Black Music Sunday is a weekly sequence highlighting all issues Black music, with over 260 tales protecting performers, genres, historical past, and extra, every that includes its personal vibrant soundtrack. I hope you’ll discover some acquainted tunes and maybe an introduction to one thing new.
On condition that the month of June is Caribbean American Heritage Month, I assumed it will be each enjoyable and academic to discover jazz musicians who’re from that heritage, particularly as a result of after we speak about Caribbean roots, many people instantly consider musical genres like calypso, dancehall, soca, reggae, or reggaeton, which we lined right here final Sunday, and never of jazz.
At first, traditionally jazz has a foundational Caribbean connection. From the Jamaica Gleaner:
Whereas jazz is mostly related to New Orleans as its birthplace, that American metropolis, in accordance with a number of cultural historians, myself included, it’s geographically and culturally extra Caribbean than North American. Moreover, New Orleans was populated by a combination of African, French, Creole, and Caribbean enslaved and free peoples who first innovated jazz. Certainly, in his allegorical account of jazz recorded on The Drum is a Lady, Duke Ellington acknowledges jazz’s Caribbean antecedence with the depiction of Carribee Joe because the drummer and Madam Zajj because the drum who arrived in New Orleans and produced a baby known as Jazz.
Give a take heed to Ellington’s “Carribee Joe”
Certainly one of this era’s best jazz musicians, saxophonist Sonny Rollins, will not be solely a baby of fogeys from the Virgin Islands but additionally one in all his hottest tunes, “St. Thomas,” pays tribute to that heritage:
Right here’s a dwell model:
Jazz Video Man has a sequence of Rollins interviews on his YouTube Channel. On this clip, he talks about his St. Thomas tune.
Rollins’ web site has his bio:
Walter Theodore Rollins was born on September 7, 1930 in New York Metropolis. He grew up in Harlem not removed from the Savoy Ballroom, the Apollo Theatre, and the doorstep of his idol, Coleman Hawkins. After early discovery of Fat Waller and Louis Armstrong, he began out on alto saxophone, impressed by Louis Jordan. On the age of sixteen, he switched to tenor, making an attempt to emulate Hawkins. He additionally fell underneath the spell of the musical revolution that surrounded him, bebop.
He started to comply with Charlie Parker, and shortly got here underneath the wing of Thelonious Monk, who grew to become his musical mentor and guru. When he was dwelling in Sugar Hill, his neighborhood musical friends included Jackie McLean, Kenny Drew, and Artwork Taylor, but it surely was younger Sonny who was first out of the pack, working and recording with Babs Gonzales, J.J. Johnson, Bud Powell, and Miles Davis earlier than he turned twenty. “After all, these individuals are there to be known as on as a result of I believe I signify them in a approach,” Rollins has mentioned of his friends and mentors. “They’re not right here now so I really feel like I’m form of representing all of them, the entire guys. Keep in mind, I’m one of many final guys left, as I’m continuously being instructed, so I really feel a holy obligation typically to evoke these folks.”
Within the early fifties, he established a status first amongst musicians, then the general public, as essentially the most brash and inventive younger tenor on the scene, by means of his work with Miles, Monk, and the MJQ.
A superb in-depth introduction to Rollins is that this 2023 biography, by Aiden Levy, reviewed right here by Lewis Wittington for Tradition Vulture.
Aiden Levy’s “Saxophone Colossus” is an engrossing portrait of jazz musician Sonny Rollins. Rollins, now 92, stopped performing a decade in the past after being recognized with pulmonary fibrosis, however his legacy and affect lives on. The guide’s title was taken from Rollins’ breakthrough 1956 LP that outlined his artistry as one of the revolutionary jazz musicians of the twentieth century.
Levy interviewed 200 folks, together with members of the family, buddies, colleagues, and Rollins himself describing his life, out and in of music. And is totally forthcoming about his ups and downs as an artist. no want to brighten with jazz lore, the plain information are compelling sufficient. Levy is a meticulous researcher, and an achieved sax participant himself has the technical talent to write down in regards to the instrument.
