Best Jazz CD of 2008

I was ready a recent “top 10 jazz albums” article (funny that they still call them albums) and was surprised by one that I had missed. And a big one.

If you have no interest in jazz, music, or history, you should probably stop reading now.

Sonny Rollins is one of the great jazz musicians of all time.  He is one of the few that you can refer to in the present tense (78 and going strong). The jazz greats of the 40’s and 50’s (golden era of jazz) tended to have various vices, most common and deadly among them heroin. Many jazz greats died young (only the good, right?).

Sonny Rollins got busted for heroin in the 50’s and was sent to a (then) experimental Methadone treatment jail. In the 50’s John Coltrane and Sonny Rollins were the premier jazz tenor saxophone players (their only recording together, “Tenor Madness” (circa 1956) is a classic). Coltrane would die at 40 of liver cancer (believed to be caused by heroin use). Sonny would keep on going.

Sonny Rollins has always had a reputation for being better in concert than in the studio. I’ve seen him a few times and he is always awesome. The album released this year is a collection of live recordings that Sonny finally consented to be released (he is apparently hugely self-critical).

One of the things that I’ve always loved about Sonny Rollins was his musical sense of humor. In jazz there is a technique called “quoting”. For those that know little about jazz, in general the group plays the melody of the song (called the “head”) and then improvises using the same chord changes as the melody and then they play the “head” again. There are obviously many songs that  use the same or similar chord changes. “Quoting” means playing a different recognizable melody that fits the chord changes of the song you are improvising on.

You can be listening to Sonny Rollins doing a solo over some jazz tune and suddenly he’ll be playing the Looney Tunes (Bugs Bunny for those too young to know Looney Tunes) theme song because it happens to fit the chord changes and then he’ll go back to improvising. That is his sense of humor.

If you ever get the chance to see Sonny Rollins live, you need to go. It doesn’t matter if you like jazz or not. It’s like having the chance to see Pavarotti. Even if you don’t like opera, it’s a once in a lifetime chance. When Sonny Rollins dies, there are no more jazz greats left. Sure there are new jazz musicians who are great, but Sonny Rollins is a pillar of jazz history. Enjoy him while you can.