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125-578: Walter Theodore " Sonny " Rollins (born September 7, 1930) is an American retired jazz tenor saxophonist who is widely recognized as one of the most important and influential jazz musicians. In a seven-decade career, Rollins has recorded over sixty albums as a leader. A number of his compositions, including " St. Thomas ", " Oleo ", " Doxy ", and " Airegin ", have become jazz standards . Rollins has been called "the greatest living improviser". Due to health problems, Rollins has not performed publicly since 2012 and announced his retirement in 2014. Rollins

250-626: A "special relationship to time defined as 'swing ' ". Jazz involves "a spontaneity and vitality of musical production in which improvisation plays a role" and contains a "sonority and manner of phrasing which mirror the individuality of the performing jazz musician". A broader definition that encompasses different eras of jazz has been proposed by Travis Jackson: "it is music that includes qualities such as swing, improvising, group interaction, developing an 'individual voice', and being open to different musical possibilities". Krin Gibbard argued that "jazz

375-868: A 1965 residency at Ronnie Scott's Jazz Club were released by the Harkit label as Live in London ; they offer a very different picture of Rollins's playing from the studio albums of the period. (These are unauthorized releases, and Rollins has responded by "bootlegging" them himself and releasing them on his website.) Upon signing with Impulse! Records , he released a soundtrack to the 1966 film Alfie , as well as There Will Never Be Another You and Sonny Rollins on Impulse! After East Broadway Run Down (1966), which featured trumpeter Freddie Hubbard , bassist Jimmy Garrison , and drummer Elvin Jones , Rollins did not release another studio album for six years. In 1968, he

500-536: A Song: The 9/11 Concert . The band that year featured his nephew, trombonist Clifton Anderson , and included bassist Cranshaw, pianist Stephen Scott , percussionist Kimati Dinizulu , and drummer Perry Wilson. After a successful Japanese tour Rollins returned to the recording studio for the first time in five years to record the Grammy-nominated CD Sonny, Please (2006). The CD title is derived from one of his wife's favorite phrases. The album

625-435: A band with other future jazz legends Jackie McLean , Kenny Drew , and Art Taylor . After graduating from high school in 1948, Rollins began performing professionally; he made his first recordings in early 1949 as a sideman with the bebop singer Babs Gonzales (trombonist J. J. Johnson was the arranger of the group). Within the next few months, he began to make a name for himself, recording with Johnson and appearing under

750-514: A day, with two lathes going simultaneously, and I'm glad to see the LP go. As far as I'm concerned, good riddance. It was a constant battle to try to make that music sound the way it should. It was never any good. And if people don't like what they hear in digital, they should blame the engineer who did it. Blame the mastering house. Blame the mixing engineer. That's why some digital recordings sound terrible, and I'm not denying that they do, but don't blame

875-660: A district of Mumbai . He returned from his second sabbatical with a performance in Kongsberg , Norway, in 1971. Reviewing a March 1972 performance at New York's Village Vanguard night club, The New Yorker critic Whitney Balliett wrote that Rollins "had changed again. He had become a whirlwind. His runs roared, and there were jarring staccato passages and furious double-time spurts. He seemed to be shouting and gesticulating on his horn, as if he were waving his audience into battle." The same year, he released Next Album and moved to Germantown , New York. Also in 1972, he

1000-473: A drum made by stretching skin over a flour-barrel. Lavish festivals with African-based dances to drums were organized on Sundays at Place Congo, or Congo Square, in New Orleans until 1843. There are historical accounts of other music and dance gatherings elsewhere in the southern United States. Robert Palmer said of percussive slave music: Usually such music was associated with annual festivals, when

1125-456: A form of folk music which arose in part from the work songs and field hollers of African-American slaves on plantations. These work songs were commonly structured around a repetitive call-and-response pattern, but early blues was also improvisational. Classical music performance is evaluated more by its fidelity to the musical score , with less attention given to interpretation, ornamentation, and accompaniment. The classical performer's goal

1250-410: A limited melodic range, sounding like a field holler, and the guitar accompaniment was slapped rather than strummed, like a small drum which responded in syncopated accents, functioning as another "voice". Handy and his band members were formally trained African-American musicians who had not grown up with the blues, yet he was able to adapt the blues to a larger band instrument format and arrange them in

1375-655: A matinee with bassist Donald Bailey and drummer Pete LaRoca and an evening set with bassist Wilbur Ware and drummer Elvin Jones . Rollins used the trio format intermittently throughout his career, sometimes taking the unusual step of using his sax as a rhythm section instrument during bass and drum solos. Lew Tabackin cited Rollins's pianoless trio as an inspiration to lead his own. Joe Henderson , David S. Ware , Joe Lovano , Branford Marsalis , and Joshua Redman led pianoless sax trios. While in Los Angeles in 1957, Rollins met alto saxophonist Ornette Coleman and

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1500-460: A multi- strain ragtime march with four parts that feature recurring themes and a bass line with copious seventh chords . Its structure was the basis for many other rags, and the syncopations in the right hand, especially in the transition between the first and second strain, were novel at the time. The last four measures of Scott Joplin's "Maple Leaf Rag" (1899) are shown below. African-based rhythmic patterns such as tresillo and its variants,

1625-497: A neighboring expectant mother. Today, a fifteen-story apartment building named "The Rollins" stands on the Grand Street site where he lived. Almost every day from the summer of 1959 through the end of 1961, Rollins practiced on the bridge, next to the subway tracks. Rollins admitted that he would often practice for 15 or 16 hours a day, no matter what season. In the summer of 1961, the journalist Ralph Berton happened to pass by

1750-420: A peerless technician than a sonic visionary." Writer Stanley Crouch argued in an interview with Ethan Iverson that Van Gelder made particular adjustments to the sound of John Coltrane's tenor saxophone sound when engineering Coltrane's Impulse Records sessions: "I know the difference between the sound of someone in person and the recorded sound of an engineer. Coltrane's tone was much darker and thicker than

1875-591: A performance at New York City's Beacon Theatre that reunited him with musicians with whom he played as a teenager, including McLean, Walter Bishop Jr. , Percy Heath , Connie Henry, and Gil Coggins . In 1997, he was voted "Jazz Artist of the Year" in the Down Beat magazine critics' poll. The following year, Rollins, a dedicated advocate of environmentalism , released an album entitled Global Warming . Critics such as Gary Giddins and Stanley Crouch have noted

