April’s music monsoon here in the Live Music Capital, from Leonard Cohen and Bruce Springsteen the same week to Morrissey and then My Bloody Valentine last Tuesday, saves the best for last this Sunday, May 3, 7pm, at the Bass Concert Hall when jazz colossus Sonny Rollins strides onstage with his saxophone. If Miles or Coltrane were putting on a show here in your backyard, you’d sell your mother to the gypsies for a chance to stand in the eye of their storm. Sonny Rollins’ tenor madness blows just such a force of nature.
Speaking with Ornette Coleman in advance of his Bass Concert Hall convergence in 2004 shook out the same as 30-plus minutes on the horn with Rollins. Stuck to your ear is a conduit to another plain of existence, where gods of invention and innovation chuckle philosophically, if a little sad, like they were actual flesh and blood. In fact, their musical pioneering has already granted them immortality that time will prove no less enduring as two pianists Rollins mentions in these extracts from a print interview appearing in today’s Chronicle: Mozart and Chopin. Centuries will not tarnish the gale winds of Sonny Rollins.
Tickets remain plentiful and compared to the aforementioned musical touchstones, cheap. As they say on television, this opportunity won’t be repeated.
Austin Chronicle: Musically, you came up during bebop. Culturally speaking, does this country honor the form as it deserves?
Sonny Rollins: Well, probably not. As you probably realized in our fast paced world, people don’t study history too much and people don’t get a chance to ruminate on things that happened even very recently. Musicians and people in the music industry would know about bebop, would know about the renaissance period, but the average guy, no. That’s unfortunate, but that’s the way of life, especially the way things are these days – very short attention spans, et cetera. People don’t really think about those things, and I think that’s to the detriment of thought, but that’s the way it is.
AC: We recently interviewed Quincy Jones, and he’s very committed to educating kids about music. He says that he routinely finds that they don’t even know the names Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong. Should the know it, or do they need to be taught it?
SR: Well, I would think they should know it, of course, but I think they should know Beethoven. I think they should know Bach, I think they should know Charlie Parker, I think they should know Duke Ellington, I think they should know Mozart. I think they should know Chopin, too. I think people should be educated.
AC: Quincy was bemused that hip-hop had taken so much from bebop culture. Do you think that’s true?
SR: Oh sure, I think it’s a continuation. In fact, I was talking to somebody the other night about my view. I feel hip-hop is part of jazz, that it comes under the jazz umbrella. It’s not really two things. Is hip-hop distinct from jazz? No. I think that it’s now a part of jazz. But again, you have to have education. These things have to be taught to people and in our culture there’s no time for that. You look at TV and how much time is spent on education as opposed to lying to people about consumer products. Ninety percent of it is nonsense. There’s no time left for society to educate people so we have to try to do it ourselves and that’s it. Certainly hip-hop is okay as is anything inimitable like bebop and any kind of jazz. It takes somebody to bring all of these things together, and that’s my aim. That’s my goal in life and my music – to show that jazz is jazz and all these things are jazz.
AC: What kind of shape do you find jazz in here in the early 21st century?
SR: Well, it’s a question that can be misinterpreted, because in the first place what do people think when they hear the word “jazz”? People think, “Oh, jazz is a smokey night club with a piano trio playing and a girl singing with a flower in her hair maybe.” Some people think that’s jazz. What do you mean when you say “jazz”? A lot of people have their own ideas and of course the media, the culture, reinforces those misconceptions. Jazz is a much bigger force in the world than that, but when you say “jazz” people think, “Well gee, there’s no night clubs anymore,” and, “Where do you go to see a jazz trio playing?” So jazz is thought of in those reductive terms. I would say jazz is down to a very small percentage in the musical world as well as in the cultural world, if it’s thought of at all.
AC: You’ve long been considered one of the giants of jazz. Is it lonely at the top?
SR: Well, of course I don’t read my press. I don’t believe my press. So I don’t get too carried away and therefore I haven’t considered myself removed from other people. So no, I might be considered at the top in some ways, but I consider myself just another musician plowing in the fields trying to create some music. I don’t think of myself in those lofty terms, so I never feel lonely, not at all.
AC: One of the hot trends of the past several years is the meeting of jazz and world music and you were ahead of that curve by 50 years. Have you since taken much interest in that melding?
SR: That’s a very tricky one. I feel that jazz is a distinct form. I think it’s good because I feel like music is an open sky and you can do anything. But I feel there’s still something distinct about jazz and if you play jazz with world music, to excite me, I still have to hear a distinct jazz element or else it just will be just music, not jazz music. I appreciate world music for what it is, but when you have a jazz element in there it becomes something special. I’m a jazz enthusiast and I feel jazz is the premiere music of the world. Whereas I’m all in favor of these meldings with other music, I think there has to be a distinct jazz element there.
AC: What’s your reaction to the technological advancements taking place in music recently? How has technology impacted jazz?
SR: I think that’s something still not really determined, at least in my mind. In a sense the record industry and the music industry is in a transition phase right now, because people are not buying CDs anymore. They’re downloading music and so on and so forth. That’s a big change. Musicians have to deal with that. They’re going to have to find another way to make a living selling their music. As far as someone having 1,000 tunes on their iPod, I guess it’s okay. It’s still about trying to have something worthwhile on your music delivery system. You can’t slight it, so I guess it’s okay if somebody takes advantage of that. The only thing is we have to keep bringing jazz up to its full potential. And when I say “we,” I don’t mean myself personally. I mean having a good representation of the music, jazz.
This article appears in April 24 • 2009.
