1972: Sonny Rollins, Next Album
By Bismillah Earnest Harachandh
What’s Next?
1.
“Let Sonny do his whole concept. It’s gonna come out better.”
Orrin Keepknews
Sonny has said goodbye before.
Sonny said goodbye when he walked into Rikers’. After a drug felony, and a stint in Lexington, Kentucky he promised himself to lay low and work odd jobs after he got a second chance at the YMCA in downtown Chicago. He was trying to get clean, so he played the horn all along Wabash Ave in the mean time, with his roommate or other scrubs he met in the growing Second City. Usually, this was after he cleaned ad offices as a quotidian janitor in the South Loop.
He took a breather. He breathed. He breathed and he breathed, until he quit the junk and found his way home.
Back home, his tenor mouth spray painted the Williamsburg Bridge black, like the dusk.
After loosening up the cool, west coast and swing heavy jazz scene of the late fifties—thanks to sessions and recordings with giants like Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, and Max Roach; Sonny introduced a sillier variation of “free jazz” which danced to Calypso, Broadway musicals, or in protest.
Harlem-born Rollins introduced unusual dynamics into his bands, beyond his atypical standards. Sonny was known for covering light and unexpected numbers like “There’s No Business Like Show Business” or “I’m an Old Cowhand (from the Rio Grande).” Starting with his legendary record The Bridge, Sonny began to experiment with his trios and quartets by replacing pianists with guitarists, most notably Jim Hall, to create space in the music for intelligent and often comically rhythmic improvisation.
His early masterpiece, Saxophone Colossus, foreshadowed his soon to arrive destiny as a jazz giant himself like his mentors Monk and Coleman Hawkins. After iconic, and indefinable, records like Way Out West, The Sound of Sonny, Freedom Suite, and East Broadway Rundown, Sonny was the melodic blend of arty, fun, and populist. Sometimes known as Knewk, Rollins molded a unique archetype of musical comedy which belonged entirely to his dedicatedly fun filled breath. This mold is similar to forces like The Talking Heads or De La Soul, both to arrive later in the twentieth century. Or Os Mutantes, for their ability use experimental music techniques for liberating, often humorous, effects. Sonny wrote and performed the score for the fashionably British, Michael Caine led movie Alfie. He was an attraction. Other saxophonists of the day were reinventing Jazz in their own ways. In the sixties, the tradition was about to, pow, explode.
Ornette Coleman rattled like a Picasso.
Albert Ayler shouted in pain.
He shouted in joy.
Albert Ayler shouted, nonetheless.
Coltrane prayed.
The sound and definition of Jazz stretched beyond the popular imagination. Rock and Psychedelic music innovated in magical and spiritual ways. Listeners could dance to the gospel thanks to singers like Aretha Franklin and Sam Cooke, or sing along like they’re in an ashram with George Harrison or Jim Morrison.
At the end of the decade, America had changed drastically from the quaint Americana YMCA on Wabash.
The last president was murdered. His brother was murdered. Martin Luther King was murdered. Malcom X was murdered. Fred Hampton was murdered. Folks left the church and danced or tripped in their free time to a holy spirit. Violence and war overtook the American consciousness.
Vietnam was poisoned, tortured, and murdered by the American military. The youth, often nonwhite, was usurped by the failures of the vapid post-war American dream. Young Americans, sometimes idealist sometimes escapist, were tossed into the hot jungle soups of Southeast Asia.
The heat.
Steamy pornos lit up Times Square. Hollywood allowed white boys to say “fuck” in the cinemas, and get celebrated with Oscars at the same time. Meanwhile, Black people kept dying at alarming rates. The Nation of Islam, along with The Black Panther Party, two young and promising, though scrutinized, movements in favor of Black liberation failed to expand against the police.
