Great column by noted Jazz writer Nat Hentoff:
Having known jazz musicians off the stand from my teens on, I was struck—contrasting with most of the adults I knew—by their dedication to their life’s work. Louis Armstrong, for example, distilled how he and the music were one in an interview long ago with Gil Millstein of the New York Times. Armstrong said, “When I pick up my horn, that’s all. The world’s behind me. I don’t feel no different about that horn now than I did when I was playing in New Orleans. That’s my living and my life. I love them notes. That’s why I try to make them right. Any part of the day, you’re liable to see me doing something toward playing that night. You got to live with that horn.”
I thought about that essence of the jazz calling when I heard a penetrating interview with Sonny Rollins on National Public Radio on April 28. It was by Howard Mandel, the seemingly tireless engine behind the Jazz Journalists Association and a valuable historian of the music. His conversation with Sonny ought to be anthologized.....
Sonny told Mandel: “If I’m doing a song, I practice it, I learn it. I learn the lyrics. I learn everything possible there is to learn about the physical piece of the composition or whatever it is I’m going after.”
But that preparation is only prologue to the surge of spontaneity that makes the jazz life so worthwhile. Once Sonny is on the bandstand or on a concert stage, he continued, “I don’t want to think about [all that]. I let the music play me. When I’m playing completely spontaneous, just something comes out of nowhere; that’s my best work.” ......
In the interview, Sonny went on to put into words why jazz musicians in their 80s and beyond never stop. “We’re about creation, thinking things out at the moment, like life is,” he said. “Life changes every minute. I mean, a different sunset every night. I mean, that’s what jazz is about.”
Or, as John Coltrane told me, “The music is the whole question of life itself.” And Charles Mingus: “I’m trying to play the truth of what I am. The reason it’s difficult is because I’m changing all the time. But I’m going to keep on getting through and finding out the kind of man I am through my music. That’s the one place I can be free.”
As for Sonny—keenly aware that jazz has to go beyond what he calls the “corporate culture” of past distribution of recordings—he has, as Mandel notes, “launched his own Web site with MP3s from his current album and video podcasts.” .....
Read the rest of the interview at : http://www.jazztimes.com/columns_and_features/final_chorus/
Interview on NPR with Sonny Rollins:
Recommended Cd's by Rollins: Saxophone Colossus, Thelonious Monk & Sonny Rollins
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