Rollins’ dad and mom Valborg and Walter Rollins had been from the Virgin Islands, had two youngsters Gloria, and a son Valdemar. The Rollins had kinfolk in Harlem and in 1929 they moved there. A 12 months later Sonny was born. His father was a chief steward in U.S. Navy continuously stationed away from house.
Sonny’s mom made positive he was uncovered to Harlem’s vibrant arts and music scenes and acquired him a saxophone when he was 13 and paid for his classes Rollins would follow hours (in his closet, no much less) and a long time later he would flip a Caribbean calypso music his mom sang him into his jazz hit ‘St. Thomas’ in honor of his household’s island heritage.
AllAboutJazz reviewer Ian Patterson wrote:
Rollins’ Thirties childhood in Harlem is evocatively recounted, the household, buddies and neighborhood that nurtured and formed him. Levy conveys the wealthy cultural milieu of the period properly—the dance, music, artwork, theatre, literature and politics of the Harlem Renaissance—and the way it impacted Rollins.
This is a crucial a part of the guide, as to grasp Rollins’ early life is to realize perception into his taking part in. From a younger age, Rollins was uncovered to his Caribbean-born household’s love of calypso, the music of cinema and the Sanctified church, and particularly the joyous rhythm ‘n’ blues of Louis Jordan. From the radio, the younger Rollins lapped up present tunes and program themes. All these musical tributaries would move into his marathon improvisations. Then there was the comedian duo Bob and Ray: “That informs my taking part in, I believe,” Rollins reveals.[…]
In Levy’s rounded portrait Rollins doesn’t come throughout as significantly outspoken, nor a rallying determine for black rights. His protests had been private—he refused to face for the nationwide anthem throughout the 1960 World Sequence. Jim Crow, clearly, affected him deeply, significantly when his father, Walter Rollins Sr.—a profession navy man who ran an officer’s membership—was discharged and imprisoned on trumped up prices of fraternizing with white girls at an official occasion. As Levy notes, “the sluggish violence of witnessing the army’s failure to uphold justice communicated unequivocally to sixteen-year-old Sonny what it meant to be black in America.”
The college child who aspired to be the following Paul Robeson (“my super-hero”) almost at all times let his music do the speaking. When racial prejudice prevented Rollins from renting an residence in 1957, his response was Freedom Suite (Riverside, 1958), which Levy describes as “the primary distinguished civil rights-themed album of the fashionable jazz period.” Definitely, the album proved to be a catalyst, with Max Roach for one acknowledging its affect in pushing him to report We Insist! Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite (Candid, 1960), one in all a raft of civil rights albums that appeared in these turbulent years.
Right here’s the complete “Freedom Suite” album, with Rollins on tenor sax, Oscar Pettiford on bass, and Max Roach on drums:
Author and theater critic Hilton Als interviewed Rollins for Pitchfork in 2016, wherein Rollins cleared up some misinformation :
I learn that one of many first experiences of music that you simply beloved was a live performance that Frank Sinatra gave once you had been in highschool the place he spoke about racial tolerance.
I’d like to deal with that. From the time I used to be a baby my grandmother was an activist.
She was West Indian?
Oh yeah. My grandfather, her husband, was from Haiti, however my grandmother was from St. Thomas. Anyway, once I was a bit of boy I used to stroll in parades up and down Lenox Ave. We might be marching for W.E.B. Dubois, Paul Robeson. I grew up with that. By “Free the Scottsboro Boys.” Now quick ahead to 1946, after they bussed us from the place we lived on a hundred and seventy fifth Avenue. There was a brand new faculty opening up down in Italian Harlem, on 116th Avenue, off of the river. This was a brand new highschool. We had been met with lots of hostility from the neighborhood. The folks within the space figured it was some black children coming into their neighborhood, and there have been lots of fights—folks had been throwing stuff out the home windows as we had been getting out. It was only a entire lot of violence. So Frank Sinatra got here right down to our college and did a live performance. Naturally, he was an Italian hero. So he preached to the those that we shouldn’t struggle with these children, which was very useful. Issues straightened out after that. Now, I believe that was nice, however that was not my introduction to civil rights. I’ve been round all of it my life. The fallacious folks have placed on Wikipedia that Frank Sinatra got here down, and it modified my life. That’s full bullshit. And it’s very offensive.
