A Complaint

Okay, okay, okay, I get it. Jazz music isn't popular. To many, it's something that old people enjoy, to others it's easy-listening background music for quasi-sophisticated restaurants and lounges. The media assumes that none of their readers have any clue what the music is or who the performers are, and that even fewer care. Unfortunately, they're usually correct.   

Case in point: in today's NY Times news quiz, one of the questions was "The jazz legend Sonny Rollins died on Monday at 95. What instrument did he play?" The multiple choices were bass, drums, saxophone, trumpet, and xylophone. To put the question another way, the way jazz fans would put it, "What instrument did the Saxophone Colossus play?" But given the fact that the sax is the dominant instrument in jazz, the answer should be obvious to even the most casual reader. Still, 24% got it wrong. 

To put the assumed ignorance of jazz into perspective, another question in the same quiz, presumably on the same order of difficulty, was, "The New York Knicks are back in the NBA Finals for the first time in years. What was the No. 1 movie at the box office last time they reached the finals?" Not what year, not who was president, but what was the top-grossing movie at the time? If you ask me, a question of the same difficult as "What instrument did saxophonist Sonny Rollins play?" would be "The New York Knicks are back in the N.B.A. Finals for the first time in years. What sport do they play?"  By the way, the answer to the actual question is "Citizen Kane."

But that's not my complaint. The media photo editors, who obviously know nothing about jazz in general or Sonny Rollins in particular, all included recent photographs of the 95-year-old Rollins in their obits and stories about his passing, such as this one that popped up when you answered the question in the news quiz: 

Yes, that is Rollins, but that's not how he looked during the great majority of his 60-year performing career. But it is how those editors imagine his fans probably look, and the constant use of pictures of him in the last years of his life solidifies the impression in the popular imagination that he was some old geezer who tooted on a horn for your grandparents. Here he is in 1963, at probably the height of his popularity and celebrity, sporting a Mohawk a decade and a half before the look was popularized by punk rockers:

The same thing happened with Carla Bley when she passed away at age 87. The press predominantly ran the most recent pictures of her that they had on file, and the public was taught that she looked something like this:

Which is true. That's the performer I saw at Big Ears in 2023, but that's certainly not the one I saw in Boston's Copley Square in 1977, or at the Paradise Theater in '79. Back in her day, Carla was a babe. She got her start as a cigarette girl at Birdland. Cigarette girls, if you don't know, were attractive young women who sold cigarettes table to table at nightclubs in the '40s and '50s, often flirting with customers in the hopes of better tips. She was the leggy wife and muse to jazz pianist Paul Bley, and later the mini-skirted arranger and composer to large free-jazz ensembles led by second husband Michael Mantler, and then still later, the jazz-fusion bandleader performing on the rock-club circuit at places like, well, Boston's Paradise Theater. The Carla Bley of my memory looks more like this:

Now, at 72 years of age myself, I'm as opposed to ageism as anyone and agree that images of these artists in their later years are nothing to be ashamed of. But when all articles and obituaries only show the most recent images on file, it just reinforces negative stereotypes in the popular imagination of jazz and the age of its artists and fans. We're all dandelions, morphing from one form to another through life, but we can choose to remember some of our favorite dandelions in our favorite phases of theirs, and not necessarily in their last phase before the puffball was blown away. 

Sonny Rollins, R.I.P.

Legendary jazz musician Sonny Rollins has passed away, age 95. Impermanence is swift.

Rollins was the last surviving member of the infamous A Great Day in Harlem photograph, except possibly some of the children who photobombed the picture, and Sonny may well have outlived many of them.

Rollins was a tenor saxophone master with a great, full-bodied tone and an incredible ability to improvise beautiful melodic tunes, and his only problem was to have lived during the same timeframe as John Coltrane. Miles Davis famously picked Coltrane over Rollins for his first quartet, and Coltrane ushered in an era of new jazz where timbre and technique were more important than melody. A joke going around in the 1960s went, "Anyone know what happened to Sonny? I heard he got hit by a Trane."   

It was just Sonny's luck to have died the day before what would have been Miles' 100th birthday, and all the tributes and retrospectives on Miles' career and discography had already been written and recorded, ready to be published, released, and played today. 

Here's one of my favorite Rollins' performance, his cover of We Kiss In a Shadow, a Rogers and Hammerstein composition from The King and I, performed with Jimmy Garrison and Elvin Jones, Coltrane's rhythm section, recorded at Van Gelder Studio, home of Coltrane's most iconic albums, and released on Impulse! records, "the house that Trane built."  In other words, here he is filling in for Coltrane showing another direction that jazz could have gone, but instead he followed this 1966 recording with a six-year hiatus, visiting Jamaica and spending several months studying yoga, meditation, and Eastern philosophy at an ashram in India.

Things Have Got to Change, Part III

Where, oh where, are the protest songs of 2026? Don't tell me Rage Against the Machine - they're cool and all, but they were 1990s, not today, even if they're still together and performing. Bruce and Neal get political at times, but neither is channeling the rage or leading the people to a popular uprising. They're also both old.

At Big Ears 2026, jazz guitarist Marc Ribot led a group after a show to a nearby No Kings event, which is cool, but most people don't even know who Marc Ribot is (hint: he's not Mr. Robot or Marc Rebillet), and he's directing the people to other, sanctioned events, not leading the charge himself. And he's also old, too. 

