Rollins keeps rollin'
At 80, a jazz master blows strong
By Jed Gottlieb
The Boston Herald
Friday, April 16, 2010
Rock stars are often blockheads. They want to get paid, party hearty and occasionally make some art.
Sonny Rollins is no rock star.
A link to the last great jazz age, tenor saxophonist colossus Rollins thinks deeply about his music. He also talks deeply about it.
Ahead of his 80th birthday celebration concert at Symphony Hall on Sunday, the contemporary of Miles Davis and John Coltrane got on the phone in his New York kitchen and chatted about his five-decade search for musical bliss.
What's your secret to keeping your chops up?
That's a question Maya Angelou asked me once. I was in California mixing a record and she came to meet me. She wanted to know just that: "What was my secret?" But until she asked me I'd never even thought of it. (Laughs) I'm just in the middle of the stream here trying to paddle. I haven't realized my goals musically. I'm still trying to improve myself and have certain things I think I can accomplish while I'm still here. I see myself as much in the middle of my art as I was when I was a 20-year-old, and still practice everyday like when I was young.
It's a little funny to think of someone with your talent running through scales.
I have certain rudimentary things I do constantly. Things as simple as scales and embouchure exercises. Then I just play whatever I feel like. I never have set regimen after I do my rudimentary things. I remember Max Roach said, "When you practice, you're cheating." (Laughs). No, a professional musician must practice, but I understand what he means. In jazz, you can't manufacture your ideas in practice and then go on the bandstand and play them. It doesn't work. Believe me, I've tried it. I've come up with clever ideas at home and tried to insert them into something on stage and it never works because the ideas are going by so fast that if I stop and try to find the proper place to insert this artificial idea it won't fit. The beauty of jazz is it completely comes from the subconscious in the moment.
Listening to older recordings, can you see a progression or evolution in your playing? Do you hear choices you made as a younger player that you would never make now?
I can, but it's not always as evolution. It's kind of disconcerting because you may take two steps forward and then take two steps back. So it's not a straight progression. But I never listen to my work. I had to listen to something I did from the 1950s recently for business reasons. I took as much as I could before I removed it in despair.
You thought it was that bad?
I saw everything that was wrong. But it wasn't just my playing, it was the style I was playing in. It was so narrow, so constricted.
After a century of jazz, is there new territory yet to be explored?
There is new territory. The melding of styles is a really fertile area that has to be explored. But it's difficult to do. Some people just want to hear Dixieland jazz, some people just want to hear experimental music. But it's part of my quest in jazz - which is the greatest music because of the freedom - to find this new ground. Sometimes when I'm playing I get close to it. But I want to get consistently close, to be able to come close to finding it at every concert.
What is the "it" you're forever searching for? A tone? A feeling? What is it that's still eluding you?
It's everything you said. It's tone, it's feeling, it's vibe, it's all of those things. And you know it when you hear it. It's like what the Supreme Court judge (Potter Stewart) said about pornography, "I don't know what it is, but I know it when I see it." (Laughs) That's a bad analogy, but you get it. It's something that can't be described, but when everyone hears it, they say, "Amen, that it!"
When you reach this cosmic point in concert, can the audience feel it?
When I'm there, they're there with me. When I'm playing well, even if I'm not close to this utopian playing, the audience is always with me. I may have a much higher standard than the audience because jazz is my life, but when everything is right with my playing they understand that because, really, we're all after the same thing.
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