2000-750: A performance with the Yomiuri Shimbun Orchestra in Japan of his Concerto for Saxophone and Symphony , a work composed in collaboration with the Finnish pianist and composer Heikki Sarmanto . In 1993, the Sonny Rollins International Jazz Archives opened at the University of Pittsburgh . New York City Hall proclaimed November 13, 1995, to be "Sonny Rollins Day". Several days later, Rollins gave

2125-518: A pitch which he called a 'jazz ball' "because it wobbles and you simply can't do anything with it". The use of the word in a musical context was documented as early as 1915 in the Chicago Daily Tribune . Its first documented use in a musical context in New Orleans was in a November 14, 1916, Times-Picayune article about "jas bands". In an interview with National Public Radio , musician Eubie Blake offered his recollections of

2250-660: A popular music form. Handy wrote about his adopting of the blues: The primitive southern Negro, as he sang, was sure to bear down on the third and seventh tone of the scale, slurring between major and minor. Whether in the cotton field of the Delta or on the Levee up St. Louis way, it was always the same. Till then, however, I had never heard this slur used by a more sophisticated Negro, or by any white man. I tried to convey this effect ... by introducing flat thirds and sevenths (now called blue notes) into my song, although its prevailing key

2375-491: A saxophone player, I would never try it on Alfred's date. Weinstock didn't give a damn, and it worked out great. Alfred would benefit from that... Despite his prominence in recording jazz, some artists avoided Van Gelder's studio. The bassist and composer Charles Mingus refused to record with him. Taking Leonard Feather 's "blindfold test" in 1960, he said that Van Gelder "tries to change people's tones. I've seen him do it; I've seen him do it; I've seen him take Thad Jones and

2500-630: A tight range, and employing staccato and semi-detached notes. This is interrupted by a sudden flourish, utilizing a much wider range before returning to the former pattern. (Listen to the music sample.) In his book The Jazz Style of Sonny Rollins , David N. Baker explains that Rollins "very often uses rhythm for its own sake. He will sometimes improvise on a rhythmic pattern instead of on the melody or changes." Ever since recording "St. Thomas", Rollins's use of calypso rhythms has been one of his signature contributions to jazz; he often performs traditional Caribbean tunes such as "Hold 'Em Joe" and "Don't Stop

2625-454: Is a construct" which designates "a number of musics with enough in common to be understood as part of a coherent tradition". Duke Ellington , one of jazz's most famous figures, said, "It's all music." Although jazz is considered difficult to define, in part because it contains many subgenres, improvisation is one of its defining elements. The centrality of improvisation is attributed to the influence of earlier forms of music such as blues ,

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2750-693: Is a fundamental rhythmic figure heard in many different slave musics of the Caribbean, as well as the Afro-Caribbean folk dances performed in New Orleans Congo Square and Gottschalk's compositions (for example "Souvenirs From Havana" (1859)). Tresillo (shown below) is the most basic and most prevalent duple-pulse rhythmic cell in sub-Saharan African music traditions and the music of the African Diaspora . Tresillo

2875-568: Is a nineteen-minute improvised bluesy suite; the other side of the album features hard bop workouts of popular show tunes. Oscar Pettiford and Max Roach provided bass and drums, respectively. The LP was available only briefly in its original form, before the record company repackaged it as Shadow Waltz , the title of another piece on the record. Following Sonny Rollins and the Big Brass ( Sonny Rollins Brass/Sonny Rollins Trio ), Rollins made one more studio album in 1958, Sonny Rollins and

3000-558: Is a reminder of "an oppressive and racist society and restrictions on their artistic visions". Amiri Baraka argues that there is a "white jazz" genre that expresses whiteness . White jazz musicians appeared in the Midwest and in other areas throughout the U.S. Papa Jack Laine , who ran the Reliance band in New Orleans in the 1910s, was called "the father of white jazz". The Original Dixieland Jazz Band , whose members were white, were

3125-800: Is estimated to have sometimes earned as much as $ 100,000 per performance. On September 18, 2007, he performed at Carnegie Hall in commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of his first performance there. Appearing with him were Anderson (trombone), Bobby Broom (guitar), Cranshaw (bass), Dinizulu (percussion), Roy Haynes (drums) and Christian McBride (bass). Around 2000, Rollins began recording many of his live performances; since then, he has archived recordings of over two hundred and fifty concerts. To date, four albums have been released from these archives on Doxy Records and Okeh Records : Road Shows, Vol. 1 ; Road Shows, Vol. 2 (with four tracks documenting his 80th birthday concert, which included Rollins's first ever recorded appearance with Ornette Coleman on

3250-493: Is heard prominently in New Orleans second line music and in other forms of popular music from that city from the turn of the 20th century to present. "By and large the simpler African rhythmic patterns survived in jazz ... because they could be adapted more readily to European rhythmic conceptions," jazz historian Gunther Schuller observed. "Some survived, others were discarded as the Europeanization progressed." In

3375-583: Is his introduction to the tune "Autumn Nocturne" on the 1978 album Don't Stop the Carnival . By the 1980s, Rollins had stopped playing small nightclubs and was appearing mainly in concert halls or outdoor arenas; through the late 1990s he occasionally performed at large New York rock clubs such as Tramps and The Bottom Line . He added (uncredited) sax improvisations to three tracks by the Rolling Stones for their 1981 album Tattoo You , including

3500-520: Is regarded as one of the most influential engineers in jazz. Van Gelder was born in Jersey City, New Jersey . His parents, Louis Van Gelder and the former Sarah Cohen (Jewish), ran a women's clothing store in Passaic . His interest in microphones and electronics can be traced to a youthful enthusiasm for amateur radio . He was also a longtime jazz fan. His uncle, for whom Rudy was named, had been

3625-502: Is the last surviving musician from the photo. The same year, Rollins recorded another landmark piece for saxophone, bass and drums trio: Freedom Suite . His original sleeve notes said, "How ironic that the Negro, who more than any other people can claim America's culture as his own, is being persecuted and repressed; that the Negro, who has exemplified the humanities in his very existence, is being rewarded with inhumanity." The title track

