Original subtitles

- Before a concert I try to meditate

Downloaded from YTS.MX

on what I have to do, I try to block out

Official YIFY movies site: YTS.MX

any extraneous thoughts.

I try to think about what it's going to be like,

I try to will the band to sound good.

I try to act in a positive way,

and I try to create a picture of what I hope

is going to happen on the stage.

So it's sort of a meditation, in a way,

prior to performing.

[upbeat jazz music]

[crowd applauding]

Of course, I was born here, number one, in Harlem,

and the great excitement here in New York, of course.

I always felt New York was the center of a lot of music,

at least during the time when I was growing up.

52nd Street was where everybody was playing

and I had a chance to

really hear some of the great musicians.

And you know, there's just the energy,

the wonderful energy that is in New York and nowhere else.

- My first memories of Sonny Rollins is when he

recorded with J.J Johnson for Prestige.

I had been hearing about him a little bit,

they kept saying there's this tenor player up town

who's really upsetting everybody

and I heard that some of the test pressings on this date

and was kind of impressed and was told about him

in the studio, they way he stood,

I guess he impressed this friend of mine

who had seen him and that he really assumed the very

planted stance and dug in and just blew.

I guess the first reaction to hearing him in person was,

and also on that record was that,

here was a guy who had heard Charlie Parker

and was putting that kind of knowledge

into the tenor saxophone differently, say,

than Dexter Gordon, who was acknowledged to be the first

to translate Charlie Parker's mode to the tenor.

Because at that time, people were very rigid and they said,

"Oh yes, you can sound like that on alto, like Bird,

"but you can't play like that on tenor."

And each little step of the way had to be won

in people's minds.

Sonny, even in his rawest period, in that first period

when a lot of critics were putting him down,

I felt he had something very, very personal and unique

to say and certainly he was not the polished Sonny Rollins

that he would become after the Chicago period

and coming back with Max Roach and Clifford Brown

and really turning everyone's heads arounds,

that's when he really established himself.

But I feel all through the earlier period,

'51 through '53, he played a lot of valuable music

as we know from listening to the records.

- I started listening to Sonny in 1965 and 1966,

and the thing that hit me the most

was the extraordinary personal authority of the man

in the way he played, in the way he addressed the audience,

in the way he addressed the piece of music.

The incident at Saugerties where he jumped off the cliff

is not uncharacteristic of Sonny because he always had

a very strong visual sense, he's a performer who likes to

keep the audience entertained.

I remember the one time there was a concert in '66

called Titans of the Tenor that he shared a bill on

with Coleman Hawkins, Zoot Sims, and John Coltrane,

and Dave Lampert was the MC and he said,

"And now Sonny Rollins,"

and a much shorter fellow walked out,

it was Yusef Lateef, whom Sonny had just convinced

to come along for the gig, who was not billed,

and after Yusef played several chords,

Sonny walked out, all in black,

black Keds sneakers, black pants, black T-shirt,

walked straight to the back of the stage,

and started to improvise chords behind Lateef

and then came up for, I think he was playing

Hold 'Em Joe with Calypso,

and then went into a whole incredible

15, 20 minute solo thing.

And the control of the horn, the time,

the phrasing, everything about it

just held you in your seat.

And so even if you were a novice, as I was at that time,

there was something about Rollins that was so compelling

that you understood him.

I never understood, I used to see reviews

where people would talk about him being

too complex or intellectual

and the great thing about Rollins

is that he is a communicator, he always tells a story.

I think he's the most compelling tenor saxophonist

we have right now.

- Whenever talking about Sonny Rollins

I almost feel the need to preface anything I might say

by pointing out that I consider him to be

the greatest living jazz improvisor.

Of course, that puts the standards higher

by which you have to judge Sonny Rollins

and you can only imagine the standards

by which he must judge himself.

Play time for us is work time for him.

We just go to enjoy his concerts.

To him it means something else, something much greater

seems to be a stake and I think some of that tension

communicates itself to an audience

and it becomes pretty fascinating.

- I dropped out of the jazz scene in 1959

which was more well known,

that was the bridge period

when I practiced on the bridge for a while.

As you know, I'm always trying to improve myself

and I'm partly a self-taught musician

and all my career I've been trying to improve my craft.

