Some legends are still alive. There is still magic in the air. Here is a list of six living jazz musicians who are all iconic within the cannon of jazz. These men are among the biggest names in post WWII Jazz history. And some have near rock star-like status in the jazz world and even beyond it. They are all over 80 years old.
As always, this is a subjective list. Though while I might be missing someone, I really can’t think of anyone 80 or older who is still alive. There are excellent and iconic jazz musicians like McCoy Tyner and George Coleman who are still alive, but they are in their 70s. I was going to include George Coleman on this list, but things got too long. Rock star like jazz musicians like Herbie Hancock and Chick Corea and Ron Carter are still alive as well. Of course Pat Metheny is still with us. There are still many great great musicians in their 50s, 60s, and 70s still alive. Wynton and Branford are in their early 50s. I can think of a great crop of jazz musicians of my generation in their 40s. Some younger guys are darn good too. Not to mention that there are probably unknown but fantastic jazz musicians living in a city near you who would love for you to come and see them play. They wont disappoint you.
Please follow me through the orange portal of living legends.
Sonny Rollins, b. September 7, 1930, is still alive. (Please reread that sentence out loud and thank your version of the creator for nearly 84 years of his walking this earth so far)
Basketball is often a useful analogy to jazz. It also happens to be the sport I can speak best about. I’ve heard that in the 50s, it was similar to whether you were a Bill Russel man or a Wilt Chamberlin man, Magic or Michael? Sonny Rollins or John Coltrane. There aren’t just stories, there are actual recordings of Trane and Sonny in tenor sax battles. So how good is Sonny Rollins? To some, he’s better than Coltrane…at least within the context of their era. And maybe he is more accessible.
Sonny has been performing since the late 1940s. He is on early recordings with Miles and Monk. He replaced Harold Land in the Brown-Roach Quintet. He is also known for taking a “leave of absence” from performing a few times. The most famous being around 1960 when he is said to have wandered the Brooklyn Bridge late at night for hours practicing by himself. This story is not true, it was the Williamsburg Bridge.
He returned with the classic recording, The Bridge. This group had no piano, but included the great Jim Hall on guitar who passed away in January of this year.
Sonny is playing sax on the Rolling Stone’s recording “Waiting for a Friend”. Sonny didn’t like his solo and asked for his name to be removed from the credits. You can you tube that one on your own, but personally I think it is one of the greatest saxophone solos on a rock and roll recording and as classic as the Walk on the Wild Side or Shine on You Crazy Diamond sax solos are.
Sonny is the only person on the list to be honored by the Kennedy Center. This happened in 2011.
Btw…ya gotta love the fact that the internets have stuff like this available……
And since I probably wont pull off writing a mardis gras diary: "Dont Stop the Carnival"….
Next up….possibly the biggest “rock star” on this list: Wayne Shorter, born August 25, 1933.
Much like everyone else on my list, Wayne could be the focus of an entire diary. He has been involved with some of the greatest jazz recordings of the 1960s and 1970s.
He played with Art Blakey and the jazz messengers and then replaced George coleman in the miles davis quintet. All the while he recorded his own albums. In the 1970s, he founded and co-lead Weather Report with Joe Zawinul. Hes also recorded with rock/pop groups like steely dan. And in addition to being an amazing tenor saxophonist, to many he is one of the great composers of jazz. His compositions have become jazz standards and are played by legions of musicians throughout the world.
Im bound to do a diary on art blakey’s bands and mile’s different groups. I will revisit wayne shorter here…more than once more.
Ahmad Jamal, born Fritz Russell Jones, July 2, 1930
I’ve seen Sonny live at the Bottom Line in NYC. I’ve seen Wayne in large concert halls in New York and in Holland. But I’ve seen Ahmad Jamal up close many many times in the later 1980s. He would often play the club Gullivers…I think it was in Wayne NJ. I know the club used to be in Paterson, my dad would play there sometimes in the 70s. But it moved deeper into the ‘burbs and one could sit not 5 feet from Ahmad. Often. Rufus Reid would tell 19 year old me to go and watch and learn. I was not always a great student, but this thing I did.