3750-437: Is to play the composition as it was written. In contrast, jazz is often characterized by the product of interaction and collaboration, placing less value on the contribution of the composer, if there is one, and more on the performer. The jazz performer interprets a tune in individual ways, never playing the same composition twice. Depending on the performer's mood, experience, and interaction with band members or audience members,

3875-460: The 2006 Grammy for Jazz Instrumental Solo for Rollins's performance of " Why Was I Born? " Rollins was presented with a Grammy Award for lifetime achievement in 2004; that year also saw the death of his wife, Lucille. In 2006, Rollins went on to complete a Down Beat Readers Poll triple win for: "Jazzman of the Year", "#1 Tenor Sax Player", and "Recording of the Year" for the CD Without

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4000-625: The Atlantic slave trade had brought nearly 400,000 Africans to North America. The slaves came largely from West Africa and the greater Congo River basin and brought strong musical traditions with them. The African traditions primarily use a single-line melody and call-and-response pattern, and the rhythms have a counter-metric structure and reflect African speech patterns. An 1885 account says that they were making strange music (Creole) on an equally strange variety of 'instruments'—washboards, washtubs, jugs, boxes beaten with sticks or bones and

4125-617: The Dixieland jazz revival of the 1940s, Black musicians rejected it as being shallow nostalgia entertainment for white audiences. On the other hand, traditional jazz enthusiasts have dismissed bebop, free jazz, and jazz fusion as forms of debasement and betrayal. An alternative view is that jazz can absorb and transform diverse musical styles. By avoiding the creation of norms, jazz allows avant-garde styles to emerge. For some African Americans, jazz has drawn attention to African-American contributions to culture and history. For others, jazz

4250-586: The Modern Jazz Quartet , Charlie Parker , and Thelonious Monk . A breakthrough arrived in 1954 when he recorded his famous compositions "Oleo", "Airegin", and "Doxy" with a quintet led by Davis that also featured pianist Horace Silver , these recordings appearing on the album Bags' Groove . In 1955, Rollins entered the Federal Medical Center, Lexington . While there, he volunteered for then-experimental methadone therapy and

4375-578: The White House . It was also during this period that Rollins's passion for unaccompanied saxophone solos came to the forefront. In 1979 he played unaccompanied on The Tonight Show and in 1985 he released The Solo Album , recorded live at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He also frequently played long, extemporaneous unaccompanied cadenzas during performances with his band; a prime example

4500-411: The 1920s Jazz Age , it has been recognized as a major form of musical expression in traditional and popular music . Jazz is characterized by swing and blue notes , complex chords , call and response vocals , polyrhythms and improvisation . As jazz spread around the world, it drew on national, regional, and local musical cultures, which gave rise to different styles. New Orleans jazz began in

4625-451: The 1950s, many women jazz instrumentalists were prominent, some sustaining long careers. Some of the most distinctive improvisers, composers, and bandleaders in jazz have been women. Trombonist Melba Liston is acknowledged as the first female horn player to work in major bands and to make a real impact on jazz, not only as a musician but also as a respected composer and arranger, particularly through her collaborations with Randy Weston from

4750-476: The 21st century, such as Latin and Afro-Cuban jazz . The origin of the word jazz has resulted in considerable research, and its history is well documented. It is believed to be related to jasm , a slang term dating back to 1860 meaning ' pep, energy ' . The earliest written record of the word is in a 1912 article in the Los Angeles Times in which a minor league baseball pitcher described

4875-554: The 71-year-old Rollins, who lived several blocks away, heard the World Trade Center collapse , and was forced to evacuate his Greenwich Street apartment, with only his saxophone in hand. Although he was shaken, he traveled to Boston five days later to play a concert at the Berklee School of Music . The live recording of that performance was released on CD in 2005 as Without a Song: The 9/11 Concert , which won

5000-638: The Black middle-class. Blues is the name given to both a musical form and a music genre, which originated in African-American communities of primarily the Deep South of the United States at the end of the 19th century from their spirituals , work songs , field hollers , shouts and chants and rhymed simple narrative ballads . The African use of pentatonic scales contributed to

5125-464: The Caribbean. African-based rhythmic patterns were retained in the United States in large part through "body rhythms" such as stomping, clapping, and patting juba dancing . In the opinion of jazz historian Ernest Borneman , what preceded New Orleans jazz before 1890 was "Afro-Latin music", similar to what was played in the Caribbean at the time. A three-stroke pattern known in Cuban music as tresillo

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5250-412: The Carnival", and he has written many original calypso-influenced compositions, such as "Duke of Iron", "The Everywhere Calypso", and "Global Warming". In 1956, he recorded Tenor Madness , using Davis's group – pianist Red Garland , bassist Paul Chambers , and drummer Philly Joe Jones . The title track is the only recording of Rollins with John Coltrane , who was also a member of Davis's group. At

5375-471: The Contemporary Leaders , before taking a three-year break from recording. This was a session for Contemporary Records and saw Rollins recording an esoteric mixture of tunes including " Rock-a-Bye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody " with a West Coast group made up of pianist Hampton Hawes , guitarist Barney Kessel , bassist Leroy Vinnegar and drummer Shelly Manne. In 1959 he toured Europe for

5500-498: The London Daily Telegraph wrote of "Van Gelder's extreme fastidiousness" as an engineer, and his insistence on "no food or drink in the studio, and on no account was anyone to touch a microphone. He himself always wore gloves when handling equipment". Though his output slowed, Van Gelder remained active as a recording engineer into the new century. In the late 1990s, he worked as a recording engineer for some of

5625-535: The Notes . Rollins has not performed in public since 2012, and retired in 2014, due to recurring respiratory issues caused by pulmonary fibrosis . Jazz Jazz is a music genre that originated in the African-American communities of New Orleans , Louisiana , in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with its roots in blues , ragtime , European harmony , African rhythmic rituals, spirituals , hymns , marches , vaudeville song, and dance music . Since

5750-665: The Starlight Roof at the famed Waldorf-Astoria Hotel . He entertained audiences with a light elegant musical style which remained popular with audiences for nearly three decades from the 1930s until the late 1950s. Jazz originated in the late-19th to early-20th century. It developed out of many forms of music, including blues , ragtime , European harmony , African rhythmic rituals, spirituals , hymns , marches , vaudeville song, and dance music . It also incorporated interpretations of American and European classical music, entwined with African and slave folk songs and