So at that point I had dropped out

and figured I'd stay away from music

and the music scene and everybody

and just try to improve my playing

and I studied piano for it again.

And so, that was a very important period,

a publicized period.

I had been practicing on the bridge and I think

a jazz writer had seen us on the bridge,

seen me on the bridge practicing

and he wrote a little story about it

and it became famous, infamous Sonny Rollins

practicing alone on the bridge.

So when I finally came back to the jazz scene

and I came back to appearing,

I was appearing in a night club and I made my debut again,

I recorded for RCA at that time and we thought,

well it would be apropos if we named

the album The Bridge, or at least some songs in the album.

- Although I never saw Sonny Rollins

practicing on the bridge,

I did see him blowing into a little closet

in his apartment on Grand Street,

he used that to muffle the sound

so he wouldn't bother anybody and he could play at any hour.

He also had a board on which he did exercises.

He was drinking orange juice, he was into Rosicrucianism,

and a complete contrast from the guy who had been

strung out a few years earlier.

So he did a complete about-face, he started really working

on physical fitness and he knew that in order to be

a tenor player, to have the endurance

to play that instrument, that he had to be in shape

and he talked about this.

- Any instrument eventually gets to be a part

of the person playing it, it's a very personal thing.

And the saxophone is closer to me,

I hate to say it's almost closer than Lucille.

But she knows this already so she's not jealous.

Before I was married to Lucille, though,

I did have problems with girlfriends

and my saxophone though, I must say that.

And one of them broke up my saxophone at one time

when she was mad at me.

I was playing a very important job

at the Five spot with Mingus and a lot of people.

But the saxophone is very close to you

and it's a very delicate instrument

and the slightest thing can change the

nuance that you put into it.

So it can drive you crazy.

It can drive you crazy because even if you know what

you want to play, sometimes it doesn't come out

because of the differences in the horn

and it might not be working exactly right

or something like that.

So it's a very close relationship.

- Obviously I think he's important.

And just as obviously, I have a hard time explaining why

to a general audience, why he is so important.

It's almost gotta be accepted.

In one sense, he's never been as influential

at any given period as say, Miles Davis,

well, as Miles Davis has been throughout

Miles Davis' whole career.

But he's never been as important as Miles,

he's never been as influential as Coletrane was

in the mid to late '60s,

or Ornette Coleman during much of that same time.

And I think one of the reasons is he's never,

unlike them, he never formed the band in his own image.

He's never been successful at doing that.

And in a way, that almost enhances his appeal,

that lack of context.

It's just Sonny Rollins as the single most excellent

standard of jazz you can possibly imagine.

- Jazz is a music that's made be people playing together

but the master improvisers are always the ones

who set the tone, they take the lead,

the bring everyone in around them

and Sonny Rollins is someone who has listened

to all the great players before him

and come up with something of his own

and that's the way the music moves along.

His tone is so personal,

that deep sound of his is like no other saxophonist.

His sense of time, the rhythmic displacement,

his pauses, his rests, the way he then comes

rushing up from behind the beat.

His ability to play at length

and still come up with interesting ideas

is something that stands out in my mind.

- One of the most important aspects of Sonny's influence

on jazz is his ability to improvise

an extended solo and keep your attention

and not just go through the cycle of choruses and chords.

I guess the first examples were, again,

an unlikely song, Irving Berlin's

There's No Business Like Show Business,

and There Are Such Things

which has a a terrific cadenza at the end.

And he figured out how to alternate the chorus

and the verse in such a way

to constantly keep you a little bit off balance

while you're listening to the performance.

And then he developed this subsequent record

with a piece called Blue 7,

and in writing about that I'd,

Gunther Schuller coined the phrase thematic improvisation,

well he meant by that was that Sonny will take a theme

and he will use the melody to govern

the improvisational ideas that follow rather than simply

playing rote on the chord changes.

And actually, Rollins has a lot of different ways

that he organizes improvisations

but the end product is that combining them together

he manages to sustain interest for say,

five, six choruses,

10, 12 minutes in a way that very few improvisers

have ever been able to do.

And it never becomes just a self-indulgent howl

or a kind of emotional outpouring.

