Music

HARMONY OF LIBERTY:

A Timely Remix of ‘Lift Every Voice and Sing’ Out of a New York Prison (Redemption Songs, Marshall Project)

The pageantry of July 4th can make you cynical, as you look at America’s failures and cruelties and think, What, exactly, should I be celebrating here? Alfred Roberts was feeling a similar disillusionment at New York’s Sing Sing Correctional Facility on January 6, 2021, as he watched a mob storm the U.S. Capitol from a television in his cell.He wondered aloud to his friends about how the mostly White rioters would have been treated had they been Black. “Your mind does go back to marches on Selma and the visuals of water hoses and dogs,” he told me recently.He worked out his reaction to that moment by writing a song called “Victory.” He borrowed lyrics and melodic fragments from “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” the James Weldon Johnson song written in 1900 that is now known as the Black national anthem.“I wonder if there’s another fight in us,” Roberts sings. “‘Cause it’s hard to see the signs that we’re still marginalized.”

LEGEND:

The Rise of Satchmo: Louis Armstrong was a legend from the start. (Alan Pell Crawford, June 19, 2026, Modern Age)

The age-old slam on Armstrong among those who consider themselves sophisticates is that he might have been an admirable enough musician in his early days but in time succumbed to the temptations of showbiz and sold out to the squares. As Louie, not Louis, he mugged and shuffled and grinned, playing to his white audiences in a manner that was subservient, undignified, and degrading.

The fact is, he was mugging, shuffling, and grinning when he was a boy in the streets of New Orleans, busking for coins as a member of a vocal quartet. He would do little buck-and-wing dances to entertain the crowds, and long after he mastered the cornet and then the trumpet, he continued to amuse himself as well as his audiences with his exuberant capers. “They called it Tomming—it wasn’t Tomming!” the guitarist and singer Danny Barker explained. “He just loved people!”

Knowledgeable fans of pop music today seem to make a fine distinction between the black jazz musicians of Armstrong’s generation and what the cognoscenti see as their white imitators. But there is little evidence, at least from Riccardi’s exhaustive research, that the musicians themselves felt this way. Oliver, it turns out, mentored white musicians, and Armstrong followed his example. He befriended them too, and vice versa. Armstrong admired white musicians who are seen these days as corny and square. He was a fan of Paul Whiteman, “whose very name might have been chosen by a satirist to illustrate what black musicians were up against,” in Clive James’s words. He was a fan of Guy Lombardo and His Royal Canadians as well. “Everything they play is perfect,” Armstrong said. “They can play anything . . . a whole lot of things I did remind me of Guy Lombardo.”

Armstrong, who said he was always “trying to Cultivate Myself,” was that lifelong learner we hear so much about these days. He couldn’t read music or follow a basic arrangement until, at nineteen or so, he joined Fate Marable’s band on a riverboat. Before long, he was playing passages from Wagner’s Tannhauser, and of his 1926 solo on “Big Butter and Egg Man,” the late Gunther Schuller wrote, “no composer, not even a Mozart or Schubert, composed anything more natural or simply inspired.”

THE LAST GIANT:

Sonny Rollins, Giant of the Jazz Saxophone, Is Dead at 95: Even by the standards of a music that prizes individuality, he stood out, as both a musician and a personality. (Peter Keepnews, May 25, 2026, NY Times)

In the late 1940s, when most young jazz saxophonists favored a light tone with minimal vibrato, he developed a fat, full-bodied sound that was a throwback to the older style of Coleman Hawkins, the first great tenor saxophonist in jazz. In the late 1950s, when his career as a bandleader was just getting off the ground, Mr. Rollins abruptly began a hiatus that lasted more than two years — mostly, he explained later, because he was not satisfied with the quality of his playing.

Mr. Rollins came of age when a new kind of jazz known as bebop was in ascendance, and from the start his playing was suffused with bebop’s harmonic sophistication and rhythmic daring. To classify him as a bebopper, however, would be an oversimplification.

Over the years he flirted with the avant-garde, jazz-rock fusion and other styles. But with his ferocious energy, his penchant for playing the unexpected note at the unexpected moment, and his unusual sound — sometimes harsh and mocking, sometimes lush and romantic — he was ultimately unclassifiable.

“The music I play is too big to be put into any one style,” he told an interviewer in 2002. “Every time I pick up the horn, I want to hear something fresh.”