5875-546: The Time and The Standard Sonny Rollins (which featured pianist Herbie Hancock ). In 1963, he made the first of many tours of Japan. In 1965, he married Lucille Pearson, born on July 25, 1928, in Kansas City, Missouri. She eventually became his very effective manager/producer. They moved (partially, then completely) from New York City to Germantown, New York, where she died November 27, 2004. In 2007, recordings from

6000-589: The U.S. Female jazz performers and composers have contributed to jazz throughout its history. Although Betty Carter , Ella Fitzgerald , Adelaide Hall , Billie Holiday , Peggy Lee , Abbey Lincoln , Anita O'Day , Dinah Washington , and Ethel Waters were recognized for their vocal talent, less familiar were bandleaders, composers, and instrumentalists such as pianist Lil Hardin Armstrong , trumpeter Valaida Snow , and songwriters Irene Higginbotham and Dorothy Fields . Women began playing instruments in jazz in

6125-468: The Van Gelder sound of the 1950s and 1960s have focused on Van Gelder's recording of pianos as a particular source of criticism: The best Van Gelder recordings feature wonderful-sounding brass, bass walks, and cymbal shimmers, but one instrument he rarely got right was the piano, which, on most of his albums, sounds hooded. Some engineers suspect this was due to reflections over the piano, brought on by

6250-531: The band are Clifford Brown and Max Roach at Basin Street and Sonny Rollins Plus 4 . After the deaths of Brown and the band's pianist, Richie Powell , in a June 1956 automobile accident, Rollins continued playing with Roach and began releasing albums under his own name on Prestige Records , Blue Note , Riverside , and the Los Angeles label Contemporary . His widely acclaimed album Saxophone Colossus

6375-569: The baritone saxophonist Gil Mellé , introduced him to Alfred Lion , a producer for Blue Note Records , in 1953. In the 1950s, Van Gelder performed engineering and mastering for the classical label Vox Records . He became a full-time recording engineer in 1959. In 1959, he moved the Van Gelder Studio to a larger purpose-built facility in Englewood Cliffs , a few miles southeast of the original location. An obituarist in

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6500-552: The blues are undocumented, though they can be seen as the secular counterpart of the spirituals. However, as Gerhard Kubik points out, whereas the spirituals are homophonic , rural blues and early jazz "was largely based on concepts of heterophony ". During the early 19th century an increasing number of black musicians learned to play European instruments, particularly the violin, which they used to parody European dance music in their own cakewalk dances. In turn, European American minstrel show performers in blackface popularized

6625-455: The combination of emotion, memory, thought, and aesthetic design with a command that allows him to achieve spontaneous grandiloquence. With its brass body, its pearl-button keys, its mouthpiece, and its cane reed, the horn becomes the vessel for the epic of Rollins's talent and the undimmed power and lore of his jazz ancestors. Rollins won a 2001 Grammy Award for Best Jazz Instrumental Album for This Is What I Do (2000). On September 11, 2001,

6750-555: The development of blue notes in blues and jazz. As Kubik explains: Many of the rural blues of the Deep South are stylistically an extension and merger of basically two broad accompanied song-style traditions in the west central Sudanic belt: W. C. Handy became interested in folk blues of the Deep South while traveling through the Mississippi Delta. In this folk blues form, the singer would improvise freely within

6875-403: The disparity between Rollins the recording artist, and Rollins the concert artist. In a May 2005 New Yorker profile, Crouch wrote of Rollins the concert artist: Over and over, decade after decade, from the late seventies through the eighties and nineties, there he is, Sonny Rollins, the saxophone colossus, playing somewhere in the world, some afternoon or some eight o'clock somewhere, pursuing

7000-536: The drummer for Ted Lewis 's band in the mid-1930s. During his high school years, Van Gelder took trumpet lessons and played in the school band. Van Gelder trained as an optometrist at Philadelphia 's Pennsylvania College of Optometry because he did not think he could earn a living as a recording engineer. He received an O.D. degree from the institution in 1946. Thereafter, Van Gelder maintained an optometry practice in Teaneck, New Jersey until 1959 when he made

7125-434: The early 1910s, combining earlier brass band marches, French quadrilles , biguine , ragtime and blues with collective polyphonic improvisation . However, jazz did not begin as a single musical tradition in New Orleans or elsewhere. In the 1930s, arranged dance-oriented swing big bands , Kansas City jazz (a hard-swinging, bluesy, improvisational style), and gypsy jazz (a style that emphasized musette waltzes) were

7250-509: The early 1920s, drawing particular recognition on piano. When male jazz musicians were drafted during World War II, many all-female bands replaced them. The International Sweethearts of Rhythm , which was founded in 1937, was a popular band that became the first all-female integrated band in the U.S. and the first to travel with the USO , touring Europe in 1945. Women were members of the big bands of Woody Herman and Gerald Wilson . Beginning in

7375-480: The education of freed African Americans. Although strict segregation limited employment opportunities for most blacks, many were able to find work in entertainment. Black musicians were able to provide entertainment in dances, minstrel shows , and in vaudeville , during which time many marching bands were formed. Black pianists played in bars, clubs, and brothels, as ragtime developed. Ragtime appeared as sheet music, popularized by African-American musicians such as

7500-399: The end of the year Rollins appeared as a sideman on Thelonious Monk's album Brilliant Corners and also recorded his own first album for Blue Note Records , entitled Sonny Rollins, Volume One , with Donald Byrd on trumpet, Wynton Kelly on piano, Gene Ramey on bass, and Roach on drums. In 1957, he married his first wife, actress and model Dawn Finney. That year, Rollins pioneered

7625-556: The entertainer Ernest Hogan , whose hit songs appeared in 1895. Two years later, Vess Ossman recorded a medley of these songs as a banjo solo known as "Rag Time Medley". Also in 1897, the white composer William Krell published his " Mississippi Rag " as the first written piano instrumental ragtime piece, and Tom Turpin published his "Harlem Rag", the first rag published by an African-American. Classically trained pianist Scott Joplin produced his " Original Rags " in 1898 and, in 1899, had an international hit with " Maple Leaf Rag ",