It's always logical,

it's always a kind of Aristotelian perfection

of beginning and a middle and an end

and he takes you someplace and you know where he's going.

One of the pitfalls of that kind of playing

is that with Sonny, as I mentioned earlier,

there's no hiding for him.

You always know when he's playing very well

and when he's not because it's all right there

on the plate for you.

- Whenever I try to create anything, solos when I'm playing,

what I'm basically trying to do is to blot out my mind

as much as possible.

And of course I've already learned the material,

so after learning the material

then I try to blot out my mind and just

let it flow by itself.

So I try not to really think too much about what I'm playing

when I'm soloing.

So I sorta have the structure already

and then I just try to create and let it come by itself.

[applauding]

[audience applauding]

- At certain points during my playing I leave the stage.

Sometimes I go out into the audience

and I get feedback from the audience.

They stimulate me to do more

and to get into different areas.

And this is sort of what I had in mind

when I was doing that concert.

I figured that I would leave the stage,

jump down off of the stage and then come back onto stage.

And at first I said no, I looked and I figured

it might be too steep but I thought I could manipulate it

and I tried, at first I didn't.

And it was unfortunate because I did sustain a broken heel.

But I kept playing and I was very happy about that

and I was happy that a lot of the people didn't realize

that I was actually hurt or anything

and they thought it was just a part of the performance.

- At the time that Sonny came along,

jazz was grappling with the problem of standards

and how to play them and what to do to find new material.

The previous generation, Parker and Gillespie had taken

a lot of standard tunes and written their own chords

and their own melodies and added substitute chords

to the original chord progressions.

Rollins went back and found all kinds of pieces

that jazz musicians did not know what to do with

or would not have known what to do with

if he hadn't played them.

Things like Jolson's songs and I'm an Old Cow Hand,

Toot Toot Tootsie and all kinds of ballads

and he made them credible as music, let alone as jazz music.

He proved, and Miles Davis is someone else who did this,

that if you find the right tempo, the right attack,

the right approach for a piece of music,

you can make it work for you.

And so Rollins, even at the height of free jazz,

never had to turn away from that.

The whole standards record, he did a lot of those standards,

weren't really standards until he brought them back

into the jazz meilleur.

- Right, he one time described it as,

I was starting to do a list of them,

and he said, he named a few others and he said,

"Songs no one ever recorded before

"and no one will ever record again."

And as somebody else pointed out to me

when I told that to them,

of course they never record them again,

it's because Sonny has made the definitive versions.

It'd be crazy to record some of those songs again.

- Well, I met Lucille in Chicago

when I was playing Max Roach's group.

And Lucille was a friend of a friend of mine,

actually it was a musician that I was rehearsing with

at the time, and this musician had a girlfriend

who was a girlfriend of Lucille's so they both

got together, I think,

and came down to see us play some place.

- The same girl or woman that Sonny talked about

who was my friend had told me a lot about Sonny.

She sort of wanted us to meet.

And when I met him I knew,

I knew right away

that this was going to be something special.

I don't believe he did but I did.

And I was determined that this was the guy.

She told me not to do this because she said

you're gonna get hurt and don't get involved.

Just have a good time but don't get involved.

But I did. [laughs]

I did the booking for a long time.

Now I just do the managing and occasional booking.

- Occasionally booking.

- But I love it.

And the producing came about because I was always

involved anyway and starting about '78,

there was a particularly difficult record,

the Don't Stop the Carnival album,

which was a...

There were great problems with that album

and Sonny was reluctant to go in the studio to mix it

so Orrin and I, Orrin Keepnews,

who was Sonny's producer at that time.

- [Sonny] At that time, yeah.

- Decided that if Sonny would let us we would mix it

to spare him.

And I think he was sort of at the point,

he said, "Okay, go ahead."

And so then it just changed from there.

And finally we decided that we wanted to do everything

our own way instead of having anybody else

to say do this this way or this way or this way,

we wanted to do it the way

that was most comfortable for Sonny.

And it wasn't anything against Orrin

because we're still friends but it was

just we wanted to do it all our way.

- Sonny Rollins on records is very often not

the Sonny Rollins that we hear live.

