Without a Song

My father's taste in music was - and is - an indelible influence on my ears.  As a child, I remember the oldies station blaring in his forest green Honda.  With the advent of the in-dash CD player, radio gave way to a wide array of albums from Bruce Springsteen, Van Morrison, Stan Getz and Wayne Shorter.  Music was something we bonded over, and is to this day.  Nothing he introduced me to, however, made as significant of an imprint as the Saxophone Colossus himself, Sonny Rollins.

When I was thirteen and a budding saxophonist, my dad took me to see Rollins on a cool Halloween night.  Still a jazz neophyte, this was my first exposure to his music.  That night at the University of Minnesota's Ted Mann Concert Hall, however, I was blown away.  Rollins' craftsmanship and lyrical blowing was like nothing I'd heard before; it was true jazz, not the fusion stuff I heard in elevators or had played in middle school jazz band.  The timeless bop that Rollins shared with the audience made me decide, there and then, that I would pursue a career as a hornman.

The path I've followed has diverged from my adolescent pursuits, but not by much. I went to music school, but found the musician's life was not for me.  I still write about music and love jazz for what it is, not because it's bohemian or obscure but because it is improvised.  In this sense, jazz mimics life because every day - like in every jazz song - there is a beginning and an end, with a melody that guides the order of things; everything else in between is improvised, and it is our task to groove on it and to either make something beautiful within the changes or to follow the gut, acknowledge - yet sidestep - the changes and create something mind-blowing.  

I still remember my excitement when dad bought me a copy of Rollins' 1962 album, The Bridge, that following Christmas.  I listed to the opening track, "Without a Song," over and over again (and played along to it until I memorized it), not neglecting the rest of the album but enraptured by the tune's homage to the sound of music, for what is life without a song?  As the lyrics go in Frank Sinatra's vocal rendition, "Without a song, the day would never end/Without a song, the road would never bend." 

The radiant, pure tone Rollins exhibits on The Bridge is full-bodied and sonorous, yet contains a brightness that belies its body.  During Rollins' sabbatical - which led up to the recording of The Bridge - he would take his horn out every night to the Williamsburg Bridge and blow.  He'd blow to the city, across the water as if his tone could reach all five boroughs.  At the very least, its impact and influence did.  

Most of the grooves on The Bridge find Rollins' signature brightness balanced by contemplative introspection.  While four-sixths of the album are covers of jazz standards, they morph from their original form into embodiments of wondering and joy, sometimes both within a bar of each other.  This moody portmanteau is brightened by Rollins' steady tempos and colloquial articulation, which tell the story of what happened during his sabbatical without any words. Rollins makes room for the downtempo, too, and his take on "God Bless The Child" is one of the top three renditions of the classic - Billie Holliday's easygoing original and Blood, Sweat and Tears' funkified, horn-heavy and organ-driven 1968 version are the other two.  On "God Bless The Child," Rollins tempers his staccato tendencies and his tones inhabit the belly of the beast (the almighty tenor saxophone), creating a religious experience different than the one found in the powerful lyrics that are omitted. The two Rollins compositions on the album, "John S." and "The Bridge," have a similar swing, bounce and groove.  One might mistake their structures as duplicates, but though Rollins relied on a similar blueprint for many of his compositions, his lyrical solos are differentiators and tell distinct stories whenever he launches into one.  

LeRoi Jones (later known as Amiri Baraka) wrote in his book, Black Music, that "Sonny's first Victor album, The Bridge, was done merely to show a hopefully expanded audience that Sonny could play pretty, which is like getting Picasso to paint postcards.  He could do it, and probably quite well, but it is not really his job."  While The Bridge is Sonny's prettiest album, the beauties expressed in it are, in the words of Hilton Als, "arias of feeling and thought."  This phrase comes from a discussion Als had with Jacqueline Goldsby (of Yale's English and African American Studies departments) on the oeuvre of James Baldwin, the literary equivalent of Rollins - a writer whose voice was purely of the people, distinctly of the time yet transcendent in its impact.  The musical quality of the words, however, could have come from his 2016 interview with Rollins for Pitchfork.  Much like how Baldwin wrote in a lyrical manner, sometimes jolting yet completely soulful, his words possessed a warmth and personableness that make readers feel as if they're right there with him.  Having seen Sonny live, he possesses these same qualities in each note he blows.  And though he hasn't blown in concert for nearly three years, we'll never be without a song so long as there are copies of The Bridge floating around.