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7750-511: The fast bebop number "Strode Rode", and "Moritat" (the Kurt Weill composition also known as " Mack the Knife "). A long blues solo on Saxophone Colossus , "Blue 7", was analyzed in depth by the composer and critic Gunther Schuller in a 1958 article. In the solo for "St. Thomas", Rollins uses repetition of a rhythmic pattern , and variations of that pattern, covering only a few tones in

7875-459: The first jazz group to record, and Bix Beiderbecke was one of the most prominent jazz soloists of the 1920s. The Chicago Style was developed by white musicians such as Eddie Condon , Bud Freeman , Jimmy McPartland , and Dave Tough . Others from Chicago such as Benny Goodman and Gene Krupa became leading members of swing during the 1930s. Many bands included both Black and white musicians. These musicians helped change attitudes toward race in

8000-654: The first time, performing in Sweden, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, and France. By 1959, Rollins had become frustrated with what he perceived as his own musical limitations and took the first – and most famous – of his musical sabbaticals . While living on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, he ventured to the pedestrian walkway of the Williamsburg Bridge to practice, in order to avoid disturbing

8125-415: The first written music which was rhythmically based on an African motif (1803). From the perspective of African-American music, the "habanera rhythm" (also known as "congo"), "tango-congo", or tango . can be thought of as a combination of tresillo and the backbeat . The habanera was the first of many Cuban music genres which enjoyed periods of popularity in the United States and reinforced and inspired

8250-532: The habanera rhythm and cinquillo , are heard in the ragtime compositions of Joplin and Turpin. Joplin's " Solace " (1909) is generally considered to be in the habanera genre: both of the pianist's hands play in a syncopated fashion, completely abandoning any sense of a march rhythm. Ned Sublette postulates that the tresillo/habanera rhythm "found its way into ragtime and the cakewalk," whilst Roberts suggests that "the habanera influence may have been part of what freed black music from ragtime's European bass". In

8375-424: The influences of West African culture. Its composition and style have changed many times throughout the years with each performer's personal interpretation and improvisation, which is also one of the greatest appeals of the genre. By the 18th century, slaves in the New Orleans area gathered socially at a special market, in an area which later became known as Congo Square , famous for its African dances. By 1866,

8500-460: The instruments of jazz: brass, drums, and reeds tuned in the European 12-tone scale. Small bands contained a combination of self-taught and formally educated musicians, many from the funeral procession tradition. These bands traveled in black communities in the deep south. Beginning in 1914, Louisiana Creole and African-American musicians played in vaudeville shows which carried jazz to cities in

8625-578: The late 1950s into the 1990s. Jewish Americans played a significant role in jazz. As jazz spread, it developed to encompass many different cultures, and the work of Jewish composers in Tin Pan Alley helped shape the many different sounds that jazz came to incorporate. Jewish Americans were able to thrive in Jazz because of the probationary whiteness that they were allotted at the time. George Bornstein wrote that African Americans were sympathetic to

8750-539: The late 1950s, using the mode , or musical scale, as the basis of musical structure and improvisation, as did free jazz , which explored playing without regular meter, beat and formal structures. Jazz-rock fusion appeared in the late 1960s and early 1970s, combining jazz improvisation with rock music 's rhythms, electric instruments, and highly amplified stage sound. In the early 1980s, a commercial form of jazz fusion called smooth jazz became successful, garnering significant radio airplay. Other styles and genres abound in

8875-472: The leadership of pianist Bud Powell , alongside trumpeter Fats Navarro and drummer Roy Haynes , on a seminal " hard bop " session. In early 1950, Rollins was arrested for armed robbery and spent ten months in Rikers Island jail before being released on parole; in 1952, he was re-arrested for violating the terms of his parole by using heroin. Between 1951 and 1953, he recorded with Miles Davis ,

9000-955: The many top players he employed, such as George Brunies , Sharkey Bonano , and future members of the Original Dixieland Jass Band . During the early 1900s, jazz was mostly performed in African-American and mulatto communities due to segregation laws. Storyville brought jazz to a wider audience through tourists who visited the port city of New Orleans. Many jazz musicians from African-American communities were hired to perform in bars and brothels. These included Buddy Bolden and Jelly Roll Morton in addition to those from other communities, such as Lorenzo Tio and Alcide Nunez . Louis Armstrong started his career in Storyville and found success in Chicago. Storyville

9125-597: The medium. Van Gelder continued to reside in Englewood Cliffs until his death on August 25, 2016. Van Gelder was secretive about his recording methods, leaving fans and critics to speculate about his techniques. He would go as far as to move microphones when bands were being photographed in the studio. His recording techniques are often admired by his fans for their transparency, clarity, realism, warmth and presence. Van Gelder pioneered use of close miking techniques , peak limiting, and tape saturation to imbue

9250-413: The melody was stated briefly at the beginning and most of the piece was improvised. Modal jazz abandoned chord progressions to allow musicians to improvise even more. In many forms of jazz, a soloist is supported by a rhythm section of one or more chordal instruments (piano, guitar), double bass, and drums. The rhythm section plays chords and rhythms that outline the composition structure and complement

9375-697: The music internationally, combining syncopation with European harmonic accompaniment. In the mid-1800s the white New Orleans composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk adapted slave rhythms and melodies from Cuba and other Caribbean islands into piano salon music. New Orleans was the main nexus between the Afro-Caribbean and African American cultures. The Black Codes outlawed drumming by slaves, which meant that African drumming traditions were not preserved in North America, unlike in Cuba, Haiti, and elsewhere in

9500-583: The music of New Orleans with the music of Cuba, Wynton Marsalis observes that tresillo is the New Orleans "clavé", a Spanish word meaning "code" or "key", as in the key to a puzzle, or mystery. Although the pattern is only half a clave , Marsalis makes the point that the single-celled figure is the guide-pattern of New Orleans music. Jelly Roll Morton called the rhythmic figure the Spanish tinge and considered it an essential ingredient of jazz. The abolition of slavery in 1865 led to new opportunities for

9625-416: The music with an added sense of immediacy. He also demonstrated a commitment to superior signal-to-noise ratio while recording and mastering, allowing Van Gelder to achieve greater volume on his LPs and minimize tape hiss and vinyl surface noise. Van Gelder was unusual compared to other recording engineers of the time insofar as he enjoyed ownership of the entire recording and post-recording process (excepting

