09.08.22
Bridges, street poetry, little gray cells
Yesterday was Sonny Rollins’s 92nd birthday. Rollins was the first jazz musician I ever saw live, which was a stroke of undeserved good luck. I had a school assignment to attend a concert of classical music, and it seemed appealingly irreverent to me to see a jazz concert instead. I knew nothing about jazz, or American music in general, having grown up on my father’s collection of early Bollywood songs, and only possessing one album of my own—a copy of Weird Al in 3-D a classmate had dubbed onto cassette for me (in many cases, I heard his parodies before I heard the originals). But I was immediately taken with Rollins, whose eccentric wit and probing intellect were on display in everything from his demeanor to his dress to, of course, his saxophone playing. Along with Thelonious Monk, with whom he sometimes collaborated, Rollins is one of the few musicians who makes me laugh out loud without the use of words. I don’t remember who accompanied him that night, other than his longtime sidekick Bob Cranshaw on electric bass, but I believe he played “St. Thomas.”
One of the more storied moments in the Rollins legend was his disappearance from the jazz scene in 1959, followed by a reemergence in 1962 with the LP The Bridge. He had spent the interim practicing in solitude—”woodshedding,” in the jazz parlance—on the Williamsburg Bridge, which there is an ongoing petition to rename in Rollins’s honor. You can hear the band from that record, featuring guitarist Jim Hall, in this episode of the public TV series Jazz Casual, hosted by jazz critic (and founding editor of Rolling Stone) Ralph J. Gleason. The show is uniformly charming; the indefatigably enthusiastic host cuts an archetypal figure of the midcentury hipster, leaning across a piano in a cardigan and skinny tie, lit cigarette dangling from his lips. (Fellow guitarists may want to note that the Count Basie episode is possibly the best place to witness, and enjoy, the technique of the great Freddie Green.)
While I’m reminiscing, the Brooklyn Academy of Music is screening my father’s favorite Hindi film, Pyaasa, tonight. If you’re in the vicinity, I can’t recommend it highly enough. For the uninitiated, you can read an essay on the director, Guru Dutt, by Mayukh Sen for The Criterion Collection. (I do wonder why the film doesn’t have its own edition in the collection—it certainly deserves a better transfer and more accurate subtitles than the version my father bought at an Indian grocery.)
And yet more nostalgia: I enjoyed this review by Molly Young of a new biography of Agatha Christie. When I was a kid, I read all the Hercule Poirot novels, my mother’s influence. I started rereading them sporadically when the pandemic struck; Five Little Pigs, a Rashomon-esque installment, was a standout, and I just started Peril at End House, the first narrated by Dr. Watson surrogate Arthur Hastings. One of these days, I’ll start the Miss Marple series, which I never got around to.