Chapter 1: What was Sonny Rollins' impact on jazz music?
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This is Fresh Air. I'm David Bianculli. Tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins died Monday. He was 95 years old. For decades, he had been hailed as the greatest living jazz musician. Today, we're going to listen to Terry's 1994 interview with Sonny Rollins. But first, we have this appreciation from jazz historian Kevin Whitehead. He says no figure in jazz was more universally revered.
Wagon Wheels, old cowboy song written for Broadway's Ziegfeld Follies of 1934. It's from the album Way Out West, an excellent introduction to a few things that made Sonny Rollins great, like how the saxophone has thrived in the bare-bones trio format, which left him fully exposed. Also, the clarity of his best improvisations. When you have as much technique as Rollins, it's easy to overdo it.
But he leaves so much space, the effect is more like singing than showing off.
. . .
Wagon Wheels also speaks to Sonny Rollins' love of unlikely material. On Way Out West, he also does I'm an Old Cow Hand, just as he'd recently cut There's No Business Like Show Business and How Are Things in Glockomora. And then there's his imposing, sometimes garish sound.
Sonny's saxophone tone in his 1950s prime is as durable and flexible as steel-reinforced rubber, and he got plenty of mileage out of it.
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Chapter 2: How did Sonny Rollins describe his improvisational style?
. . . You can divide Sonny Rollins' career into three acts.
First came Rollins the searcher, the saxophone colossus of the 1950s, when he had one of the all-time jazz hot streaks, knocking out one classic album after another.
Chapter 3: What unique aspects of Rollins' music are highlighted in the tribute?
But in 1959, he began a two-year sabbatical from gigging to up his game. He practiced on the Williamsburg Bridge, blowing to the tugboats, an act so New York iconic Spike Lee restaged it in Mo' Better Blues. Coming back in the 60s, Rollins tried on new situations, a quartet with guitar, another with Ornette Coleman's sidemen, and a brassy big band. Plus, he wrote music for the film Alfie.
Sometimes his playing revealed a harder edge and harder rhythm that look ahead to his next phase. This is the 1965 Calypso, Hold'em Joe.
Hold'em Joe
Sonny Rollins' four-decade last act began after a longer sabbatical. In 1966, fed up with the music business, he stopped recording for six years. When he came back in the 70s, much had changed. He was now using electric instruments, which gave the band a rockier edge, but that may have also been a practical move. easier to tour with a bass guitar than an upright bass.
Rollins was gearing up for the long haul, conserving his energy for the stage. But also, his glorious, pliable tone had become more metallic and yackety as his solos became more riffy and groove-oriented. It was still exciting, but different. Sonny Rollins, 1981, on the Dolly Parton favorite, Here You Come Again. This latter-day music was designed to be more accessible.
Backing musicians came and went, but it hardly mattered. His old bands were gloriously interactive. Now they were the curtain behind the star, and Sonny, for his part, didn't hold back. It was the most big-hearted embrace of the public by a jazz horn player since Louis Armstrong. But where Pops had set solos, Rollins, the improviser, shared his musical thoughts in real time.
That made him famously self-critical, but the candor was brave no matter how it all turned out. And even skeptics went to his shows in case he'd have one of those inspired nights. He had a few, like in Boston four days after 9-11.
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And yet, with Sonny Rollins, as with Louis Armstrong, when it comes to their records, I tend to reach for the old classics, those first explosions of the creativity they'd later learn to measure out in more sensible doses to keep themselves from burning out. Sonny made it to 95 and performed into his 80s. For a guy who blazed so brightly early on, he paced himself well.
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Chapter 4: What were the key phases of Sonny Rollins' career?
We've been wanting to talk with you on the show for so long. Thank you so much for doing it. It's been wonderful.
Thank you. Rollins, it's worth noting, was the inspiration for a character in the long-running popular Fox cartoon series The Simpsons. The character is a musician known as Bleeding Gums Murphy, who, like Rollins, takes a sabbatical to practice nightly on a bridge. In 2013, Rollins himself made a guest appearance on the show in an episode titled Whiskey Business.
He plays himself, not Bleeding Gums Murphy. Young Lisa Simpson, who is a big jazz fan, is writing a letter of complaint because a music company has started taking advantage of artists and their catalogs by presenting them as performing holograms. Sonny Rollins visits Lisa in response, but eventually she realizes he's a hologram too.
Dear She Done Left Me Records, once again, I write protesting your holographic exploitation of blues icon Bleeding Gums Murphy. I call for a boycott and girlcott of your entire catalog until you... Sonny Rollins?
That's right, Lisa. And I'm here to beg you to stop writing those letters.
You're siding with record companies?
This isn't about money, Lisa. From Tupac Shakur to Dwight Eisenhower, holograms have introduced some of our leading dead people to a new audience of people with money. Resetting, resetting. From Tupac Shakur to Dwight Eisenhower.
You're a hologram, aren't you?
No. Resetting, resetting.
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Chapter 5: How did Rollins' personal struggles influence his music?
There were world premieres of blockbusters like The Da Vinci Code and X-Men The Last Stand. Terrible movies, but great photo ops. And near the end of the festival, I walked into a film I knew nothing about called Pan's Labyrinth and emerged knowing I'd seen a classic. This year's Cannes kicked off with a 20th anniversary screening of Pan's Labyrinth.
But otherwise, there wasn't much of that 2006-era razzle-dazzle. the major Hollywood studios tightened their belts and stayed home, perhaps with still-fresh memories of the stinging Cannes reception for the last Indiana Jones movie back in 2023. But there were stars here and there. Demi Moore and Stellan Skarsgård were on this year's jury.
Adam Driver and Miles Teller showed up for the world premiere of James Gray's terrific 1986 set crime drama, Paper Tiger. in which they play brothers who unwisely go into business with the Russian mob. Driver and Teller are outstanding, and Scarlett Johansson is heartbreakingly good as a family member forced to deal with the fallout.
Paper Tiger deserved a prize, but it left the festival empty-handed. Instead, the jury awarded The Palm Door to the gripping and sometimes infuriating small-town drama Fjord. It's the second palm win for the Romanian filmmaker, Cristian Mungiu. He won his first in 2007 for the movie Four Months, Three Weeks, and Two Days.
In Fjord, Sebastian Stan and Renata Reinsveig are almost unrecognizable as an evangelical Christian couple who have recently moved from Romania to a small Norwegian town with their five children. In this scene, they sing a hymn with their church friends.
At the cross, at the cross, where I first saw the light, and the burden of my heart rolled away. It was there by faith I received my sight, and now I am happy all the day.
When the couple are accused of child abuse, Fjord becomes a fierce battle between the forces of religious conservatism and secular liberalism. It may be set in Norway, but it's likely to resonate with American audiences when it opens later this year. I hope there will also be robust turnout for Minotaur, a perfectly chilled tale of adultery and murder that won the Grand Prix, or second place.
It's a remake of the 1969 Claude Chabrol drama La Femme Infidèle, this time set in Russia not long after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The director of Minotaur, Andrei Zvyagintsev, nearly died of COVID during the pandemic. and it was moving to see him back in Cannes with a film this powerful and uncompromising in its critique of the Putin regime.
One of the buzziest out-of-competition titles was Club Kid, a hugely enjoyable comedy directed by the actor, writer, comedian, and social media star Jordan Firstman. He plays a gay New York City club promoter who's sent reeling when he learns that he has a 10-year-old son. The result is basically a ketamine-laced version of every adult bonds-with-cute-kid movie you've ever seen.
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