That commitment to freshness was the key to Mr. Rollins’s approach, and to his appeal. The jazz critic Francis Davis wrote in 2000 that Mr. Rollins “is the greatest living jazz improviser, and if we redefine virtuosity to include improvisational cunning as well as instrumental finesse (as we probably should when discussing this music), he may be the greatest virtuoso ever produced by jazz.”

Mr. Rollins was rarely satisfied with his own playing; he often came away from a performance or a recording session proclaiming that he was sure he could have done better. He unquestionably did have his off nights, perhaps more than any other jazz musician of his stature, but some fans saw this as a positive sign: The occasional bad night, they argued, was a small price to pay for his willingness to take chances and his refusal to constantly play the same things the same way.

Sonny Rollins: 12 Essential Albums: The towering saxophonist, who died at 95, was a master of living in the moment. Listen to some of his most compelling work, onstage and in the studio. (Hank Shteamer, May 25, 2026, NY Times)

‘The Bridge’ (1962)
By 1959, Rollins was one of the most celebrated saxophonists in jazz, but he wasn’t meeting his own high standards. So he decided to take more than two years off from performing and recording, famously spending much of that time practicing on the Williamsburg Bridge, near the Lower East Side apartment he shared with his wife, Lucille. The album that commemorated his return made no radical break with the past, instead showcasing a warm, intimate sound built on the plush chording of the guitarist Jim Hall. Offsetting the relaxed mood was the title track, a Rollins original where he sailed over the brisk up-tempo swing of the bassist Bob Cranshaw and the drummer Ben Riley with marvelous agility.

Sonny Rollins – Stockholm – 1963 – (Sonny Rollins – 1930-2026) – Past Daily Tribute Edition

Sonny Rollins: One of jazz’s last living greats dies at 95 : Revered for albums including “The Bridge” and “Saxophone Colossus,” Rollins overcame addiction, prison and self-doubt to become one of jazz’s greatest saxophonists. (Shakeel Sobhan, 5/26/26, AFP)

Ever critical of his work, he once said in an interview, “I don’t consider myself a musician that has learned as much as I want to learn.”

At the height of his fame, he withdrew from performing in 1959 and spent more than two years practicing alone on New York’s Williamsburg Bridge, a period that inspired “The Bridge” and cemented his legacy.

Magic, mastery and magisterial power: 10 of Sonny Rollins’ greatest recordings: After his death aged 95, we look back at a remarkable catalogue of work that stretches from vivacious mid-50s sets to his evocative performance after 9/11 (John Fordham, 26 May 2026, The Guardian)

Sonny Rollins, colossus of jazz saxophone, dies aged 95: One of the last stars of the bebop generation, Rollins was a genius of melodic invention and improvisation, working with Davis, Monk, Coltrane and others (Ben Beaumont-Thomas, 25 May 2026, The Guardian)

‘I was so close to the sky. It was spiritual’: Sonny Rollins on jazz landmark The Bridge at 60 : It’s one of the most romantic stories in music: the jazz star rejecting fame to practise on a New York bridge for two years. Now 91, Rollins recalls those long cold days – and how he has coped after losing the power to play (John Fordham, 21 Jan 2022, The Guardian)

Rollins had withdrawn from jazz before, in the early 50s, when heroin addiction had taken him into a stretch of hard-labour rehab at the Lexington Narcotics Farm in Kentucky. In 1956, the year after he got clean, the exultant Saxophone Colossus session emerged. So Rollins understood the liberating potential of focused, relentless hard work, away from gigging and hanging out. But he also knew how fresh and different the new music of Coltrane, Coleman and Davis was sounding by 1959 (the year in which those three made the groundbreaking albums Giant Steps, The Shape of Jazz to Come and Kind of Blue) and felt he needed to provide answers of his own.

Did he worry about the disappointment his withdrawal might bring to his fans? “Am I playing music for other people, you mean?” Rollins inquires. “Yes I am, in a way. But I’m playing for myself. I have to sound good. I don’t want to make my public feel I’m great if I don’t feel like that. Also, I’ve always loved practising – as much as I did performing. Wherever I was, on tour or whatever, I always wanted to find some place to practise, because that’s in my DNA, to keep improving myself.”

Every scrap of music Rollins heard from his youth in jazz-steeped Harlem onwards seemed to get stored in the random access memory of his mind, to be inverted and reshuffled on the fly in performance. His neighbourhood friend Thelonious Monk would smuggle him underage into clubs, he would pass the world-famous Cotton Club on his walk to school, and he would internalise it all, plus snatches of his siblings’ classical practice, jukebox hits and more. Reappraising and digging into all that material in his head, away from the pressures of gigging and travel, seems to have been a trigger for Rollins ascending to the bridge.

