Review: The Notebooks of Sonny Rollins

I've been reading The Notebooks of Sonny Rollins, edited by Sam V. H. Reese, and can recommend it to anyone, musician or otherwise, who has appreciated Sonny's very significant contributions to jazz. For the insight and enjoyment you will get from this book, it's a real bargain at $16.16 (paperback), or $11.99 (Kindle).

Reese's book presents selections from an archive that the New York Public Library purchased from Sonny in 2017, and that was more recently opened up to researchers. The total amount of material in the archive is immense - the NYPL catalog lists it as 73.43 linear feet (click the link for a complete listing of material in the archive). Included are notebooks that Sonny kept from 1959 to 2010. The NYPL catalog describes the writings:

Rollins's writings offer an extremely rare look into a jazz musician's thought processes regarding his art, personal development, career, and daily life. Mostly written on lined yellow legal pads, they contain reflections on personal and musical growth; his opinion of his and his band members' performances; notes on practice methods, saxophone issues and fingerings; sporadic journal entries; social and political observations; drafts of letters and essays; and drawings and sketches. 

To this list of topics, I could add, from Reese's book:

• Notes for an envisioned sax method book
• Some of Sonny's practice routines
• Harmonic/melodic improvisation techniques and observations
• Self-improvement outside of music: exercise, yoga, diet, vocabulary, learning Japanese, reading lists, self-evaluation
• Deep thoughts on human behaviors
• Music of other cultures
• Social commentary: value of jazz to society; environmental degradation; destructive effects of American capitalism/greed/consumer culture. 
• Dental worries and medical notes
• Favorite music recordings and films

The NYPL catalog lists the notebooks as 3.62 linear feet, in six containers. Reese's book is 176 pages, of which about 150 pages are Rollins' writings. It must have been quite a task to read through the original material and to decide which excerpts to include!

It's not clear to me exactly how Reese decided which material to excerpt for his book. It seems to me that he was thinking of readers who were not necessarily musicians (there are no notated musical examples in the book), and that he tried to provide interesting samples of the many disparate topics listed above. If that was the intent, I'd say he did a nice job.

As a jazz/sax person, I was especially interested in musical detail and sax-specific topics. There is certainly some of that in the book (though nothing in musical notation). However, Sonny's writing is not always clear. In many cases, he was apparently writing for himself, not for future readers. Some of it I could puzzle out, some I could not. For example,

Today, hear for the first time, the theoretical designation of B♯ and the aesthetic realization of it join and yoke as the inner mental hearing of F♯ rejects it as a major 7 of the preceding F♯. Not so with the thinking of E♯!!

Sentences like the one above are pretty much impenetrable, though I’m sure they made sense to Sonny when he wrote them. In some places, explanatory footnotes might have been helpful; Reese could have consulted a saxophonist colleague for annotations, if he is not himself a player.

A few useful items that I gleaned:

• On Sonny's tenor that he called "Betsy," the best-sounding fingering for C was bis Bb plus side C. "Betsy" was probably either a Selmer Mark VI or a Buescher. I checked this out on a number of different horns, and it works great on Mark VI tenors; on other horns not so well.
• He apparently used the side D key for 4th-line D fairly often.
• Some cool ideas for superimposing triads, that I might try out. 
• Sonny's concept of tongue position.
• Consciousness of overtone content in tone production.

If you are interested in a more specifically musical look at material from Sonny's archives, I can suggest an article in the Winter 2023 Journal of Musicology by Benjamin Givan, titled Sonny Rollins’s Musical Thought: Rhetoric, Reticence, and Reality. It’s free, just click the link. This is a scholarly article, aimed at musicians and musicologists.

In Reese's book the selections are in Sonny's own words. In Givan's article you will find more concrete musical detail from the archive, along with Givan's comments, written in scholarly jargon, not necessarily in Sonny's own words.

 

However, I have to mention a caveat regarding this article. Givan presents a lot of musical detail from the archive, but does so as part of making a case for an overarching assertion: that over the years, many jazz musicians have made public statements that have fostered the common misconception that skill in jazz improvisation comes from untutored/natural/intuitive talent. These statements avoid mentioning the technical work that the great players must do, to achieve control of their instruments and facility with musical thinking. To this extent I agree, but Givan goes further. Here is the introduction to his article:

In interviews, jazz saxophonist Sonny Rollins has described himself as a “primitive” or intuitive musician. Manuscripts in his personal archive dating from the 1960s indicate that this is not true. During this period, he closely studied several published instrumental primers and handwrote many highly systematic practice exercises using staff notation, along with much technical and introspective prose commentary. In a holistic quest for self-knowledge, he also read a wide variety of literature, including texts on music theory and acoustics, works on human anatomy and the physiology of breathing, and esoteric theories of pitch and color. The contradiction between Rollins’s claims to rely on subconscious knowledge and his extensive private engagement with written, self-analytical modes of musical conceptualization reflects a recurrent tendency among early generations of jazz musicians, noted by pianist and educator Billy Taylor, to publicly deny the actual extent of their own conscious, technical musical knowledge.

Givan seems to believe that artists' "reticence" to publicly mention technical matters has some root in Black culture. He follows his introduction with this quote from Zora Neale Hurston:

What is actually known about us? Very little. Certainly little that we do not wish to tell. Because we do not refuse to answer questions does not mean that we welcome probings. We are a polite people. So we say something, and usually what we say is what is expected of us, rather than the truth. 

In my opinion, the popular misconception of the "natural" jazz genius has a simpler explanation, that does not need to resort to any such characterization of Black culture. Both interviewers and interviewees knew that their readership would not be musical specialists. The interviewers themselves were often non-musicians. They asked questions that were not meant to elicit technical answers. The musicians being interviewed and quoted were likewise directing their answers to the general public, not to a readership of skilled musicians. Modesty may factor in. Another factor might be the writer’s idea of what makes for a good story.

At the same time, it is absolutely correct to say that improvisation involves a basically intuitive approach. It's mystical, in a way. It was no different for Bach and Mozart, who were known to be great improvisers in their time. 

In any case, I think Givan's article would have been just as valuable, or more so, if he had just stuck with presenting and commenting on the musical examples in Sonny's archive.  

Givan's article provides some of the more specific musical information that is missing from Reese's book. In his effort to prove that Sonny really did have a deep concern for technical detail, Givan shows, in musical notation, a number of specific musical patterns that Sonny practiced. Some other interesting musical points covered in this article:

• To what extent Sonny utilized Slonimsky's Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns 

• How Sonny conceived of using patterns (not necessarily patterns from Slonimsky) in soloing

• Sonny's investigation of superimposing triadic shapes on other chords

• Sonny’s exploration of how Isaac Newton, Rimsky-Korsakov, Scriabin, and Don Cherry each conceived of an equivalence between pitches and colors

• Sonny's work with overtones, growing out of his use of Sigurd Rascher's Top Tones book

Both the Reese book and the Givan article are very much worth your time. But Sonny should have the last word here, right?