Outside Counsel

 Sometimes when reading a review of a biography I run across the reviewer saying something like, "this is what all future biographies of this person will be built on." I used to wonder why future biographies would be necessary, but Aidan Levy's Sonny Rollins bio has given me an answer. Saxophone Colossus is an impressive feat of research and scholarship, meticulously researched and documented- but in some ways it feels like it is inside-out. The main text details every gig, frequently down to what Rollins wore, but the best quotes from his sidemen, and the contemporary reviews of his recordings, and a lot of Rollins' own words are found in the footnotes. There's a lot that seems missing, too. More photographs would have been welcome. The footnotes are off-shored to Dropbox. Why not more pix there? A comprehensive discography would have been useful. But mainly what I went into it wanting was the answer to a question: what made the guy who wrote Freedom Suite,  and played on Brilliant Corners and all the rest decide that he wanted to become Grover Washington, Jr?

Gary Giddins interviewed George Benson once, and Benson defended his decision to record pop stuff because he was a professional who wanted to sell records- and I get that. "Selling out" is a value judgment that frequently comes from a place of privilege- if Chevy wants to buy your song to sell pickup trucks you haven't done a damn thing wrong- you've won. So did Sonny Rollins win? I'd like to know if he made money on things like The Way I Feel. In terms of sales how did it compare with, say, Miles Davis' Water Babies,  released the same year? Herbie Hancock was in his Headhunter's period-  how were his sales? Weather Report's Heavy Weather came out in 1977. I'm not a big fan of that phase of Wayne Shorter's career, but it'd be interesting to compare sales. Rollins was touring a fair bit in this period- was ha making most of his income from festivals and college appearances or record sales? 

I can certainly hear how a Rollins show would have been fun to hear- he plays with power, and as Robert Christgau says in his review of the Giddins-curated Silver City anthology of the Milestone recordings, "[Rollins uses the] entire vocabulary of the saxophone, from follow-the-notes melody reproduction to squeaks and blats that know no tonal referent, as a sound-palette that is its own reason for being." Giddins and Christgau are my go-to critics and they thought Silver City was just swell, but I'm mostly not hearing it, and Saxophone Colossus doesn't really inform me as to why.

// posted by Bill @ 12:18 PM