked away from all of it. For almost three years, from the summer of 1959 to the fall of 1961, the only way to hear him play was to climb up onto that bridge. No clubs, no records, no stage. You have to understand where he stood when he quit. Rollins was 28 years old, and the jazz world had run out of fresh ways to praise him. He had cut Saxophone Colossus in 1956, then Way Out West, then a run of records critics tripped over themselves describing. The New Yorker called him possibly the most influential jazz instrumentalist since Charlie Parker. He had played beside Miles Davis, and he had gotten one of his first real breaks in Thelonious Monk's band. He had come up close enough to greatness to reach out and touch it. He came up on Sugar Hill, in Harlem, on the blocks people called strivers' row. His parents had come up from the Virgin Islands, and they were not sure what to make of a son who wanted to play this music. His mother bought him his first saxophone anyway. He was seven years old. On his walk to school he passed the Cotton Club and the Savoy Ballroom, the doorways the whole jazz world wanted through. His neighbor Thelonious Monk used to slip him into clubs before he was old enough to get in honestly. By his late twenties, Sonny Rollins did not have to slip into anywhere. He was the headline. And then he disappeared. People assumed something had gone wrong. A man at the top does not simply stop, so there had to be a reason, a scandal, a collapse. There was no collapse. There was only Sonny Rollins, listening hard to himself play, and not liking what he heard. "What made me withdraw and go to the bridge was how I felt about my own playing," he said years later. "I knew I was dissatisfied." He said it another way too. "I was getting a lot of publicity for my work at that time, but I wasn't satisfying my own requirements for what I wanted to do musically." He was not failing. The publicity was real, the money was real, the crowds were real. He simply held a standard the applause could not reach. The crowd was sure he was great, and he was not, not yet. Here is how it actually started, and it started small. He and his wife Lucille shared an apartment at 400 Grand Street on the Lower East Side. A woman next door was expecting a baby. A tenor saxophone is a loud thing in a small apartment, and Rollins did not want his long hours of practice keeping a pregnant neighbor from her rest. So he went looking for somewhere else to play. One day he was walking on Delancey Street and saw a set of steps climbing up off the road. He climbed them, horn in hand. What he found at the top, he never stopped talking about for the rest of his life. "I just saw all this fantastic open space," he said. "No one was up there." The bridge ran high over the river between Manhattan and Brooklyn. Trains rattled across it, boats slid underneath, traffic poured by, and almost nobody walked it. For a man who needed to play loud and play alone, there was nothing better in the whole city. "This is what I have been looking for," he remembered thinking. "I can blow my horn as loud as I want." He talked about that bridge the way a person talks about a present they never expected to get. It was, he said, like a gift. After that, the bridge became the center of his life. He would leave the apartment and make the same walk, the same climb up the same iron steps, day after day after day. He would stay up there fourteen hours at a stretch. Some days it ran closer to sixteen. He tucked himself into the crannies of the steelwork, behind the heavy pillars, out of the wind and out of the way. The subway trains came through close enough to feel in his chest, and he would play right back at them. He found the bridge changed the sound itself. "Playing against the sky really does improve your volume, and your wind capacity," he said, and so he played louder and longer up there than any room on the ground would have let him. He worked on all of it. Fast tumbling runs, low honking notes, the blues, the calypsos of his parents' islands, scraps of pop songs and classical lines, every bit of it pulled apart and built back better. He was not performing up there. There was no one to perform for, and that was the entire point. Every so often a person crossing the bridge would catch sight of him. A man with a saxophone, wedged in the steel, deep into his fourth or fifth hour. They did not know him. Most of them, Rollins said, took him for some crazy guy with a horn. The most acclaimed saxophonist in America was standing in open view on a public bridge, and the people walking past could not spare him a second glance. He did not mind it at all. He would later call those some of the happiest hours of his entire life. "When I was up there I was enjoying myself tremendously," he remembered. "I didn't care if anybody came up there or not." He called it seventh heaven. Up on that bridge, he said, he did not believe there was anything he could not do. The horn was not the only thing he rebuilt up there. While he climbed that bridge he took up yoga, drove himself through hard exercise, quit smoking, and read his way through books on philosophy and faith. He kept notebooks the whole time. He was remaking the player and the man together, in the same place, at the same hour. It went on like that for about a thousand days. A thousand climbs up the same steps, a thousand sessions out over the open water. He admitted later that the bridge could have held him forever. "I could have probably spent the rest of my life just going up on the bridge," he said. It was quiet up there, and it was honest. Nothing could reach him, not a club owner, not a critic, not a crowd he did not believe. But he made himself come down. "I realized, no, I have to get back into the real world," he said. In November of 1961, Sonny Rollins walked back into a recording studio. The jazz world had been waiting on him, and it was waiting for something enormous. He had vanished at the very top and stayed gone three years. Surely a man came down off a thing like that carrying a revolution in his case. In early 1962 he recorded the album, and he gave it the only title it could have had. He called it The Bridge. He cut it with a quartet built around the guitarist Jim Hall, no piano in it at all. The reviews came back mixed. While he had been up in the steel the music had moved on without him, and Ornette Coleman's free jazz was the new argument everyone wanted to have. Some listeners had wanted Rollins to come down as someone unrecognizable. He came down instead as a sharper, surer, deeper version of exactly himself. For a handful of critics, that was not the shock they had ordered. They had missed the point completely. He had never climbed that bridge for the critics. He had climbed it for himself. He was the one listener he could never lie to, and by his own ear, the only ear he had ever truly answered to, he had done precisely what he set out to do. The Bridge has lasted. It went into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2015, and saxophone players still take it apart note by note to learn from it. And Rollins did not stop there, nowhere close. He kept playing for more than fifty years after he came down off that bridge. He went away again later, all the way to a monastery in India, and he came back again. He scored a film, put his horn on a Rolling Stones record, and filled concert halls on every continent. Lucille, the wife who lived out the bridge years with him at 400 Grand Street, became the manager who ran his whole career. She died in 2004, after forty-seven years at his side. He played his last concert in 2012. A lung disease he carried after September 11, 2001 slowly took the horn out of his hands, and he stopped playing for good in 2014.'... |
