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.
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."
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.
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.
This post should get us the rest of the way through the 2026 Big Ears sets that we saw this year. Most years, I don't finish a full recap of the festival, getting either bored or distracted about halfway through, so either I'm getting more disciplined or there's less going on in my life (or both!).
Also, I want to point out that these sets aren't the "also-rans," the mediocre to poor seeds and stems that I'm including just for the sake of completeness. Some of them, like Jeff Parker's Expansion Trio and the Patricia Brennan Septet, were among the best of the weekend, but just didn't fit in with the broad categories of the previous posts.
I might could have put Parker in with the SML post from two weeks ago, as Jeremiah Chiu, the synth player in SML, was a member of the trio, which also included drummer Ben Lumsdaine. I (sadly) missed Parker's ETA IVtet last year, and his spacey, grooved-out set this year by his Expansion Trio was as good a salve as any to make up for my loss.
The music of Parker is also as good an example as any of the continuing evolution of so-called jazz music. Jazz history has been marked by rebels and innovators, from Charlie Parker upending the swing era with bebop to Miles introducing cool jazz and modal forms to Coltrane opening things up to free jazz and the avan-garde to Miles revolutionizing the form again with electric instruments and jazz fusion. But jazz purists would want to freeze the history sometime in the 1970s and not want to recognize any innovations since then.
But look at other forms of music, from rock to hip-hop, that have continued to evolve and evolve significantly since then. No one expects hip hop to still be all "hip, hop, don't stop the rockin' to the bang-bang boogie." No one expects rock music to still sound like Billy Joel. Both forms have evolved in so many ways, but why not jazz? Why must it still sound like Duke Ellington or Dizzy Gillespie, like Charles Mingus or Sonny Rollins?
To be sure, that's not what Jeff Parker's about, but his music, while still undeniably "jazz," is moving in directions no one could have anticipated in 1975. The music is rhythmic and beat driven, melodic but not tied to song structure, free but not chaotic. It's centered around the electric guitar, not horns, but doesn't sound anything like Wes or Les. It's 2026 music, lovingly crafted and tastefully presented.
I also got to see another iconoclastic guitarist who defies any classification or genre - the legendary Fred Frith. There is no telling what to expect from Frith, and I for one didn't expect the notorious improviser to be playing primarily bass, accompanied by accordion, sax, and drums on carefully crafted compositions. I saw Frith a year or two ago at Big Ears improving with a table guitar along with Ikue Mori, and the galactic distance between that set and this is but a hint of the breadth of Frith's universe.
Speaking of guitars, I also caught a set of six guitars but not one single live musician, except for a technician keeping the set going. Lou Reed Drones was a longform, six-hour drone performance curated by Laurie Anderson of guitars from Reed’s collection arranged against a group of amplifiers so that their tuned feedback created a drone of ever-changing harmonics. The sound was deafeningly loud, far louder than this video sample suggests.
Although set in the same former Greyhound station as the SML performances, it was less than visually compelling - after you took in the arrangement, there wasn't much to see, but I hung around for some 15 minutes before wandering off to find something to eat. I'm still glad I stopped by, though.
Speaking of drone, the legendary Charlemagne Palestine gave a rare performance at Big Ears this year. I missed his organ recital, but caught his piano piece, where he performed an extended drone of repeated notes with changing overtones and harmonics. His piano and stage were covered by silk fabrics and stuffed animals in front of projections of his own abstract water-color artwork. The piece developed a hypnotic quality and the audience was as rapt and attentive as any I've been a part of.
One of my most anticipated sets was possibly Patricia Brennan's Septet. The vibraphonist, who I first encountered in Mary Halvorson's Amaryllis band, was joined by trumpeter Adam O’Farrill and saxophonists Mark Shim and Jon Irabagon (who I also saw with Brain Marsella's Imaginarium), along with a bass, a drummer, and a percussionist to give it all an Afro-Cuban flavor. My anticipation was high, and Brennan's high-energy and exciting performance more than met my expectations. This band swings and swings hard (even though it also sound nothing like what anyone might have imagined in 1975).
Finally, speaking of 1975, the festival concluded (for me at least) with a performance of something called the Miles Electric Band: Celebrating Miles Davis at 100. It was a large, at least ten-person, ensemble and reasonably recreated some of Miles' late 60's and early 70's compositions, although perhaps a tad too faithfully and without much apparent enthusiasm or passion. And why did they include an extended acoustic piano solo in a set of "Electric Miles?" This would have been an exciting discovery had I stumbled across them unexpectedly at some club, but as the final headlining act of Big Ears 2026, well, the festival had delivered far better all weekend.
Not to say I don't love the music of that period in Miles career. I do. And not to say the musicians weren't talented. They were. But it was a case of the whole being less than the sum of its parts, or possibly that after four days of outstanding musicality, I had become jaded.
And that was it! Four day, and my seventh year at the Festival. Looking forward to 2027!
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