9750-660: The nickname "Newk" because of his facial resemblance to Brooklyn Dodgers star pitcher Don Newcombe . In 1957, he made his Carnegie Hall debut and recorded again for Blue Note with Johnson on trombone, Horace Silver or Monk on piano and drummer Art Blakey (released as Sonny Rollins, Volume Two ). That December, he and fellow tenor saxophonist Sonny Stitt were featured together on Dizzy Gillespie 's album Sonny Side Up . In 1958, he appeared in Art Kane 's A Great Day in Harlem photograph of jazz musicians in New York; he

9875-467: The northeastern United States, a "hot" style of playing ragtime had developed, notably James Reese Europe 's symphonic Clef Club orchestra in New York City, which played a benefit concert at Carnegie Hall in 1912. The Baltimore rag style of Eubie Blake influenced James P. Johnson 's development of stride piano playing, in which the right hand plays the melody, while the left hand provides

10000-618: The northern and western parts of the U.S. Jazz became international in 1914, when the Creole Band with cornettist Freddie Keppard performed the first ever jazz concert outside the United States, at the Pantages Playhouse Theatre in Winnipeg , Canada. In New Orleans, a white bandleader named Papa Jack Laine integrated blacks and whites in his marching band. He was known as "the father of white jazz" because of

10125-470: The performer may change melodies, harmonies, and time signatures. In early Dixieland , a.k.a. New Orleans jazz, performers took turns playing melodies and improvising countermelodies . In the swing era of the 1920s–40s, big bands relied more on arrangements which were written or learned by ear and memorized. Soloists improvised within these arrangements. In the bebop era of the 1940s, big bands gave way to small groups and minimal arrangements in which

10250-500: The period 1820–1850. Some of the earliest [Mississippi] Delta settlers came from the vicinity of New Orleans, where drumming was never actively discouraged for very long and homemade drums were used to accompany public dancing until the outbreak of the Civil War. Another influence came from the harmonic style of hymns of the church, which black slaves had learned and incorporated into their own music as spirituals . The origins of

10375-406: The perspective of other musical traditions, such as European music history or African music. But critic Joachim-Ernst Berendt argues that its terms of reference and its definition should be broader, defining jazz as a "form of art music which originated in the United States through the confrontation of the Negro with European music" and arguing that it differs from European music in that jazz has

10500-441: The piano "as distinctive as the pianists' playing" itself. This unique sonic quality is considered a key component of the Van Gelder sound. Such a piano sound was initially the consequence of recording in a living room rather than a purpose built recording facility, where close miking of the piano strings was necessary to avoid sound bleed from other instruments. Though creating a distinctive albeit compressed piano sound, critics of

10625-494: The plight of the Jewish American and vice versa. As disenfranchised minorities themselves, Jewish composers of popular music saw themselves as natural allies with African Americans. The Jazz Singer with Al Jolson is one example of how Jewish Americans were able to bring jazz, music that African Americans developed, into popular culture. Benny Goodman was a vital Jewish American to the progression of Jazz. Goodman

10750-459: The post-Civil War period (after 1865), African Americans were able to obtain surplus military bass drums, snare drums and fifes, and an original African-American drum and fife music emerged, featuring tresillo and related syncopated rhythmic figures. This was a drumming tradition that was distinct from its Caribbean counterparts, expressing a uniquely African-American sensibility. "The snare and bass drummers played syncopated cross-rhythms ," observed

10875-623: The pre-jazz era and contributed to the codification of jazz through the publication of some of the first jazz sheet music. The music of New Orleans , Louisiana had a profound effect on the creation of early jazz. In New Orleans, slaves could practice elements of their culture such as voodoo and playing drums. Many early jazz musicians played in the bars and brothels of the red-light district around Basin Street called Storyville . In addition to dance bands, there were marching bands which played at lavish funerals (later called jazz funerals ). The instruments used by marching bands and dance bands became

11000-600: The pressing of the records themselves). This control gave Van Gelder the opportunity to ensure that the final records reflected the sound of the original tape recording, with each record bearing his hallmark: a small 'RVG' inscribed into the run-out area. Though instrumental in developing the so-called 'Blue Note sound', Van Gelder's approach was often dictated by the production personnel with whom he worked. Blue Note's Alfred Lion worked closely with Van Gelder during sessions: Alfred knew exactly what he wanted to hear. He communicated it to me and I got it for him technically. He

11125-484: The previous one. The 1962 disc What's New? explored Latin rhythms. On the album Our Man in Jazz , recorded live at The Village Gate , he explored avant-garde playing with a quartet that featured Cranshaw on bass, Billy Higgins on drums and Don Cherry on cornet. He also played with a tenor saxophone hero, Coleman Hawkins , and free jazz pianist Paul Bley on Sonny Meets Hawk! , and he re-examined jazz standards and Great American Songbook melodies on Now's

11250-537: The prominent styles. Bebop emerged in the 1940s, shifting jazz from danceable popular music toward a more challenging "musician's music" which was played at faster tempos and used more chord-based improvisation. Cool jazz developed near the end of the 1940s, introducing calmer, smoother sounds and long, linear melodic lines. The mid-1950s saw the emergence of hard bop , which introduced influences from rhythm and blues , gospel , and blues to small groups and particularly to saxophone and piano. Modal jazz developed in

11375-400: The recording trade, Van Gelder might be the most overrated engineer in audio history....Van Gelder would alter the sounds of the individual instruments – and the entire recording – with compression, equalization and reverberation both as they were being recorded, and after.... But for me, the so-called "Blue Note sound" has always been a musical, rather than audio, innovation, and Van Gelder less

11500-410: The rhythm and bassline. In Ohio and elsewhere in the mid-west the major influence was ragtime, until about 1919. Around 1912, when the four-string banjo and saxophone came in, musicians began to improvise the melody line, but the harmony and rhythm remained unchanged. A contemporary account states that blues could only be heard in jazz in the gut-bucket cabarets, which were generally looked down upon by

11625-511: The saxophonist on the bridge one day and published an article in Metronome magazine about the occurrence. During this period, Rollins became a dedicated practitioner of yoga . Rollins ended his sabbatical in November 1961. He later said "I could have probably spent the rest of my life just going up on the bridge. I realized, no, I have to get back into the real world." In 2016, a campaign