For the sixtieth anniversary of the recording of Rollins’ Vanguard album, “A Night time on the Village Vanguard,” jazz critic and creator Nate Chinen dove into the historical past and interviewed the legend—then 87—for NPR in 2017.
“The Vanguard was form of the premier room at the moment,” [Rollins] recollects, talking by cellphone from his house in Woodstock, N.Y. “Lots of guys performed there, and so they all appeared to precise the music with none form of obstacle. I felt significantly comfy.”
Within the unique liner notes to the LP, launched on Blue Be aware Data in 1958, Leonard Feather notes that it “constitutes a double premiere.” He is referring to A Night time on the Village Vanguard being each the primary dwell documentation of Rollins as a bandleader and the primary album recorded the Village Vanguard, a wedge-shaped basement room regarded, then and now, as “one in all New York’s foremost havens of latest jazz.”
Joseph Neff, senior editor at The Vinyl District, wrote his personal paean to Rollins’ album in 2014.
What these musicians achieved is amongst the very best jazz ever laid to tape. Certainly no launch in Rollins’ discography ranks larger, with the horn solos in “Outdated Satan Moon” alone greater than justifying the complete value of this LP. And as he performs, Jones and Ware are in fixed communication with the saxophonist and one another. Rollins remains to be clearly the chief; he known as the tunes and was the one who chiseled the marble of this splendid audio sculpture right down to a three-piece within the first place.
However all it takes is a take heed to the colourful elasticity, the assured stability of the rhythmic crucial in tandem with the need for melodiousness, in Ware’s opening bass-line on “Softly, as in a Morning Dawn” to understand that within the creation of this music, hierarchy was on no person’s thoughts. So logically Ware’s solos are ceaselessly attention-grabbing and by no means in service to system, with this characteristic simply extending to Jones’ responsive work on the package.
Over half a century later it’s Rollins that impresses most although, primarily as a result of few have sounded this nervy whereas unfurling so naturally, his improvising free-flowing however reliant on important swing. However whereas he was at all times related to a savvy classicism, he additionally wasn’t chained to it. For instance, by imbuing the concise “Striver’s Row,” the primary of Rollins’ tunes, with elevated freedom, the group concurrently references bebop and transcends it.
Right here’s the entire album—simply 43 minutes lengthy:
A few decade youthful than Rollins, Jamaican-American pianist Monty Alexander was born on June 6, 1944, in Kingston, Jamaica.
Born on D-Day, June 6, 1944, Monty Alexander was taking part in Christmas carols by ear at 4, entertaining neighbors and kinfolk by 5, taking his first piano classes at 6. He resisted formal instruction, however nonetheless, rising up in Kingston, absorbed all of the musical flavors that comprise his mature sonic palette.
“I soaked up every part—the calypso band taking part in on the swimming pool within the nation, native guys at jam periods who wished they had been Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis, a dance band taking part in Jamaican melodies, songs that Belafonte would have sung,” he recollects.
When Alexander was 9, his father, a Kingston service provider, introduced him to listen to and play for the legendary pianist Eddie Heywood. At 10, he noticed Nat “King” Cole play at Kingston’s Carib Theater, the identical venue the place, at 13, he heard a live performance that includes Louis Armstrong.
“I had one foot within the jazz camp and the opposite within the old-time people music,” Alexander says. “One was no more priceless than the opposite. Boogie-woogie was essential to me, too. I’d sit on the piano and assume I used to be the Depend Basie Orchestra or a rhythm-and-blues band. I robotically reached for something I wished to play on the piano, and simply performed it. It didn’t include training. It got here with playing, taking part in, taking part in on a regular basis.”
This Downbeat article from Jazz journalist Ted Panken highlights a musical battle for Alexander that I by no means thought of—the institution of a “jazz identification.”
The adage “absence makes the guts develop fonder,” coined to convey the kindling impact of separation on romantic ardor, applies with equal measure to pianist Monty Alexander’s ongoing obsession with the music of Jamaica, his homeland, whence he migrated to Miami in 1961, at 17.
