Saxophone Colossus - The Life And Music Of Sonny Rollins

[Dan Gould]

7 hours ago, ghost of miles said:

30 pages in and greatly enjoying it so far. I love Sonny’s expressions of admiration for Louis Jordan (pg 22-23), and there’s a hilarious story about Sonny interrupting a lengthy dinnertime grace. Also a sort of theatrical/cosmic screenplay description from Sonny of why and how he fell in love with the saxophone. For such a big book Levy narrates and writes with a brisk economical pace—he nicely evokes the world and culture of early-20th-century Harlem that shaped Sonny. 

Curious if there's any mention of Percy other than a cursory "among others" kind of thing about his early playing/gigging. 

[Big Beat Steve]

10 hours ago, ghost of miles said:

A bit of a bummer that the footnotes can only be accessed online (since I’m the kind of nerdy reader who goes down footnote rabbit-holes), but no quibble if that move allowed Levy to keep more of the story in the book…

Ouch ... now that's a new method I would not have expected ... I suppose an easily follow-upable link is provided in the book?
I already see myself printing the footnotes out and filing them with the book (which should be here by about Jan. 3). I am like you in that respect - I find footnotes are part of the essence of most books and they often touch on things where I've wondered why and how the author did not find them important enough to include them in the main text.
Though I understand not every author or publisher would want the footnotes on the relevant pages (particularly if this would mean 1/2 page of text plus 1/2 page of footnotes throughout the entire book - there ARE books like that ...) but on the other hand having to leaf constantly between the main text and the notes at the end of the book can become a real nuisance too (I've worked my way through a music book like that recently).
Wait and see ...

Edited December 13, 2022 by Big Beat Steve

[ghost of miles]

4 hours ago, Dan Gould said:

Curious if there's any mention of Percy other than a cursory "among others" kind of thing about his early playing/gigging. 

The only indexed mention of France comes in a passage on pg 48 right before my stopping point last night:

”Most of what Sonny learned about music at Franklin came from his peers, many of whom passed through the school. Among them were tenor saxophonist Percy France and drummer Sonny Payne; trumpeter Red DiStefano and pianist Elmo Hope attended earlier at the old Franklin building. Pianist Walter Bishop Jr had been a student there but, by the time Sonny arrived, had dropped out to join Buddy Brown’s band playing taxi dances. ‘I used to go to Gilly(Coggins)’ house after school and get him to teach me stuff,” Sonny recalled of the pianist, who was six years older. “He (didn’t) want to get into the… XYZ’s of music, but I got something from him anyway.’”

3 hours ago, Big Beat Steve said:

Ouch ... now that's a new method I would not have expected ... I suppose an easily follow-upable link is provided in the book?
I already see myself printing the footnotes out and filing them with the book (which should be here by about Jan. 3). I am like you in that respect - I find footnotes are part of the essence of most books and they often touch on things where I've wondered why and how the author did not find them important enough to include them in the main text.
Though I understand not every author or publisher would want the footnotes on the relevant pages (particularly if this would mean 1/2 page of text plus 1/2 page of footnotes throughout the entire book - there ARE books like that ...) but on the other hand having to leaf constantly between the main text and the notes at the end of the book can become a real nuisance too (I've worked my way through a music book like that recently).
Wait and see ...

The link listed on pg 727 doesn’t seem to be operative at the moment, but I found a link to the PDF (which can be downloaded) on Hachette’s website:

Saxophone Colossus notes

Robin D.G. Kelley’s Monk bio had a lot of interesting material in the footnotes, iirc. Just glanced at the book itself and Kelley’s notes take up exactly 100 pages.

EDIT: Holy crap, I just looked at the PDF of Levy’s notes, and they run to 414 pages. 😯 That’s a whole other book!

 

Edited December 13, 2022 by ghost of miles

[mjzee]

416 pages of footnotes!?!  Impressive!

Is Sonny still working on his autobiography, or is this in lieu of that?

[ghost of miles]

Dan, see pg 24 note 32 at the PDF link above. It includes Sonny’s quote about Percy from your website and your website’s address.

[AllenLowe]

Percy talked about Coggins a lot; at the time Coggins was playing in a place down in the village, where I only caught him once. His late work was terrific, very original.

those notes are formidable; when I first sent Devilin' Tune out for one of its many rejections, one editor who turned it down complained I didn't have enough footnotes, though I had hundreds. It was maddening.

Aidan, as I've said, is really smart. 700+pages is a lot. I have to admit that in books like this I tend to skip the sections on the early years, which I think often are dragged down by too much research. But he clearly knows the way around this subject (though I would avoid one source cited, Farah Jasmine Griffin, like the plague. She's a classic tenured know-nothing).

