Sonny Rollins: Audio Interview with Ira Gitler, 2 of 3, plus an Article for All

On April 26, 1994, jazz journalist and historian Ira Gitler interviewed Sonny Rollins before an audience of student and faculty musicians at the Manhattan School of Music. The recording of that event has never before been heard. We heard Part One last time (see the Index). Today we’ll hear the second of three parts.

At the outset, Ira asks about Sonny’s interest in songs that appeared in movies. At 2:22, Sonny discusses his exposure to calypso through his family. Ira asks him at 4:18 about his penchant for inserting quotations of other songs in his solos. The topic of long solos comes up at 6:34, followed by a discussion of performing alone on the sax, without a rhythm section. Sonny talks about the current scene and the future at 11:30. At 15:40 they take questions from the audience, starting with one about practicing and developing one’s own style. At 18:12 there is an 18-second gap while the tape is flipped over, so keep listening—when the audio returns, Rollins is saying that it’s good to practice with someone else. (As we’ll see in another essay, that was important to Coltrane too.) At 18:45, trumpeter Booker Little is the topic. The question at 21:55 until the end of this segment is about how much Sonny pre-plans his solos, and the answer of course is that he doesn’t. Okay, let’s listen:

But, in his answers Sonny is not really sharing the full details of how and what he practices, and you can even hear him skirting around the subject a bit, what we call “hemming and hawing” (as in saying “ahem”). In his private music notebooks, which are now housed with the rest of his archives at the Schomburg branch of the New York Public Library, Sonny notated and analyzed many music exercises over the years. Skidmore music professor Ben Givan, one of the best jazz scholars of today and a subscriber to this series, has taken the time to go through these notebooks and has written a detailed and perceptive overview of their contents. Ben’s analysis is freely available at this link.

Next time, we’ll hear the rest of the Rollins interview.

All the best,
Lewis

P.S. Thanks for help with this post to bassist David Perrott, my former grad student and now a bass repair expert/luthier in the N.Y.C. area.