“I just happened to be out walking and I saw some steps and I thought: let’s see what’s up there,” Rollins says. “And when I got up to the top, I just saw all this fantastic open space. No one was up there. It was busy, sure – the subway trains and cars were going over and the boats going underneath – but there weren’t many people walking on it in those days; it’s much busier now. There were a lot of pillars and abutments back then, where I could find spaces where people couldn’t see me, though they could hear me. The only people who could see me were the few who were walking across the bridge. And not many of them would stop to talk. I guess they mostly thought: who’s that crazy guy?”

Presumably calls of nature and inhospitable weather must have intervened now and then? “Well, I would play for a long time every day, often 14 or 15 hours. Of course, sometimes I’d come down to go to the bathroom, or I’d go to a bar I liked where I might have a cognac, but then I’d go right back up. If it was cold, I’d play with gloves on; that was not a problem.

“It was so wonderful to be so close to the sky up there, any time of year. Maybe this might sound a little bit corny to people, but it was a spiritual feeling to me. Years later, I remember playing an open-air concert, somewhere in Buffalo or Maine, and I looked up at the sky and felt that communion with some kind of spiritual element. It felt great to me – that distance thing, reaching out to something beyond the people.”

INDEX: Sonny Rollins (The Guardian)

AUDIO: The Bridge (remastered) (You Tube)

Sonny Rollins Is at Peace. But He Regrets Trying to One-Up Coltrane. (David Marchese2/27/20, NY Times Magazine)

I’m working toward why I’m here — what it’s all about. At this point in my life I’m — well, I don’t want to say satisfied, but I feel that I’m closer to an understanding. It’s always been my idea that the golden rule is a good thing, but I wasn’t quite able to understand if the golden rule was possible. If somebody is playing music and I’m playing music and we’re in a saxophone battle, I still have to play my best, regardless of the other guy. It has nothing to do with my trying to make him feel bad because playing music is for a higher cause. So I believe living by the golden rule is possible. Not only possible but the reason we’re here.

An Uncanny Moment for Jazz Lovers: Sonny Rollins dies the day before the Miles Davis centenary (Ted Gioia, May 26, 2026, The Honest Broker)

STARKS TRUTHS:

The Ballad of Ollie Jackson: How the Baddest Man in the St. Louis Underworld Failed to Become a Folk Hero (Eric McHenry, North American Review)

Every character Starks was singing about had been a real person, and, remarkably, part of the same small community—the St. Louis vice district of the 1890s, which must rival the Mississippi Delta of the 1930s for per-capita contributions to the American musical canon. St. Louis also boasted half a dozen thriving daily newspapers, most of which are now digitized, allowing researchers to study the events that inspired those songs and see how much of a folkloric makeover they got. The real Frankie Baker shot her abusive boyfriend once in her apartment and successfully pleaded self-defense; in the “Frankie and Johnny” song tradition she became the jilted avenger, hunting down her two-timing lover in a barroom and blasting away. Harrison Duncan went to the gallows denying that he’d shot Officer Brady in a saloon melee; in song he became an enraged bartender who’d had enough of the cops busting up his gambling operation (“Brady said, ‘Duncan, you’re under arrest.’ / Duncan shot a hole in Brady’s chest”). “Stack Lee” Shelton was a gambler who shot a man for stealing his hat; in the “Stagolee” songs he became … pretty much exactly that. He didn’t need much revision to be the “badman” people wanted to sing about. This is all consistent with a pattern that folklorists have long observed: Unlike white outlaw ballads, which tend to airbrush their historical subjects, turning murderous thieves like Jesse James and William Quantrill into righteous Robin Hood figures, Black “badman” ballads push their protagonists in the opposite direction—toward antisocial rashness and self-interest, qualities for which the songs make no apologies. (In a racist society, self-interest is its own sort of righteousness.)

Starks’s repertoire also included “Ollie Jackson”—another badman ballad that recounts, with astonishing specificity, the 1901 killing of two brothers over a craps-game dispute in St. Louis. It must have been composed immediately after the shootings by someone impressively familiar with the facts. Four decades later and four hundred miles to the south, Starks sang the correct names of the killer, both victims, two witnesses, and the owner of the saloon, as well as the intersection at which it stood, the day of the week, and the contested amount of money (seventy-five cents).