11750-447: The shape and size of his parents' living room and, later, his studio. It may be significant, in this regard, that his best-sounding album (and one of his best musically too), Eric Dolphy's Out to Lunch! , does not feature a piano. Van Gelder has also been criticized for his use of compression and high-frequency boosting, both of which, it is argued, compromise the sound. Journalist and radio producer George Hicks wrote: For many of us in

11875-524: The single, " Waiting on a Friend " and the long jam " Slave ". That November, he led a saxophone masterclass on French television. In 1983, he was honored as a "Jazz Master" by the National Endowment for the Arts . In 1986, documentary filmmaker Robert Mugge released a film titled Saxophone Colossus . It featured two Rollins performances: a quintet concert at Opus 40 in upstate New York and

12000-556: The slang connotations of the term, saying: "When Broadway picked it up, they called it 'J-A-Z-Z'. It wasn't called that. It was spelled 'J-A-S-S'. That was dirty, and if you knew what it was, you wouldn't say it in front of ladies." The American Dialect Society named it the Word of the 20th Century . Jazz is difficult to define because it encompasses a wide range of music spanning a period of over 100 years, from ragtime to rock -infused fusion . Attempts have been made to define jazz from

12125-444: The soloist. In avant-garde and free jazz , the separation of soloist and band is reduced, and there is license, or even a requirement, for the abandoning of chords, scales, and meters. Since the emergence of bebop, forms of jazz that are commercially oriented or influenced by popular music have been criticized. According to Bruce Johnson, there has always been a "tension between jazz as a commercial music and an art form". Regarding

12250-491: The songs featured in the soundtracks for the Japanese anime series Cowboy Bebop . From 1999, he remastered the analog Blue Note recordings he made several decades earlier into 24-bit digital recordings in its RVG Edition series. He was positive about the switch from analog to digital technology. He told Audio magazine in 1995: The biggest distorter is the LP itself. I've made thousands of LP masters. I used to make 17

12375-426: The sound on those Impulse! records engineered by Rudy Van Gelder. But maybe Van Gelder chose that sound because he could hear that Coltrane was an alto player first before switching to tenor." Within a few years of opening his studio, Van Gelder was in demand by many other independent labels based around New York City, such as Prestige Records . Bob Weinstock , owner of Prestige, recalled the following in 1999: "Rudy

12500-463: The start of a contract with RCA Victor . Produced by George Avakian , the disc was recorded with a quartet featuring guitarist Jim Hall , Ben Riley on drums, and bassist Bob Cranshaw . This became one of Rollins's best-selling records; in 2015 it was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame . Rollins's contract with RCA Victor lasted through 1964. Each album he recorded differed radically from

12625-553: The transition to full-time recording engineer. In the evenings after work, Van Gelder recorded local musicians who wanted 78-rpm recordings of their work. From 1946, Van Gelder recorded in his parents' house in Hackensack, New Jersey , in which a control room was built adjacent to the living room, which served as the musicians' performing area. The dry acoustics of this working space were partly responsible for Van Gelder's inimitable recording aesthetic. "When I first started, I

12750-700: The twenty-minute "Sonnymoon for Two"); Road Shows, Vol. 3 ; and Holding the Stage , released in April 2016. In 2010 Rollins was awarded the National Medal of Arts and the Edward MacDowell Medal ; in the fall of the same year he celebrated his 80th birthday with a concert at New York's Beacon Theatre that included a guest appearance by Ornette Coleman. The following year he was the subject of another documentary by Dick Fontaine, entitled Beyond

12875-500: The twice-daily ferry between both cities to perform, and the habanera quickly took root in the musically fertile Crescent City. John Storm Roberts states that the musical genre habanera "reached the U.S. twenty years before the first rag was published." For the more than quarter-century in which the cakewalk , ragtime , and proto-jazz were forming and developing, the habanera was a consistent part of African-American popular music. Habaneras were widely available as sheet music and were

13000-522: The two of them practiced together. Coleman, a pioneer of free jazz , stopped using a pianist in his own band two years later. By this time, Rollins had become well-known for improvising based on relatively banal or unconventional songs (such as " There's No Business Like Show Business " on Work Time , " Toot, Toot, Tootsie " on The Sound of Sonny , and later " Sweet Leilani " on the Grammy-winning album This Is What I Do ). Rollins acquired

13125-617: The use of bass and drums, without piano, as accompaniment for his saxophone solos, a texture that came to be known as "strolling". Two early tenor/bass/drums trio recordings are Way Out West and A Night at the Village Vanguard , both recorded in 1957. Way Out West was so named because it was recorded for California-based Contemporary Records (with Los Angeles drummer Shelly Manne ), and because it included country and western songs such as " Wagon Wheels " and " I'm an Old Cowhand ". The Village Vanguard album consists of two sets,

13250-575: The use of tresillo-based rhythms in African-American music. New Orleans native Louis Moreau Gottschalk 's piano piece "Ojos Criollos (Danse Cubaine)" (1860) was influenced by the composer's studies in Cuba: the habanera rhythm is clearly heard in the left hand. In Gottschalk's symphonic work "A Night in the Tropics" (1859), the tresillo variant cinquillo appears extensively. The figure was later used by Scott Joplin and other ragtime composers. Comparing

13375-415: The way he sets him up at the mike, he can change the whole sound. That's why I never go to him; he ruined my bass sound". Even Blue Note president and producer Alfred Lion criticized Van Gelder for what Lion felt was his occasional overuse of reverb , and would jokingly refer to this trait as a "Rudy special" on tape boxes. Richard Cook called Van Gelder's characteristic method of recording and mixing

13500-463: The week to different labels". Writer Fred Kaplan has argued that Van Gelder's reputation with the record-buying public was aided by Blue Note Records' conspicuous mentions of Van Gelder on their album covers: Van Gelder was hardly the only great jazz engineer on the scene in those days; he may not even have been the best. Other stellar figures included Fred Plaut at Columbia, Roy DuNann at Contemporary, Val Valentin at Verve, Roy Goodman at RCA. But

13625-498: The writer Robert Palmer, speculating that "this tradition must have dated back to the latter half of the nineteenth century, and it could have not have developed in the first place if there hadn't been a reservoir of polyrhythmic sophistication in the culture it nurtured." African-American music began incorporating Afro-Cuban rhythmic motifs in the 19th century when the habanera (Cuban contradanza ) gained international popularity. Musicians from Havana and New Orleans would take