Coltrane said goodbye for good, in 1967. At the end of the decade, Monk escaped reclusively in the mansions of Hackensack. Hawkins was gone by the seventies. Armstrong and Ellington were semi-retired, laurels and all. There was new stuff brewing, but the definition of “jazz,” its techniques and traditions, its laughter and rhythm, were dissipating. Eric Dolphy, Ornette Coleman, and Cecil Taylor took the genre out there. Max Roach, Nina Simone, and the Coltranes stunned jazz into a movement harnessed with social and civil power. Miles Davis built jazz a chamber, a museum of musicology that spanned from hot jazz to space-aged funk. From their waves, along with the remaining currents of bebop, the kids began to play faster and smarter.
A revolution was about to erupt. The feds were paranoid. White people voted in Nixon, for fuck’s sake. Roland Kirk saw the future with an endless selection of horns, but still no eyes.
The war was never going to end.
Sonny said goodbye.
2.
“there's newk in the picture of matisse who wields
a ten-foot brush as he lay in his deathbed”
A.B. Spellman
ON HEARING SONNY (“NEWK”) ROLLINS IN THE
PARK ON A HOT SUMMER NIGHT
It’s been a while since Sonny said goodbye. This may be the last goodbye. To listeners like me who have often escaped to Sonny’s free spirited sax for comfort in moments of immense loss or chaos, he has often whispered his bronze notes to cradle me into a feeling of comfort and ease, generally reserved for grandparents, parathas, or daydreams.
I discovered Sonny Rollins’ thanks to an appearance by Monk on his early record Moving Out. The saxophonist was twenty-six at the time, and in the mid-2000’s I was a lost, goofy nineteen year old Muslim working at a suburban chain store in Illinois. My ambitions at the time were modest, I dreamt of taking the train, day-in and day-out of the city with the hopes to catch an obscure movie at either Doc Films, the Siskel, or the Music Box.
Otherwise, I could be found at Odd Obsession in search of the longest, absurdist European theater recorded on celluloid.
Movies, and culture in general, provided my flat, overcast young adult years something indelible to chew on. School, direction, and professional ambition were lost out the window of Ammi’s egg white sedan. As the tortuous War on Terror scratched Islam off my Indian lineage like a lotto ticket stolen from the gas station, I discovered the charm of Sonny Rollins between the slow, multilinear notes from Monk’s heavy hands in the unforgettable love song “More Than You Know.”
It was in this song, inside my ovoid car, against the pale banal drizzle of industrial Joliet, where I recognized the contours of unconditional love. Sonny has redefined humor, art, and jazz for many people, but his ability to long for something greater is unprecedented.
Newk has perfected jazz, or its saxophone tradition, especially in its predominant tenor lens, to sunny delights. It’s likely that he hasn’t breathed a sour note since the late fifties.
When Sonny returned to jazz after the sixties, he was a different musician then the twenty-five year old first-generation jazz phenom from Sugar Hill. The same phenom who was in recovery, anonymous under the cold rambling El which loops around and across the pinstriped skyscrapers of Chicago.
In the early seventies, the now thirty something Sonny Rollins was something of an enigma. He didn’t fit the stereotypes of Jazz Musicians of the post-modern fashion. He was funny, but he wasn’t funky. He was romantic, but wasn’t sexy. He was spiritual, but he wasn’t openly Muslim or Buddhist. He loved to improvise, but he wasn’t white or European. He was a New Yorker, yet he liked to take it slow. He was arty, but he wasn’t an artiste.
Most importantly, the most enigmatic feature of Sonny’s talent is that he’s remained alive while so much of jazz has passed — so fast. Lightning burnt up Black genius, especially in the twentieth century, at an alarming speed. Legends of Robert Johnson, Charlie Parker, Billie Holiday, and Jimi Hendrix, alongside so many others, couldn’t make it past their thirties.
Sonny might as well be a miracle. He returned from his last sabbatical with the confidently stellar Sonny Rollins’ Next Album.
3.
“The signature of Mohammed. He used to draw it like his sword, complete,
without raising the blade from the ground.”