Dick Carr had the dice,
Bet six bits he’d pass.
Ollie Jackson faded him
And that was poor Dick’s last.
When you lose your money, learn to lose.

It’s hard to overstate how lucky we are that Lomax recorded this performance. Of all the songs that survive from the era of Black ballad-making (roughly 1890–1910), it’s the only one that describes a real event so thoroughly and accurately, meaning that it’s probably the closest thing we have to a Black folk ballad in its original form. And that form challenges some common assumptions about Black songwriting.

MAY AS WELL BE AT THE CROSSROADS WITH THEM:

This is blues legend Robert Johnson like you’ve never heard him before. (Ted Gioia, 4/16/26, Honest Broker)

It showed up on YouTube a few days ago, and almost nobody noticed. Sound restorer Nick Dellow got his hands on a a shellac master test pressing of blues legend Robert Johnson.

“AGAINST THAT INCREDIBLE WEIGHT”:

Gillian Welch: This Land is Her Land (Jewly Hight, April 1, 2026, Bitter Southerner)

It pleases Welch when songs prove to be malleable in meaning. “I love that Dave and I kill ourselves working to make things just so,” she says, “and then we put them out there into the world and they can do anything and mean anything to anybody. That’s why we work so hard on them.” But there is one way of interpreting the spirit of their music that bothers her: “If someone were to think that our songs are maudlin or pessimistic, I would be shocked. Because I hear them as strong, quiet. I think if you really digest those narratives, there’s an incredible undercurrent of perseverance. When we’re singing those songs, we think the people are going to make it through.” Lange had a similar perspective on the people she photographed weathering the cruel deprivations of the Depression. “I many times encountered courage,” she told a Smithsonian archivist. “Real courage. Undeniable courage.”

There’s another point upon which Welch is insistent: she and Rawlings haven’t walled their material off in the past by depicting characters in the throes of displacement, hardship, and economic precarity. She throws out hypothetical questions: “Do people not still have children who die tragic early deaths? Of course they do. Do people not still take narcotics to try to ease the pain for a moment? Of course they do.” “One More Dollar,” her song about the inner turmoil of a migrant worker caught between the necessity of toiling for meager but essential pay and a longing to be back with the people they love, has powerful resonance at a time when when ICE raids — blatantly driven by racial profiling and often targeting businesses staffed by immigrants — have created life and death stakes nationwide.

Welch’s singing, initially squarely in the austere Appalachian tradition, has developed a miraculous blend of leanness and litheness over the years. Her recordings of “Dark Turn of Mind,” on 2011’s The Harrow & The Harvest, and “Here Stands a Woman,” on 2024’s Woodland, are fine examples; she applies her reedy instrument to supple slides, bluesy bends, and insinuating phrasing. What comes through in Welch’s vocals is a sense of bearing up beneath the weight of the world.

When I describe this quality, she confirms that she feels it too, and points to the influence of Jerry Garcia’s singing. Recently, she tried to turn a friend on to the Dead, and received a disappointing reaction. “They just sound really tired to me,” the friend commented dismissively. That left Welch feeling at least partially justified: “I said, ‘Well, yes, of course they’re tired. They’re touring musicians. They’re exhausted. But don’t you hear that [Garcia’s] constantly pushing up against that incredible weight?’”

So many folk and country songs pine for the idealized and unchanging old home place and the saintly, nurturing mother figure who waits there. But there’s an equally long tradition of ballads of the rambling, rootless, implicitly male troubadour. The Dead served as colorful embodiments of the latter role, and Nevins, Welch’s college buddy, could see her migrating toward it before she’d formally chosen music as her vocation.

REDEMPTION SONGS:

Stevie Wonder and James Brown Put This Prison Funk Band on the Map (The Marshall Project)

This story might have faded into history. But a few years ago an elderly, unhoused man named Charles McDowell walked into the Philadelphia record store Brewerytown Beats, looking for a copy of the “From The Inside…” He revealed to the store’s owner, Max Ochester, that he had played bass in the band. McDowell later passed away, but Ochester tracked down the former lead singer, Ron Aikens, singing street karaoke for tips outside of Philadelphia City Hall.

Aikens told me in an interview that the band had been allowed to spend entire nights away from the prison attending industry parties, wearing free-world clothes. When they returned, he recalled, other prisoners called them “idiots” for not using the opportunity to escape.