As a Kingston teen, Alexander recalled, “I soaked up every part—the calypso band taking part in on the swimming pool within the nation, native guys at jam periods who wished they had been Dizzy and Miles, a dance band taking part in Jamaican melodies, songs that Belafonte would have sung. I used to be totally conscious of the rhythm-and-blues, my heroes on piano had been Eddie Heywood and Erroll Garner, and, above all, Louis Armstrong was my king. I had one foot within the jazz camp and the opposite within the old-time people music—no yet one more priceless than the opposite.”
As soon as within the States, although, Alexander compartmentalized, sublimating roots in direction of establishing a jazz identification. By 1970, he was a distinguished voice, with a c.v. citing long-haul trio gigs with numerous New York A-listers, in addition to consequential sideman work in Los Angeles with Milt Jackson and Ray Brown. By the late ‘70s, when he closed the books on his 300-days-a-year-on-the-road trio with John Clayton and Jeff Hamilton, he was an upper-echelon stylist, referred to by Oscar Peterson, himself descended from St. Kitt’s and St. Croix, as “my little West Indian counterpart.”
“You come to America, you attempt to mix in and do what they do,” Alexander defined. “At first, I used to be even making an attempt to talk like American folks”—he demonstrated a number of voices—“so that they wouldn’t maintain asking, ‘The place do you come from?’ However because the years glided by, I began expressing myself by claiming my heritage extra. I mentioned, ‘Wait a minute, house is nearly as good because it will get.’”
AllAboutJazz featured Alexander’s 2008 live performance sequence bringing a number of genres collectively.
On March 7 and eight, Jamaican-born pianist Monty Alexander brings a uniquely themed live performance to Jazz at Lincoln Heart, celebrating each his roots as a Jamaican and the cultural intersections of jazz and the West Indies. Alexander is a celebrated musician whose recording and efficiency historical past with Milt Jackson and Ray Brown alone locations him squarely within the pedigree of jazz, however he has lengthy embraced his roots in Jamaica and the islands of the English-speaking Caribbean.*
“All through my profession, the music of Jamaica and Trinidad has remained very expensive to me due to my fond reminiscences of listening to Lord Kitchener, Harry Belafonte, the Mighty Sparrow, Lord Flea, Lord Melody, Alerth Bedasse, and scores of others as I grew up in Kingston,” explains Alexander. “These two types of music, calypso and mento, specific a pleasure and love of life that I hope to recapture throughout the performances at Jazz at Lincoln Heart.”[…]
All through the twentieth century, West Indian immigrants confronted distinctive challenges of their strategy of assimilation in African American communities of New York Metropolis, typically compelled to de-emphasize their heritage to keep away from prevalent stereotypes. Within the jazz group, the phenomenon was related, as Alexander recollects: “I used to be joyful to slot in for essentially the most half, however one thing inside made me made me understand that I can faucet into one thing actually essential in my very own tradition, from the deep within the nation to the cities and all over the place in between.”
By the years, Alexander and myriad jazz artists with West Indian roots made key contributions to jazz, bringing each refined and express West Indian musical expressions. Amongst West Indian musicians whose careers included jazz was Trinidadian alto saxophonist Rupert Cole, who labored with Sam Manning earlier than becoming a member of Don Redman within the Thirties and Louis Armstrong within the Forties. Different Jazz musicians who had been from the West Indies or whose households had been from the West Indies embrace Blue Mitchell (Bahamas), Fat Navarro (Bahamas), Wynton Kelly (Jamaica), Kenny Drew (Jamaica), Oscar Peterson (St. Croix and St. Kitts), Carmen McRae (Jamaica), Artwork Taylor (Jamaica), Connie Kay (Montserrat), Randy Weston (Jamaica), Roy Haynes (Barbados), Dizzy Reece (Jamaica), and Sonny Rollins (Virgin Islands)
Sadly, that live performance isn’t accessible on YouTube, however right here’s an occasion from 2009: “Monty Alexander dwell from Jazz at Lincoln Heart, ‘Harlem to Kingston Categorical.’”
On this newer 2023 clip, Alexander introduces his efficiency of “Candy Jamaica” as his journey from Jamaica to the U.S.
As talked about above, there are quite a few jazz musicians with Caribbean roots, and although I’m out of house right here, I’ll be that includes them within the feedback part under, so you should definitely be part of me!