Guy de Cointet, Notebooks (1971)
The artist is not merely the breath of the instrumentalist, but the manifestation of their spirit. The totality of Sonny’s musical expression, at its finest, funniest, most flexible iteration eases into Next Album. The record displays the full range of Sonny’s character: humor, humility, humiliated, humongous, humanistic, hummus. The narrative of the track list is straightforward. Sonny does whatever he wants. In “Playin’ in the Yard,” Sonny has fun. In Poinciana, the patron saint of tenor sax plays the soprano and hits every pitch like he’s lucky. A warm, tropical comfort fittingly accompanies the floral song.
A son of the hot Caribbean, Sonny can’t escape the joyous waltz of Calypso. To enclose the slim, orchestrated sandwich, Next Album finishes with Newk’s torn melancholy, his romance “Skylark.” It’s a pitch he learned from Hawk, where the saxophonist exhales duende like they sing the flamenco.
He’s honest. There are no frills to the album. The cover says, “Music by a Black guy in the seventies.” Goatee, afro, side burns, et cetera. If this is a performance, it’s more Yves Klein than James Brown.
But it’s not a performance. This album contains the magic of jazz that can only be appreciated by outcast loners with limited access to the world beyond their reach.
In the early Spring of 2020, the Coronavirus overtook the United States of America. I was stuck inside of an organic grocery store, in the slanted part of Potrero Hill, where I stacked dry groceries on top of each other. The virus cast a panic over San Francisco just as the weather started to cool off. The Bay Area has an unusual climate pattern, thanks to its picturesque topography, which evolves into seasons that are unique to the The Golden City.
The beige misty months of February and March offered up the corona like free broth to the raging crowds lining up the grocery store. The wealthy knew about the virus since late January. They emptied the market, decimated it for weeks, after an ominously prophetic weekend in the beginning of February.
The Center for Disease Control called for peace. The businesses were afraid to lose customers, to death most likely.
The state recommended for us to avoid masks, to maintain a sense of calm before the biological storm.
Moodiness and terror lingered on the quiet streets with pockets of black, brown, or blue tents in bricolage. Litter everywhere, the grocery store remained packed with desperation, with terror, with people.
Within a week of lockdown, San Francisco was the first city to respond to the pandemic, I was in the ICU. Out of breath.
To much of my family and friends, I was the first loved one to catch the apocalyptic cold. I can remember the look on Habiba’s face, when she saw me sit down Indian style on the paved floor of a parking lot. All American cities are gray. Gasping for air, she recognized my state right away. The city was made of glass. Within 20 minutes, Habiba drove me to the emergency room with tears rolling over from her eyes. I did my best to cheer her up with photographs of George Clooney from his days in ER.
I remember the brief tear, with violence from my father’s bottomless heart, when he suddenly broke into white rage as soon as I delivered the nightmare, “I have the corona.”
Once again, I was the pathetic, reckless nobody he feared would die a naive death in this cruel cold contemporary country.
Habiba is a medical resident, she had warned me from the beginning that victims of covid are bound to die alone. The quarantines are so strict, the disease is so contagious, that as soon as I was tested and checked: I was all alone.
My worst fears could have crystallized right before my eyes, and I, much like so many other Black and Brown folks like me awaited my impending death in the cursed year. Alone.
It is easy to hate the present. My death could have bored me to death. In the deserted moment, with little motor recognition, I spun either The Bridge or A Night At The Village Vanguard on the telly. I don’t remember. Sonny breathed for me nonstop, over the next seventy two hours.
I was only, barely capable of letting Sonny breath for me.
When I was wiped with the corona, in bed and immobile, but thankfully not intubated, it was hard to focus on anything but the next breath. It was my only task, as a cadaver asleep.
The fuzzy movements of mortality are mystifying. I can attach meanings to my choice of Sonny like I can shoot fireworks in the sky. The plain matter is that Newk knows how to have fun, every time he shows up. In a country, where people like me are arranged to die alone, folks like Sonny are bound to show up.
If this was fiction, then I would have spun Next Album. There is something comforting about its simple and Sufist title. Even though Sonny has said goodbye to music and performance, he is old and ill and humankind is incapable of performing genius for large swaths of time, I always have his next album. And the next. And so on. It’s a good time.
Bismillah Earnest Harachandh is a fiction writer and poet from Karachi. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two cats.