At least one member took the bait. At the Stevie Wonder gig, Aikens recalls McDowell, the bass player, fled the venue and remained on the lam for a few months until he was caught. But even with the occasional scandal, the band was good PR for the state: “We were ambassadors for the prison system,” Aikens said. “If something was going wrong, they’d roll us out to show what wonderful things they were doing.”

THE CULTURE WARS ARE A ROUT:

The shadow of the thorn tree: Christian culture must combine tradition and modernity (Sebastian Milbank, 3 April, 2026, The Critic)

These thoughts were brought to me powerfully by one of my favourite songs — “The Man Comes Around” by Johnny Cash. It’s a remarkable song, with a remarkable backstory. Released only a year before his death, in 2002 when Cash was an old man, it was the fruit of an improbable musical resurrection. After years in the musical wilderness, music producer Rick Rubin, known for his work with rappers and heavy metal bands, formed an improbable partnership with Cash, who produced much of his best work in the twilight of his life and career. Rubin, a secular Jew with an eclectic spirituality, got on remarkably well with the evangelically Christian Cash, and the pair would “take communion” together every day, with Cash describing the eucharist over the phone to Rubin.

The song itself is suffused with the words of Job, Acts and Revelation, but its origins, strangely, were in a vision. Cash dreamed that he was in Buckingham Palace, where he met Queen Elizabeth, who turned and said to him “Johnny Cash, you’re a thorn tree in a whirlwind”.

Cash is a late flowering of a very old tradition: the popular musical and religious imagination of the English-speaking peoples, and it’s nowhere more evident than in that song. From “terror in each sip and in each sup”, to “it’s hard for thee to kick against the pricks”, the poetry of the King James Bible vibrates through his music. At once sinister and joyful, sublime and homespun, it’s a song about the end of the world and it is impossible not to feel a chill as Cash sings of “measured hundredweight and penny pound/When the man comes around”.

I love it because it is a 21st century song plugged directly into the crackling electricity of the soul of English religiosity.

“DEAD ON SNOW”:

The Night the Music Died: Searching for the ghost of Buddy Holly in Clear Lake, Iowa. (Michael Hall, February 2009, Texas Monthly)

The other acts on the Winter Dance Party lineup were Ritchie Valens, a 17-year-old kid from the San Fernando Valley who had had a breakout hit with “Come On, Let’s Go”; the Big Bopper, a 28-year-old deejay from Beaumont who had made a splash that year with a novelty hit, “Chantilly Lace”; Dion and the Belmonts, a quartet of teen singers from New York with a few minor hits (“I Wonder Why” may be the most notable); and Frankie Sardo, an Italian kid from New York with another minor hit, “Fake Out.” Holly would be the top draw. At Christmas he returned to Lubbock to put a new band together. Earlier Holly had befriended and recorded a young deejay and singer named Waylon Jennings. Now he told him to learn how to play the bass; Tommy Allsup would play guitar and Carl Bunch drums.

The tour had no frills. Jennings, Allsup, and Bunch backed up all the stars, who sang through one microphone and whatever primitive public-address system the local promoter had found for the show. Sardo—whom Jennings later called “the worst singer you ever heard in your life”—was on first, then the Bopper, Valens, the Belmonts, and Holly (sometimes the Belmonts played second). There were no set changes; the show was a dance, and the stars played one after the other, the earlier acts doing a handful of songs and the later ones getting more time. Holly played 45 minutes to an hour. He began every performance with the old folk song “Gotta Travel On,” then moved through his hits, as well as “It Doesn’t Matter Anymore,” which had just been released, and a few covers, such as “Lucille,” “Great Balls of Fire,” and “Salty Dog Blues.” The whole concert was about two hours long.

That winter was brutally cold, and the musicians traveled in a series of cramped, drafty old charter buses that kept breaking down. The first performance was a January 23 show in front of six thousand kids in Milwaukee, where the temperature was 17 below zero. From there the tour crisscrossed between Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Iowa. The bands played every night, sometimes driving three or four hundred miles to make shows in tiny towns like Kenosha, Mankato, and Montevideo. After about a week, they were miserable. Valens was sick, and the Bopper was coming down with the flu. There was never any time to do laundry, so besides being cold, the buses began to stink. “We smelled like goats,” Jennings later recalled. On January 30 Holly asked the Fort Dodge, Iowa, promoter about chartering a plane.