Music

GET RHYTHM:

Charlie Parker: The Man and His Music (Gary Giddins, September 8, 1975, Village Voice)

The music Parker innovated in conjunc­tion with Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, Max Roach, and others is still known by the onomatopoeia bebop. But bop was not created in a vacuum. Such epochal Parker-Gillespie masterpieces as “Shaw Nuff,” “Salt Peanuts,” and “Koko” define a very different tableau from that imagined by Lester Young or Roy Eldridge, yet the styles of the younger players were originally mod­eled after their idols. Bop became a tradition unto itself when a new wave of players came along drawing exclusively on the achieve­ment of Parker’s generation. The originators of bop, however, were intimately involved with the playing of Young, Eldridge, Art Tatum, Jo Jones, Sid Catlett, Charlie Chris­tian, Bobby Hackett, Jimmy Blanton, Teddy Wilson, and other masters of the swing period. They must certainly have recognized the falsity of some of the claims made on behalf of bop.

It is easy enough to recognize bop as a style of music different from, say, swing or avante-garde, but attempts to isolate the distinguishing characteristics of bop can be treacherous. We hear a great deal about the complexity of bop, for example, yet nothing in its fabric was foreign to Ellington. Much has been made of the intensity and speed demanded by most bop compositions, but speed was also endemic to Eldridge, Tatum, and Armstrong. Bop musicians have been credited with first superimposing their own compositions on familiar chord progres­sions; but earlier examples of this practice include Benny Moten’s “Moten’s Swing” (based on “You’re Driving Me Crazy”), Sidney Bechet’s “Shag” (”I Got Rhythm”), and Ellington’s “In a Mellotone” (“Rose Room”). Most dramatically, bop musicians are said to have been the first to improvise on chords, rather than simply embellishing the given melody. Almost any handful of classic jazz recordings from the ’30s will refute this.

Another area of confusion concerns the relationship of bop to the big bands. The instrumentation of the Charlie Parker Quin­tet — sax. trumpet, piano, bass, drums — became the standard instrumentation for jazz until the ’60s, but it wasn’t the nature of the beast that required a small-group context nor did the musicians reject big bands entirely for musical reasons. The key figures in bop were actually trained in big bands: Parker with Jay McShann, Gillespie with Cab Calloway, Dexter Gordon with Armstrong, Max Roach with Benny Carter. Economic considerations have played a de­cisive role in every phase of jazz. The shoestring labels that recorded bop were hardly able to offer a musician the freedom to hire 15 men for a record date. But bop, like most schools of jazz, aspired to larger en­sembles. Gillespie formed a big band as soon as he could get the backing, Woody Her­man’s second herd was a bop band, and Tadd Dameron, the preeminent composer-ar­ranger of the movement, wrote for orches­tras whenever possible. Parker himself toured with a string ensemble of his own vo­lition.

The distinguishing characteristics of bop are immediately recognizable. The absence of vibrato and tonal coloration is necessitat­ed by the blazing tempos and the many-noted character of the solos. The techniques with which a bop solo is constructed might be discussed in jargon like flattened fifths, the higher intervals of chords, diminished scales, and chromaticism, but while the musician has to understand these terms, the listener doesn’t. In order to hear the melo­dies of a bop improvisation, one simply has to become familiar enough with the idiom to hear the component phrases of a solo. There is no greater melodist in jazz than Parker.

The central innovation in Parker’s music was rhythmic.

HIGHER SHELF (profanity alert):

Let Everything Change: On Sonny Rollins (Nate Wooley, July 31, 2026, n+1)

Rollins’s playing changed the shape of jazz saxophone. In high schools and colleges all over the country, neophytes are taught his technique of taking a small melodic cell and attacking it from every angle, until its entire musical energy has been expended. Young students learn by imitating his thick sound and teasing rhythms. They try to mimic his bravura, taking multiple long solos in search of whatever made his imagination so fecund.

We inherit much more from Rollins, however, than saxophone technique and broad stylistic memes. His example is not merely as a virtuoso, but as an artist, complete and self-realized. Like other masters of the form who passed before him, Rollins forged new paths without fear or apology. In his heyday, he was one among many, but jazz has changed. Like most art forms, jazz has solidified, and perhaps stalled, with age. It’s now a music of reverent reproduction, which praises young players not for audacity but for their skill in repeating history.

Rollins was the last feral master of an art that has become at least partly domesticated.

GRAB THE MATCHES:

Shaboozey: The Outlaw Cherie Lee & Other Western Tales review – a striking addition to the rich canon of country concept albums: Beneath the Hollywood narrators, Pink Floyd-y interludes and accompanying comic books lies songwriting that proves the Tipsy singer’s breakout success was no fluke (Alexis Petridis, 30 Jul 2026, The Guardian)

Still, as a demonstration of his eclecticism – or, if you prefer, a desire to be all things to all people – The Outlaw Cherie Lee works well. The pop-facing tracks hit, the strike rate when he diversifies is higher than his naysayers would suggest, and there’s an impressive boldness about his evident desire to draw R&B, soul and hip-hop artists into his world – aside from Gunna and Kehlani, there’s an impressive turn from Leon Bridges on Burn It Down. The overarching storyline is tight and well handled. Perhaps most importantly, the album never feels like the work of an artist whose career has been destabilised by a huge, unexpected and unrepeatable hit, but rather the work of an artist digging in for the long haul.

RAISE YOUR HOPEFUL VOICE:

He Sang About Loneliness. He Built Belonging (Samuel J. Abrams, July 30, 2026, AEIdeas)

Durkheim had a word for the feeling that runs through Once and much of Hansard’s music: anomie. It is what happens when people lose the relationships and rituals that tell them where they belong. In the film, the two protagonists have remarkable talent, but they lack people who can hear it and recognize it. They meet and truly see each other—albeit for a fleeting moment in time. The standout song, “Falling Slowly,” is remembered as a love song, but it is really about trust. Two strangers make something beautiful because each is willing to be vulnerable in front of the other.

That kind of encounter feels rarer today as we are increasingly isolated and disconnected from each other. AEI’s Survey Center on American Life found that the share of Americans with no close friends quadrupled between 1990 and 2021. Those numbers describe far more than isolation; they reveal that so many lives are lived in places where people do not feel known.

Hansard’s answer to loneliness was never a theory. In 2010, just before Christmas, volunteers collecting for Dublin’s Simon Community asked him to sing. He said no, went home, felt bad about it, grabbed his guitar, and came back. The volunteers had already left, but he played anyway. Other musicians joined him. He returned the next Christmas, then the next. 15 years later, thousands gather outside the Gaiety Theatre on Christmas Eve because one person came back.

That may be the most important thing Hansard ever created. Not an album or an Oscar-winning song, but a place people knew they could return to.

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.