When I first started reading jazz criticism

and listening to the records, I remember a critic reviewing

the recording he made for RCA in the early '60s of

If Ever I Would Leave You and saying it's a good record

but it certainly can't compare with the extraordinary

performance he gave at such and such a place.

And I thought this is remarkable.

It seemed to me, I was very naive of course,

and I thought it's amazing that they wouldn't keep

doing takes until they got something as good.

But really that's been a constant throughout his career.

We all have memories of some To a Wild Rose that he played

that we'll never forget and the version on the record

isn't quite up to that.

Every time for a long time in the mid-'70s

whenever I reviewed Sonny in concert

I would get letters from people around the country

telling me that I was nuts.

How can you compare the latest Sonny Rollins record

with Way Out West or Saxophone Colossus or Workout?

And I would always tell them you have to see him live.

And then finally in late '70s,

or I guess it was maybe the early '80s,

Fantasy put out Don't Stop the Carnival

and it's got two performances on it,

Silver City and Autumn Nocturne

that are among the great Rollins masterpieces.

And two of the people who had written me those letters

wrote me back and said, "Just heard that record,

"now I understand what you were talking about."

So, Rollins really is the ultimate example of a musician

who proves the old adage about jazz

which is that the music is very much a process of

communication between a player and the audience

and sometimes for Sonny it just does not happen

when he's playing to a glass booth.

- In his defense though, Gary,

don't you think the records are getting better?

- Oh yes, I'm glad you said that.

- [Francis] He's abandoned that approach.

Not bringing in Donald Byrd or whomever.

- Ever since Sonny and Lucille started producing themselves,

I think the records have gotten better.

- I get very angry and I get these nice fantasies.

I think I told you of having a jazz critic up to

a 39th floor apartment and telling him

to look out the window and just step further, further.

I have very nice fantasies.

[speaking Japanese]

[banging drums]

- I've always wanted, actually,

to work in different musical environments.

The opportunity to do this piece came about

through my sponsors here in Japan.

And they asked me would I like to do an orchestral piece

this time around.

So of course I said I'd love to do it.

I've never done anything quite like this before

and because of that, of course,

I sought the help of a good friend of mine,

old musical companion of mine, Heikki Sarmanto.

- I was in South America doing some playing

and I came back to Helsinki,

I flew first to New York and stayed there one day.

And I was trying to call my old friend Sonny Rollins

but I couldn't reach him in New York.

I spent there only one night and then I commuted back home

to Helsinki and as I walk into my apartment

with all the luggage in my hand, the phone rings.

And guess who it is?

It's Sonny.

And Sonny says, "I have this thing in Japan.

"Would you be interested?"

[piano music]

- The themes were mine.

I labored over them for some time

trying to come up with what would sound

proper in this context.

And I asked Heikki to orchestrate them for me

and to also conduct the orchestra for me.

[singing]

- And back to the beginning.

And there the trumpets are beginning this letter here.

Trumpets are coming in.

[singing]

While that's coming, the trumpets are coming in.

[singing]

Very Spanish feeling.

[Heikki mumbles]

[singing]

Then we go to that theme.

[singing]

That's it, the rest right?

One very important thing is that those ideas

he had originally created, those little thematic patterns,

they were so incredibly strong, melodic,

very meaningful melodies.

They were the seed for this whole piece.

If you have even a tiny little thematic pattern,

just a couple of bars, but if it's really good, strong,

original line, from that you can make

a whole big tree grow up.

- I have been called

a spontaneous orchestrator and so on.

Of course this is not a spontaneous orchestration

in that sense but I hope to bring some of those qualities

to this piece in that I will still be improvising myself

on many sections of it.

No two performances of this concerto will be alike.

And in that sense, it will be true to what I'm about.

It is very much structured.

And what will be different will be my relation

to the structure, each time will be different.

- I put them all together because we all have to play it.

That should be it because

they keep the whole thing together.

- They need a little soft-- - Yeah, a little soft there.

I think it's going to be a dynamite concert.

[laughs]

Probably like most premieres,

it's not gonna be technically finished yet

but it will have the first performance excitement.

- I'm actually quite excited about it

and looking forward to it.

[dramatic orchestral music]

When I first came to Japan sometime ago

I was very pleased to find that the Japanese fans

were very much aware of the birth dates

and the history of all of the jazz musicians,

myself included.