I think Ahmad had a slight reputation for being more commercially oriented jazz back in the 50s and 60s. He had a particular approach to jazz for sure. But his use of space was considered unique and was extremely influential on Miles Davis and subsequently Red Garland.
Ahmad has been recording and performing for more than 50 years. He is considered by many to be one of the most influential performers in jazz. There are legions of musician in NYC and the world who have studied in one capacity or another with Harold Mabern who have been lectured to at length about how they should listen to Ahmad Jamal (and George Coleman and Clifford Brown).
Roy Haynes, born March 13, 1925
Its hard for me to wrap my brain around the notion that Roy Haynes will turn 89 in less than two weeks. There is almost no one in jazz of note with whom he has not recorded and or performed. He still plays too!
He is not particularly known for leading groups, though he does now, nor is he a composer. This is probably why he is a bit more obscure to the public. However he has been involved with his share of iconic historic recordings. They put this one in the Ken Burns series….
And like miles, Roy goes forward. I don’t think Im showing a bias to piano trios, but I certainly have one in my listening habits. Piano is my instrument and so Im very familiar with the recordings of this instrumentation. In the context of the format of the piano trio, one of the freshest statements on the form with a unique voice was Chick Corea’s “Now He Sings, Now he Sobs.” Chick is an interesting figure in Jazz, I’ll write about him later. This is really the first recording that establishes Chick as one of the “big boys” and Roy’s playing is extraordinary,
Roy is on some of Pat Metheny’s best “Straight” jazz recordings. Metheny obviously has his own unique commercial approach, but he can really play and does make more “jazz” recordings from time to time. They are excellent.
Kenny Burrell, born July 31, 1931
I have no anecdotes. I have no personal connections. In my 20s when some of my friends were getting heavy into the organ groups, I got into Eddie Palmerie and started off on a path into Latin jazz which has professionally resulted so far in a lot of great gigs, trips to south America, participation on a recording nominated for a Grammy, and a PhD dissertation. But I know enough guitar players to know what’s good and I know enough about jazz to know who is important. And Kenny Burrell is still alive.
Wow…too much for one diary! And I needed to cut George Coleman! And for this last man…like Miles and Art Blakey, I don’t think one diary would be enough.
Horace Silver was born on September 2, 1928
For those of you who are wondering but don’t know for sure: Yes. Steely Dan actively copped that bass line to use in Ricky Don’t Lose That Number. Its also an extremely well known jazz composition that just about every jazz musician knows how to play. I was doing a gig once out in the middle of nowhere NJ and of all people, Bernie Worrell—the keyboard player with parliament-funkadelic and the talking heads and the pretenders and a host of others—walked in…and thought we were going to play ricky don’t lose that number when we started song for my father! Bernie was very cool btw, he lives out in the middle of red state jersey….deep Christie country…poor Bernie….
If you know jazz, you know Horace Silver. If you don’t yet and all of this is sort of new to you…the music speaks for itself. Horace is a unique voice on the piano, a prolific composer, and had some commercial success in the 60s or so. IM not sure if this was in the movie or if I heard this directly from his son, but apparently Nellie Monk, Thelonious’ wife, heard all of Horace’s songs as he wrote them. Horace liked to go to Monk’s house to show him the new tunes and Monk would slip out the back leaving Nellie as the audience!
That’s all for now. Its wonderful that these men still live, but they are all over 80 years old. It is inevitable that some if not all of these men will leave us within the next decade. Sonny Rollins, Wayne Shorter, Ahmad Jamal and Horace Silver will deserve State funerals and a national day of mourning. Roy and Kenny too...but I could understand why not. However, they most likely will not. But these men are national treasures and have contributed not just to the great soundtrack of the 20th century, they have helped create American culture for decades.
I very much appreciate the comments and such in the last diary I did! I wanted to do a few more of these for Black History Month, but I was not able to make that happen. That’s ok! This is not simply "Black History", it is American history. It is my intention to keep these up weekly for a while. Posting around 6pm est last Sunday seemed to work well, so that is what I will shoot for. I hope people like these. There is so much jazz and so much of it is just really great music to listen to and so I really want to share this with the DKos community. And it’s darn patriotic too!