13750-500: The year's crop was harvested and several days were set aside for celebration. As late as 1861, a traveler in North Carolina saw dancers dressed in costumes that included horned headdresses and cow tails and heard music provided by a sheepskin-covered "gumbo box", apparently a frame drum; triangles and jawbones furnished the auxiliary percussion. There are quite a few [accounts] from the southeastern states and Louisiana dating from

13875-603: Was able to break his heroin habit, after which he lived for a time in Chicago , briefly rooming with the trumpeter Booker Little . Rollins initially feared sobriety would impair his musicianship, but then went on to greater success. Rollins briefly joined the Miles Davis Quintet in the summer of 1955. Later that year, he joined the Clifford Brown – Max Roach quintet; studio albums documenting his time in

14000-429: Was amazing in what he heard and how he would patiently draw it out of me. Such close supervision rarely applied when Van Gelder was recording for other labels, such as Prestige or Savoy , enabling him to explore and pioneer new sound engineering techniques: When I experimented, I would experiment on Bob Weinstock's projects. Bob didn't think much of sound . . . So if I got a new microphone and I wanted to try it on

14125-436: Was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in composition. During the 1970s and 1980s, he also became drawn to R&B, pop, and funk rhythms. Some of his bands during this period featured electric guitar, electric bass, and usually more pop- or funk-oriented drummers. In 1974, Rollins added jazz bagpiper Rufus Harley to his band; the group was filmed performing live at Ronnie Scott's in London. For most of this period Rollins

14250-763: Was born in New York City to parents from the Virgin Islands . The youngest of three siblings, he grew up in central Harlem and on Sugar Hill , receiving his first alto saxophone at the age of seven or eight. He attended Edward W. Stitt Junior High School and graduated from Benjamin Franklin High School in East Harlem . Rollins started as a pianist, then switched to alto saxophone after being inspired by Louis Jordan and finally switched to tenor saxophone in 1946, influenced by his idol Coleman Hawkins . During his high school years, he played in

14375-690: Was initiated that seeks to have the bridge renamed in Rollins's honor. In November 1961, Rollins returned to the jazz scene with a residency at the Jazz Gallery in Greenwich Village ; in March, 1962, he appeared on Ralph Gleason 's television series Jazz Casual . During the 1960s, he lived on Willoughby Street in Brooklyn , New York. He named his 1962 "comeback" album The Bridge at

14500-409: Was interested in improving the quality of the playback equipment I had," Van Gelder commented in 2005; "I never was really happy with what I heard. I always assumed the records made by the big companies sounded better than what I could reproduce. So that's how I got interested in the process. I acquired everything I could to play back audio: speakers, turntables, amplifiers". One of Van Gelder's friends,

14625-433: Was major ... , and I carried this device into my melody as well. The publication of his " Memphis Blues " sheet music in 1912 introduced the 12-bar blues to the world (although Gunther Schuller argues that it is not really a blues, but "more like a cakewalk"). This composition, as well as his later " St. Louis Blues " and others, included the habanera rhythm, and would become jazz standards . Handy's music career began in

14750-521: Was more nonchalant, organizing what were essentially blowing sessions for some of the best musicians in jazz history". Van Gelder said in 2012, "Alfred was rigid about how he wanted Blue Note records to sound. But Bob Weinstock of Prestige was more easygoing, so I'd experiment on his dates and use what I learned on the Blue Note sessions". He also worked for Savoy Records in this period, among others. "To accommodate everyone, I assigned different days of

14875-592: Was recorded by producer Orrin Keepnews for Milestone Records (the compilation Silver City: A Celebration of 25 Years on Milestone contains a selection from these years). In 1978 he, McCoy Tyner , Ron Carter , and Al Foster toured together as the Milestone Jazzstars. In June of that year he joined many other major jazz artists in a performance for President Jimmy Carter on the South Lawn of

15000-462: Was recorded on June 22, 1956, at Rudy Van Gelder 's studio in New Jersey, with Tommy Flanagan on piano, former Jazz Messengers bassist Doug Watkins , and his favorite drummer, Roach. This was Rollins's sixth recording as a leader and it included his best-known composition " St. Thomas ", a Caribbean calypso based on "Hold Him Joe" a tune sung to him by his mother in his childhood, as well as

15125-476: Was released on Rollins's own label, Doxy Records, following his departure from Milestone Records after many years and was produced by Anderson. Rollins's band at this time, and on this album, included Cranshaw, guitarist Bobby Broom , drummer Steve Jordan and Dinizulu. During these years, Rollins regularly toured worldwide, playing major venues throughout Europe, South America, the Far East, and Australasia; he

15250-613: Was shut down by the U.S. government in 1917. Cornetist Buddy Bolden played in New Orleans from 1895 to 1906. No recordings by him exist. His band is credited with creating the big four: the first syncopated bass drum pattern to deviate from the standard on-the-beat march. As the example below shows, the second half of the big four pattern is the habanera rhythm. Rudy Van Gelder He worked on albums including John Coltrane's A Love Supreme , Miles Davis's Walkin' , Herbie Hancock's Maiden Voyage , Sonny Rollins's Saxophone Colossus , and Horace Silver's Song for My Father . He

15375-536: Was the leader of a racially integrated band named King of Swing. His jazz concert in the Carnegie Hall in 1938 was the first ever to be played there. The concert was described by Bruce Eder as "the single most important jazz or popular music concert in history". Shep Fields also helped to popularize "Sweet" Jazz music through his appearances and Big band remote broadcasts from such landmark venues as Chicago's Palmer House , Broadway's Paramount Theater and

15500-454: Was the subject of a television documentary (in the series Creative Persons ), directed by Dick Fontaine , entitled Who is Sonny Rollins? In 1969, Rollins took another two-year sabbatical from public performance. During this hiatus period, he visited Jamaica for the first time and spent several months studying yoga , meditation , and Eastern philosophies at an ashram in Powai , India,

15625-503: Was very much an asset. His rates were fair and he didn't waste time. When you arrived at his studio he was prepared. His equipment was always ahead of its time and he was a genius when it came to recording". According to a JazzTimes article in August 2016, "jazz lore has formed the brands into a yin and yang of sorts: The Blue Note albums involved more original music, with rehearsal and the stringent, consistent oversight of Lion; Weinstock

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