#saxophone colossus

[rastronomicals]

4:28 PM EST December 24, 2024:

Sonny Rollins - "Moritat" From the album Saxophone Colossus (1956)

Last song scrobbled from iTunes at Last.fm

File under: Hard Bop

[jazzdailyblog]

Exploring the Frontier of Jazz: Sonny Rollins' "Way Out West"

Introduction: Released in 1957, “Way Out West” by Sonny Rollins is a masterpiece that remains a hallmark of jazz innovation and individuality. This album stands as a bold declaration of Rollins’ musical prowess and his adventurous spirit, taking risks both in its musical content and its visual presentation. Accompanied by bassist Ray Brown and drummer Shelly Manne, Rollins creates a uniquely…

[hughbot]

Saturday morning with Sonny Rollins.

[videostak]

seeing that the sprinsteen darkness on the edge of town and innocent & e street shuffle LPs i got arent selling and have just been sitting in the bins for weeks im like wtf is this world coming to!

[projazznet]

Happy 94th Birthday to the Saxophone Colossus - Sonny Rollins!

Sonny Rollins – Saxophone Colossus

Sonny Rollins — tenor saxophone Tommy Flanagan — piano Doug Watkins — bass Max Roach — drums

[sklogw]

Got any jazz recommendations for a beginner?

some records that i think make a great introduction to jazz:

kind of blue by miles davis

moanin' by art blakey and the jazz messengers

mingus ah um by charles mingus

big steps by john coltrane

saxophone colossus by sonny rollins

once you get more used to this style and want something more off beat i strongly recommend the shape of jazz to come by ornette coleman

you can also discover more records and artists by looking at who else the musicians in the records you like played with. like when i listened to saxophone colossus i was really impressed by the drumming and looked for more records with max roach, and i discovered a lot of great music like that

jazz is so fun to explore, there are so many subgenres spanning many different decades, you're almost guaranteed to find something you'll love

[jazzandother-blog]

Sonny Rollins Quartet - Strode Rode (1956)

listen here

Personnel: Sonny Rollins (tenor sax), Tommy Flanagan (piano), Doug Watkins (bass), Max Roach (drums) from the album 'SAXOPHONE COLOSSUS' (Prestige Records)

[lboogie1906]

Theodore Walter “Sonny” Rollins (September 7, 1930) leading jazz innovator was born in New York. He was raised by his grandmother who had migrated to the US from the Virgin Islands. He came of age in Harlem in the late 1940s and early 1950s where he was influenced by the remnants of the Harlem Renaissance and the WWII jazz era.

Music was significant in his household. His brother and sister both studied the violin and piano. He adopted the piano as his instrument. As new jazz forms became popular in the early 1940s, he began playing the alto saxophone at the age of 11 and progressed to the tenor saxophone by 1946. His inspiration came from jazz greats Louis Jordan, who played alto saxophone, and Coleman Hawkins, who played tenor saxophone.

He and his musician friends created their band and began experimenting with a new jazz style called bebop. By his 18th birthday, he developed a reputation in Harlem as a leading performer of bebop. In 1949, he made his recording debut with Babs Gonzales. In the same year, he recorded with J.J. Johnson and Bud Powell, the great bebop pianist. In the early 1950s, he worked with Miles Davis, who was a rising trumpet performer. He joined the Clifford Brown-Max Roach Quintet in 1955.

He continued to build his reputation as an innovative artist and an accomplished musician. His most successful album was Saxophone Colossus in 1956. The first album in which he used a trio of saxophones, drums, and double bass was called Way Out West and was released in 1957. He was recognized as the most innovative tenor saxophonist in jazz. In 1965 he wrote the film score for the movie Alfie. Twenty years later, he released his first solo recording, cleverly entitled Solo Album.

After more than a half-century as a jazz performer, he won his first Grammy Award in 2000 for his performance entitled This Is What I Do. In 2004, he won a second Grammy for the composition Without A Song and the Recording Academy’s Lifetime Achievement Award.

