Saxophone Colossus: The Life and Music of Sonny Rollins by Aiden Levy
In 1959, after eight years of recording sessions with the likes of Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk and the Modern Jazz Quartet, and Clifford Brown, saxophonist Sonny Rollins called a halt. For the next two years, he played alone – on the Williamsburg Bridge above New York City’s East River. He had just graduated high school in 1948 when he made his first recordings as a side man, and only three years later he was playing with Miles Davis. Then, in 1954, his own seminal compositions “Airegin,” “Doxy,” and “Oleo” were recorded with Davis. During this early period, Rollins was a heroin user – and served two terms in Riker’s Island for theft. In 1955, he entered a federal rehabilitation center in Lexington, Kentucky, and the next year he recorded Tenor Madness with Davis, Red Garland, Paul Chambers, and Philly Joe Jones; the title track is the only one in which he played with John Coltrane. Aiden Levy employs Rollins’ self-imposed hiatus in 1959 as the pivot-point both of his fluent narrative and Rollins’ career, even if the musician continued to perform in public until 2012. Saxophone Colossus offers penetrating insights to Rollins’ life and playing – as well as set lists and other information to delight jazz fans. When I consider Rollins’ approach, I think first of his percussive impulse – as well as his emphases on bass and drums (the piano eliminated). He played long – and when he came to “The Tonight Show” in 1979 with Bill Cosby as host, they gave him just eight minutes to play. What occurred there is one of the countless anecdotes in Saxophone Colossus. The one time I heard him play, at Paul’s Mall in Boston, is mentioned – perhaps an example within the poundage of micro-facts that may amount to much more than you want to know – but it all emits the unbounded energy, high standards, moral perspective and grit that characterize this unique jazz icon.
[Published by Hachette Books on December 6, 2022, 784 pages, $35.00 hardcover]
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Distant Melodies: Music in Search of Home by Edward Dusinberre
One of the world’s most acclaimed string groups, the Takacs Quartet has been in residence in Colorado since 1983. It was founded in Budapest in 1975 by four music students who, two years later, won first prize at the International String Quartet Competition in France. They began to travel – and concluded that Hungary, then a Communist state, was inhospitable to their itinerant aspirations. So off to America they went, and in 1993, the English expat Edward Dusinberre replaced founder Gábor Takács-Nagy as first violin. Dusinberre begins his narrative by recalling that Turkish author Elif Shafak “once described the experience of self-imposed exile: while grappling with disorienting physical separation and the unfamiliarity of language and culture, it is hard to throw off a sense of not being fully present.” If the familiarity of location and the affinity of kinship influence the making and performance of the music, where does that leave the exiled or emigrating musician? Dusinberre meditates on his own situation and enhances it by considering the lives of four artists – Edward Elgar, Benjamin Britten, Antonín Dvorák and Béla Bartók. Of this foursome, only Elgar did not spend time in the United States. Although Dusinberre follows their travels and the effects of their detachments from homeland, it is his own story that has the most weight and nuance. This is a memoir for those who delight in — or want to know more about — both the composition of the music and what it takes to perform it in far-flung places. But also, Dusinberre’s relationships with the works themselves are the levers of his self-awareness. Dvorák’s tenure in America was especially trying – and for those who are drawn to this part of the story, I also recommend Josef Skvorecky’s novel Dvorák in Love (1983), published in a translation for anglophones by Paul Wilson in 1986.
[Published by the University of Chicago Press on November 8, 2022, 208 pages, $22.00 US hardcover]
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Folk Music: A Bob Dylan Biography in Seven Songs by Greil Marcus
In a “20 Questions” Wall Street Journal feature late last year, Bob Dylan described his favorite music: “slow ballads, fast ballads … Western swing, Hillbilly, jump blues, country blues … Lowland ballads, Bill Monroe, bluegrass …” In Old, Weird America (1997), Greil Marcus said Dylan’s milieu “was that of the folk revival – an area of native tradition and national metaphor … where authenticity in song and manner, in being, was the highest value … [and] the purest clay was always evident, real American red earth.” The “folk music” in Folk Music, then, isn’t the broader acoustic genre of Spotify. In the new book, structured around seven Dylan tunes, from “Blowin in the Wind” (1962) to “Murder Most Foul” (2020), Marcus darts through memories and anecdotes about Dylan and his performances – but he seems just as invested in some of the minor players of the 1960s such as Mike Seeger. Most striking are Marcus’ reassessments of Dylan’s mid- and late-career works: “Time Out of Mind, Love and Theft and Modern Times raised Bob Dylan to a plateau of heroic irrelevancy he has not left since.” Folk Music isn’t a Dylan biography. Rather, it is as if Marcus is checking his own pulse, still elevated when revisiting past pleasures and awakenings. Marcus felt – and still extols — Dylan’s connections to an obscured American truth and texture. In fact, making lively connections between various cultural and artistic influences and forces is Marcus’ forte. “Empathy” is the guiding impulse he hears in Dylan – even extending to newer music like the JFK assassination reprise in “Murder Most Foul”: “the first fact of the song: the strange way it can hardly be heard once without sparking anyone’s need to hear it again – a world gathering around a campfire of unanswerable questions, and it takes everyone around the campfire to hear the whole song.”
[Published by Yale University Press on October 11, 2022, 288 pages, $27.50 hardcover]
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Musical Landscapes in Color: Conversations with Black American Composers by William C. Banfield
Composer, jazz performer and teacher William Banfield first published Musical Landscapes in Color twenty years ago. Now available in paperback with a revised preface, this rich collection of interviews with 41 black composers still speaks to their relative obscurity: “The work and story of the artistic, social, cultural, political, spiritual paths of these creative non-commercial-based music innovators’ works is different, certainly muted, and mostly invisible.” At the same time, many of the composers who participated in the book’s first version are now well-established figures as symphony conductors, film and TV composers, in academia, in the recording studio, and at the Grammys. Think of Herbie Hancock, Tania Léon, Billy Childs or Leslie Dunner. Each of the 41 musicians speaks at some length about their development as an artist, and then goes on to describe in detail what their profession now comprises. There is an abundance of insights. For instance, the versatile Patrice Rushen, who has released five albums via Electra Records and serves as performance consultant for Yamaha, regards rap as an “industry” that has obscured the variety of black music: “There was always R&B, and there was jazz, and there was gospel, and there were radio stations playing all of it, so that you got the idea that there was a palette of black music out there, as opposed to what we see now.” But it would be futile to try to reduce any of these illuminating life statements to two or three topics. If you are intrigued by the mystery of artistic creativity, this is your book. If you want to know where these musicians believe they stand among their white peers, read on. If you are curious about how non-commercial composers and performers thrive or survive in our warped economy, there is much here to consider. Billy Taylor: “Ethnicity is something that I have been very conscious of, and I have tried to use it in a way based on models that preceded me – people like Duke Ellington, Will Marion Cook, James Reese Europe, and many musicians who were legendary in terms of being able to say, ‘This is who I am. This is what I look like. This is where I live. This is what I care about. I am different from some other people, but that difference is something of which I am very proud.’” Anthony Davis: “My goal is to be the American composer who helps to define opera for the next century, to give opera its unique American voice, and leave a legacy of works that do that. … I want to bring the aesthetic of the improviser into the orchestra, whether as the informing aesthetic of my musical composition or as musicians brought into the ensemble. I am looking forward to the day when aesthetic takes root within the orchestra, the way it took root in the creative orchestras in the 30’s and the 20’s.”
[Published by University of Illinois Press on February 21, 2023, 400 pages, 20 color photos, 95 b&w photos, $29.95 paperback]