Edited December 13, 2022 by AllenLowe

[Dan Gould]

1 hour ago, ghost of miles said:

Dan, see pg 24 note 32 at the PDF link above. It includes Sonny’s quote about Percy from your website and your website’s address.

I just saw this! Awesome! And thank you.

[Big Beat Steve]

Thaks a lot for the download link, Ghost!

But 416 pages of footnotes?
That Is a lot! Actually by conventional book layout criteria, this would make it a 1200-page tome!! One that would indeed be almost a case of 50% text and 50% footnotes on many, many pages ...

And no ... on second thought, making a printout of the PDF would be unwieldy, to put it mildly .... This would indeed yield another book ...

[ghost of miles]

26 minutes ago, Big Beat Steve said:

Thaks a lot for the download link, Ghost!

But 416 pages of footnotes?
That Is a lot! Actually by conventional book layout criteria, this would make it a 1200-page tome!! One that would indeed be almost a case of 50% text and 50% footnotes on many, many pages ...

And no ... on second thought, making a printout of the PDF would be unwieldy, to put it mildly .... This would indeed yield another book ...

I'm thinking that I may just keep the PDF open on my cellphone while I'm reading the book.  Doesn't match the permanence and convenience of having the notes in the book itself, but I can understand why they decided not to opt for a 1200-page volume.  (Does anybody here besides guilty-as-charged-me happen to have the "extended special edition" of the first entry in Mark Lewisohn's in-progress Tune In Beatles bio?  That's a "tome" so massive it had to be split into two books!)

1 hour ago, Dan Gould said:

I just saw this! Awesome! And thank you.

So glad your website was credited!  More such references to come, I'm sure, given the wealth of jazz history that you pulled together there.  

[felser]

Book is $22.79 at Amazon today, due to a $5.64 coupon they are offering.  I just ordered. 

[jlhoots]

1 hour ago, felser said:

Book is $22.79 at Amazon today, due to a $5.64 coupon they are offering.  I just ordered. 

I used that coupon too.

[medjuck]

2 hours ago, jlhoots said:

I used that coupon too.

ditto

[Big Beat Steve]

10 hours ago, felser said:

Book is $22.79 at Amazon today, due to a $5.64 coupon they are offering.  I just ordered. 

What I've been wondering those past few days is - what would the price have been if that massive tome had been published by Scarecrow Press? $199.95? 😄

[ghost of miles]

Terrible and maddening what happened to Sonny's father Walter, as described in this book.  Several mentions as well of Andy Kirk Jr., one of the "Sugar Hill Gang" group of young jazz musicians that Sonny ran with the mid-1940s, and by all accounts a supremely talented saxophonist who was lost to the drug plague.  (I remember first reading about him many years ago in the Jackie McLean section of A.B. Spellman's Four Lives In The Bebop Business.)  

[mjzee]

Just got the book today.  Huge book, as mentioned, but it's surprisingly lightweight.  They do amazing things with paper technology these days.

[JSngry]

Sonny taught the book how to partially levitate. 

[ghost of miles]

Pg 123-124 very interesting background on Chicago drummer Ike Day and his association with and influence on Sonny.

[Brad]

Review by Ben Ratliff in The NY Times.

The Sound of Sonny

“Aidan Levy has written a revealing, comprehensive biography of the improviser-hero Sonny Rollins.”

[Big Beat Steve]

Nice surprise ... 😃
My copy (ordered through Amazon) was delivered to my doorstep today (though the announced delivery date had been Jan. 2 or 3).
Very pleased!
Indeed it's lighter than one should think with such a tome (though it's no India paper).
So my reading leisure is secured though the upcoming Christmas and New Year holidays (and beyond). I had scheduled the Teddy Reig " Reminiscing in Tempo" bio (that my wife is going to give me tomorrow 😉) as my end-of-year reading matter but now there's competition ...
But at any rate this fat book is going to push my music book bookshelves in my music room into overflow mode (as everything is a tight fit on the shelves already anyway). Yes, luxury problems, I know ... 😄

 

Edited December 23, 2022 by Big Beat Steve

[felser]

I'm getting it for Christmas (ordered it myself and passed along to wife for under the tree unwrapping!).  Will dive in then.

[jlhoots]

I'm on chapter 3.

[ghost of miles]

I love the account of the Way Out West date, especially how Sonny runs down the lyrics of “I’m an Old Cow-Hand” to Brown and Manne. 

[felser]

Have gleefully started in.  Levy really is a remarkable writer.

[T.D.]

I ordered this from interlibrary loan, might take a while.

[jlhoots]

On 12/23/2022 at 1:11 PM, jlhoots said:

I'm on chapter 3.

Now on chapter 10.