He continues to record and perform. #africanhistory365 #africanexcellence

[somethingvinyl]

Virgo Vinyl Challenge day 4: High Fidelity! When I think of really perfect hifi sound, I always think jazz—the production on a certain era of jazz albums is the realest thing ever captured. And if you ask me what’s my best-sounding jazz album, that’s a crowded category… but this Analogue Productions mono pressing of the incredible Saxophone Colossus is certainly in the running!

[sinceileftyoublog]

Hurray For The Riff Raff Album Review: The Past is Still Alive

(Nonesuch)

BY JORDAN MAINZER

On The Past is Still Alive, the latest and best studio album from Hurray For The Riff Raff, Alynda Segarra looks back at a specific era of their life to pay tribute to chaos and imagine what could come from it. Their seemingly legendary but very real past is well-known by now: At age 17, Segarra left their home in the Bronx and hopped freight trains, played in a hobo band, and settled in New Orleans, a formative period of simultaneous struggle and freedom. That combined ethos has pervaded all Hurray For The Riff Raff records, but on The Past is Still Alive, Segarra's finally telling the tale, applying what they learned to the present day.

Notably, Segarra started recording The Past is Still Alive a month after their father died; while his voice appears literally on the album's final track "Kiko Forever", his musical uplift acts as a buoy for Segarra throughout the whole thing. Though they had worked with producer Brad Cook and drummer Yan Westerlund prior, Segarra had never recorded with the rest of the album's laundry list of stellar contributors, from Meg Duffy of Hand Habits, and Mike Mogis to guest vocalists Anjimile, Conor Oberst, and S.G. Goodman. That Segarra conquered a period of vulnerability to record the album with bonafide strangers is a terrific feat, but not necessarily surprising: This is a person who has the ability to treat even their fellow band members like the audience, recipients of some remarkable stories full of biography and symbolism alike.

Throughout The Past is Still Alive, Segarra alternates between timeless metaphor and hyper-specific details. On "Buffalo", they remark, simply, that "Some things take time," whether presently forming love or society's death-by-1000-cuts treatment of the oppressed. Segarra sings over strummed acoustic guitar and Mogis' pedal steel, the perfect accompaniment to earned wisdom. "Hawkmoon", on the other hand, is more electric, full of Duffy's bluesy riffing, akin to the epic sound of The Navigator, fitting for a song inspired by a lasting figure: the first trans woman Segarra ever met. As if to project to a stadium full of folks looking to honor Ms. Jonathan, Segarra sings a heartland rock-style salute: "She opened up my mind in the holes of her fishnet tights / Dildo waving on her car antenna and / I could've ridden shotgun forever." Pseudo title track "Snakeplant (The Past Is Still Alive)" juxtaposes both memories of chaos and lessons learned. As Segarra recounts shoplifting and having sex on top of an island of trash, they make sure to tell you what they took from a life among "the barrel of freaks": "Test your drugs / Remember Narcan / There's a war on people, don't you understand?" Duffy's distorted guitar and Matt Douglas's skronking saxophone create beauty from Segarra's warnings of disorder.

Some of the best songs on The Past is Still Alive are incredibly life-affirming. Opener "Alibi" is a plea to drug-addicted childhood friends, a promise that, "Maybe we'll start a band," on a song that introduces the swath of instrumentation present throughout the record, like gentle piano, steady drums, echoing guitar, and pedal steel. "Ogallala" and "Colossus of Roads" prioritize survival in a harsh world--Segarra compares themselves to the musicians still playing on the deck of a sinking Titanic--but not without a wish that the world itself would burn. Westerlund's crashing drums take the former to its logical conclusion, while the latter, inspired by the 2022 Club Q shooting in Colorado springs, makes the case for empathy along the way to the apocalypse. "Wrap you up in the bomb shelter of my feather bed," Segarra sings, fighting cruelty with compassion atop Phil Cook's mournful dobro and organ and Westerlund's funereal drum rolls.

