Jazz Festival preview

Sonny Rollins | Ornette Coleman
Jazz Festival, Chicago
Thursday, August 28 | Sunday, August 31, 2008

The battle of the saxes highlights the Chicago Jazz Festival this year, featuring a pair of giants in Sonny Rollins and Ornette Coleman.

Both publicly and musically, Rollins is a survivor. In the early ’50s, when bop’s explosion featured as much drug abuse as the Summer Of Love, he nearly got swept under. Convicted of armed robbery, Rollins spent 10 months on Riker’s Island and then violated his parole by returning to heroin (and was reportedly one of the first patients in the government’s nascent methadone clinic). It was a dangerous time to fall out of the loop, as Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, and Charles Mingus treated jazz like a rubber band. He sprung back, however, and, once convinced he could create without narcotics, his career took off.

Far from consigned to bop’s golden age, Rollins embraced rock and funk in the ’70s and ’80s and recorded with The Rolling Stones on Tattoo You. Living in the vicinity of the World Trade Center on 9/11, he successfully fled Manhattan with just a saxophone, and recorded eventual Grammy-winner “Without A Song” five days later at Boston’s Berklee School Of Music.

You could indirectly argue Rollins survived Ornette Coleman, too. Though he had some help, fingers point to Coleman as the source of avant-garde and free jazz. He loathed the latter term — the title of his watershed 1960 album — because all of his pieces were composed, yet even as a youngster he defied bop’s strict adherence to modes and chord progressions and played so improvisationally many thought he was out of tune. The saxophonist — usually alto, sometimes plastic (!) — was a lightning rod for criticism in an jazz era when everything was controversial, even leading Miles Davis to quip he was “all screwed up inside.” Despite protests, 1959’s legendary The Shape Of Jazz To Come (Atlantic) is surprisingly accessible even though many of its mysteries remain unlocked.

After the ’60s, Coleman dabbled in electric instruments (like Davis and Rollins) and, in the ’80s and ’90s, would frequently perform with the Grateful Dead. Those sessions are rumored to be connected to his decision to perform at Bonnaroo in 2007, during which the 77-year-old alarmingly collapsed in the 95-degree heat temperature to heat stroke. The same year, 2006’s Sound Grammar won the Pulitzer Prize for music.

A full Jazz Festival schedule is available here. www.chicagojazzfestival.us.

— Steve Forstneger

Category: Stage Buzz, Weekly