And I was very much excited about that.

And I find that they're a very good audience.

Very fine audience.

They take their music very seriously.

They keep up with everything that's happening,

all the latest developments in the music.

- These musicians here in the symphony orchestra,

they are just amazingly professional.

It's a very difficult piece of music, my goodness,

and they have never been playing this type of music

because frankly, I have never heard this type of piece

being written for symphony orchestra.

So this whole experience was very new for all of us,

for Sonny, myself and the orchestra.

- I try to always

inject in my work with a

spiritual quality, it sounds kind of grandiose

to put it in that way but...

I have studied Zen in Japan here.

I did study.

I studied yoga in India.

Of course, I was born a Christian in the United States

and I found elements of all these religions

that are quite similar in many ways.

So, philosophy, religion, spirituality,

all these things, it's never very far away from

what I'm doing at any time.

And I'm sure that when I'm playing here in Japan

that's the case as it is when I'm playing

in the United States and other parts of the world.

[dramatic orchestral music]

[audience applauding]

My parents come from the Caribbean area of the world,

the islands, and

it might be significant that Japan of course is an island.

And on our last trip to Japan, there's an area of Japan

near Hiroshima and we were traveling from one part

of Japan to another and we were nearing Hiroshima

and I happened to, it was striking the resemblance

between the island and the area in the Caribbean,

it was very much similar.

And it never really occurred to me until then but

it so happened that after that, not too long after that,

a Japanese friend of mine brought up the fact that

perhaps this is the reason why I'm so liked in Japan

because the island connection is there

in some mysterious way.

So being a guy that's kind of mysterious myself,

I thought hey, it's alright, why not?

So I'm all for it if that's happening.

I've been here now, this will be my twelfth time

that I've been in Japan for a tour.

So I think the Japanese people like me

and I like the Japanese people.

I like all people, I consider myself like most

jazz musicians do as diplomats of course and ambassadors

for the United States and we're usually treated quite well

around the world and so I take my job in that respect

quite seriously.

And I find that I've been accepted here by the Japanese

and I also accept them and like them quite a great deal.

[audience applauding]

I'm not that well-known.

I'm not the most famous person in the world

so a lot of places where we play,

people don't know anything about me at all.

I have played places where I play in front of people

that really don't know anything about me.

So in a way, when I'm presented as the greatest

or one of the greatest or something like that,

it gives me a little leeway and people are not quite so

hostile and judging of me.

So I'm able to sort of walk in and feel a little more

able to lead into things in a more natural way

instead of really having to

prove everything I play every minute that I play it.

I don't feel I'm the greatest anything,

I still feel I'm a developing musician

so as far as I'm concerned I'm still

proving it to myself all the time,

but it's good when I don't have to prove it to audiences.

- One thing I'd like to say about Sonny,

and we haven't touched on it, is his marvelous

interpretation of his West Indian heritage

and the way he plays those kind of songs.

And I remember being down in Saint Thomas for the first time

and this was after Sonny

had done the song called St. Thomas,

and walking along the street one night

passing under a window where there was a dance going on

and the saxophone player in that band down there,

who was not a jazz band, they were playing Calypso,

but the sound that he got was exactly the sound

that Sonny can get when he wants to duplicate that style

in addition to doing a lot of other things

with the improvisation on something like

Don't Stop the Carnival or Hold 'Em Joe.

- There was a time in my career when I thought that my

soloing and my playing would be able to turn

the world around.

I'd be able to change politics and influence things

for the better.

I don't have these illusions anymore.

Now, all I want to do is to maybe bring

enjoyment to myself and enjoyment to those people that

appreciate a little bit of my art and what I'm doing.

And I think that just being able to do that is plenty.

- To me, and people could say I'm not objective,

I feel his playing is much stronger and more beautiful now

than it's ever been.

I think not only, and I'm not talking just technically,

but I think because he's changed as a person over the years

and I sense more, and somebody else commented on this

the other day so it's not just me,

that there's now more warmth and more feeling

and more depth than ever in his playing.

And I've never heard him play better

and I honestly mean that.

And I'm in awe of his playing aside from loving him

as my husband, I think he's spectacular.

[audience applauding]

[audience cheering]