It's a line in "Hourglass" that sticks with me the most among the lyrical and instrumental brilliance of The Past is Still Alive. Recounting feeling out-of-place among the status-obsessed, Segarra shifts their perspective. "Suddenly, a boulder's just sand in an hourglass," they sing. Though they spend much of the album concentrating on time and place, they recognize that our mark on earth is statistically insignificant, something we can use to our advantage rather than something that makes us feel small. What many in society consider important--celebrity, power, money--is volatile compared to the power of your own agency, of giving life to the past.

[rastronomicals]

1:58 PM EDT April 17, 2024:

Sonny Rollins - "Blue" From the album Saxophone Colossus (1956)

Last song scrobbled from iTunes at Last.fm

File under: Hard Bop

[jazzdailyblog]

"Soul Station" by Hank Mobley: A Timeless Journey into Jazz Mastery

Introduction: In the vibrant tapestry of jazz history, certain albums stand out as masterpieces that define an era. “Soul Station” by Hank Mobley, released in early October 1960, is undeniably one such gem. This article delves into the intricacies of the album, exploring its creation, critical reception, and enduring legacy in the world of jazz. The Birth of “Soul Station”: Recorded on…

[jazz-song-of-the-day]

Jazz Song of the Day 5/16/23

“St. Thomas” by Sonny Rollins. Saxophone Colossus (1957).

[luvetlux]

Der 93jährige Sonny Rollins ist eine der ganz wenigen noch lebenden Jazz-Legenden. Rollins hat mit allen Größen gearbeitet, die Äras geprägt haben, wie Max Roach, Dizzie Gillespie, Thelonius Monk und John Coltrane bis hin zu Don Cherry und Herbie Hancock. Ich verneige mich.

St. Thomas taken from the album Saxophone Colossus (1957)

[rilshock]

Milestones - Miles Davis (1958 Review)

One of the three Miles Davis albums I have heard, we'll get to another one of those albums much later, Milestones was a transitional album for Davis in 1958. It was still showing him in his Bebop and Hard Bop phase, but he was also showing hints of his newfound knowledge of "modal jazz", where you Improvise not over chord changes, but modes. Davis would perfect this album on his seminal album Kind of Blue a year later, but since that's not part of the "10s" Revisited series it's gonna be a while before I review that album. Though the one time I did hear the album back in 2021, it has a really good stereo mix for 1959. Anyways, the album case in point. We start off with the opening track. Dr. Jackle, which I thought was just fairly average fast bebop. A rare moment other than the 1984 New Edition self-titled where I though that the opening track was the weakest on the whole album. But back to the song, all I can say about this song is that the double bass, played by Paul Chambers, sounds like the strings are being bowed rather than fingerpicked when played really fast. Much like on Sonny Rollins' Saxophone Colossus, the second track is a complete contrast from the previous in terms of speed, this case being the song Sid's Ahead. This is the longest song on the album at 13 minutes. Because it's at a slower speed, the improvisation is much more noticeably melodic, and I like how much minimalism the backbeat of the bass and drums are backing the horn solos before the piano, played by Red Garland, joins in during the second half of the song. The speed picks back up with track 3, Two Bass Hits, for some reason I can see the melodic intro and outro of this song somewhat fitting as background music in the scene of an 90s or very early 2000s anime. Unlike Dr. Jackle I actually enjoyed the Improvisation here a lot more, It's not as in your face and all over the place, but there are some melodic elements still there. Not a bad song for the side one closer. Side 2 is the golden run of this album, back to back home runs. It starts off with the albums title track, Milestones(originally called Miles). What I said about the background music in an anime applies here a lot more. This song is also one of the earliest noticeable hints showing Davis's experimentation with Model Jazz that he would later perfect on albums like Kind of Blue a year later. Moving from between G Dorian or A Aoliean. The next song, Billy Boy, is a beautiful sounding song with Red Gardland fronting in the song. Just a piano, bass and drums, no horns. The album closes with Straight No Chaser, another long song at almost 11 minutes long, which is also my favorite "long song" on this album. With each member giving time to improvise in their solos, everyone sounds remarkable. The only other similarity this album has to Saxophone Colossus, is that both albums are exactly 9 out of 10s

Listen to the album here

[projazznet]

Happy Birthday to saxophone colossus Sonny Rollins!