In 1969, the Jefferson Airplane declared, "All your private property is target for your enemy," as direct an expression of Marxism as any at the height of their popularity (and incidentally of their profitability). And in case there was any ambiguity, their next line was "And your enemy is me."   

"We are forces of chaos and anarchy," they sang. "Everything they say we are, we are, and we are very proud of ourselves."  It's not subtle stuff. "We are all outlaws in the eyes of America," they continued. "In order to survive, we steal, cheat, lie, forge, fuck, hide, and deal. We are obscene, lawless, hideous, dangerous, dirty, violent . . . and young."

I haven't heard lyrics like that since The Clash. I don't understand a lot of rap lyrics these days so I'll give them the benefit of the doubt, but outside of that, I mostly hear self pity and complaints about society, but I don't hear calls for revolution, now, when we need it the most. Where's, say, the Antifa Orchestra or the Howard Zinn Memorial Band?  Who's singing Luigi Mangioni Blues or Burn the Ballroom Down? 

Leading the charge: In 2001, yes, 25 years ago, young Sara Menuck, the daughter of Godspeed and Silver Mount Zion guitarist Efrin, sang, "When we finally cross the barricades with the angels on our side, when we finally deny all the popular lies, when we finally let doubt and worry die - how will it feel?" (The Triumph of Our Tired Eyes from Born Into Trouble As the Sparks Fly Upward).  

We need someone to lead the charge across the barricades, to make some John Lewis "good trouble," but the problem may be, as Efrin himself sang in the same song right before Sara's lines, "Musicians are cowards."

Things Have Got to Change, Part II

 

Things Have Got to Change

Apparently, back in 1971, someone at Impulse! Records fucked up on the job. They posthumously issued John Coltrane's previously unreleased Sun Ship album, but managed to run at least one pressing of the album with Side Two of Archie Shepp's Things Have Got to Change as Side Two of the Coltrane album. 

To some ears, free jazz is free jazz and it all sounds alike, but there's really a huge, oceanic difference between what the John Coltrane Quartet was playing in 1965 (when Sun Ship was recorded) and what Shepp was doing in 1971. But anyway, there are still copies of Sun Ship out there with Things Have Got to Change as Side Two.

In 1975, one of my housemates, Bruce, owned a Chevy Vega with an eight-track player. As a side note, it was Bruce who first introduced me to the music of Terry Riley and Harry Partch, and hence minimalism and 20th Century composers, and was also instrumental in my awareness of avant-garde jazz and other "out there" forms of music. In any event, that misprinted version of Sun Ship managed to make it to the eight-track format - someone apparently used a mispressed vinyl of the album as the master for both the eight-track and cassette versions - and Bruce had unknowingly bought a "wrong" copy of the album for his Vega's eight-track player.

The first time I heard Sun Ship was riding around Long Island with Bruce in his Vega. Yes, we were the kind of guys that rode around in a 1975 Chevy Vega blaring John Coltrane in suburban  New York. But we had no idea about the pressing error and innocently assumed that Shepp's Change was something by Trane. The label incorrectly said Side Two contained the tracks Attaining and Ascent, and although I couldn't hear a break anywhere in Change indicating the start of a new track, that wasn't all that unusual for late-period Coltrane, when one song in a suite might flow seamlessly into the next. 

But what was unusual was the looseness of the music, all that percussion, the choruses of voices chanting "gotta change" and "goddammit," and even the subtle washes of electronic sounds. Coltrane had gotten that funky?, I wondered. That angry? Bruce and I concluded that's probably why the material never got released until after Trane's passing. 

So all my life, at least since 1975, I had always assumed that late in his life, John Coltrane had embraced a streetwise, anarchic style of revolutionary free jazz, a style that could only be heard on Side Two of Sun Ship. The trouble was, I could never find a copy of Sun Ship with that radical Side Two. By the time of the CD era, all versions of Sun Ship only contained the quartet tracks - no choruses, no electronics, no small army of percussionists. The MP3 era didn't have the mystery track either, and even all the voluminous box sets didn't provide an answer, nor did the streaming era.

Any time I asked Google about a 1960s or '70s free-jazz track with voices chanting a chorus of "goddammit," it would always tell me I was thinking of Nina Simone's Mississippi Goddamn, a great song to be sure but a completely different animal, not to mention no chanting.    

I was starting to question either my memory or my sanity. Was I just plain wrong, and while Bruce had a copy of Sun Ship, could the track I remembered be one of his other tapes? Could he have been playing a trick all along, switching the tapes when I wasn't looking? Or were we just so high (hey, it was the '70s, man) that we were "hearing" all those voices and electronic effects, but it wasn't on the tape? Okay, that might happen once, but every time? And just on Side Two? Not likely (but we were serious stoners back then). 

Last weekend, 50 years after the fact, I finally posed the question on Reddit as to what that mystery track was, and within an hour, someone posted a reply about the mispressing. I tracked down Shepp's Things Have Got to Change on Spotify and almost instantly recognized it as that long-lost "Coltrane" track. Oddly, while I'm familiar with much of Shepp's discography, I've somehow always managed to skip past the Change album. 

But mystery solved, sanity confirmed, and crisis averted. Someone at Impulse! had fucked up.

Jeff Parker ETA IVtet

Orcutt Shelly Miller

I could start a whole series on "Bands I Wanted to See at Big Ears but Missed" or just leave it at this one post as a late "New Music Friday" entry, but here's the latest from Orcutt Shelly Miller, covering Captain Beefheart's Hot Head with David Yow (The Jesus Lizard) on guest vocals.