An Uncanny Moment for Jazz Lovers

Sonny Rollins dies the day before the Miles Davis centenary

Today feels like the end of an era for jazz fans. Something has changed—that’s the pervasive mood right now. And things will never be like they were before.

Yesterday, saxophonist Sonny Rollins died at age 95. And today is the centenary of Miles Davis’s birth (back in Alton, Illinois on May 26, 1926). The juxtaposition of those two events is unsettling.

I was planning to celebrate Miles at 100 today, but now I’m also grieving the death of the last superstar of that same generation. Put those two milestones together, and it’s an uncanny moment.

---

Please support my work—by taking out a premium subscription for just $6 per month (and less if you sign up for a full year).

---

Rollins was the last surviving musician who had appeared in the most famous jazz photo in history—the “Great Day in Harlem” image from August 12, 1958. That was when 57 illustrious musicians gathered together at 17 East 126th Street for an Esquire magazine photo shoot.

The image was used to illustrate an article called “Golden Age of Jazz”—and it really was golden back then. Most of the jazz greats were still alive, and a star-studded assembly of them had gathered together in one spot.

That photo is like Raphael’s School of Athens for jazz fans. It’s a stirring visual reminder that these legends were once real people, and coexisted in the same time and place.

In 1996, Life magazine commissioned Gordon Parks to gather the survivors for an updated photo at the same location. The building was by now decrepit, bricked up and covered with graffiti—and only 11 musicians appeared for the reunion.

Their numbers continued to dwindle and, after Benny Golson’s death in 2024, Sonny Rollins was the last survivor of that Great Day. But now he’s gone—and this Golden Age survives only in the fading memories of older jazz fans

We still have the recordings, of course. In those grooves, these artists live on forever young, full of funk and fire. Miles and Rollins not only survive this way, but are still joined together as they were in real life in Rudy Van Gelder’s studio back in 1954.

But the permanence of vinyl can’t hide the larger fact—namely that jazz history of this sort can no longer be experienced live and in-the-flesh. This is a relatively recent phenomenon.

When I first became a jazz fan, the recorded history of the music wasn’t even fifty years old. I could see the pioneers of every style of jazz on the bandstand —and that was true whether I focused on Chicago jazz legends of the 1920s or Swing Era stars of the 1930s or the beboppers of the 1940s. And on and on.

You couldn’t even call this jazz history—it was just jazz, plain and simple, in all its living glory. And I nowadays describe this as my education, but it didn’t feel like schooling back then. It was too much fun for that.

I now write books of jazz history—but they are a poor substitute for those kinds of immersive experiences. But still, I try my best to capture in my books the unfettered enjoyment of those direct and unmediated encounters with the jazz greats.

If we ever lose the fun of this music, we will be in bad shape indeed. Preserving it isn’t easy in the present day, when jazz is primarily propagated at schools and colleges—and is permeated with a pedagogical zeal that was completely unknown to the music’s originators.

Don’t get me wrong, Louis Armstrong most certainly educated a bunch of people—but they were rarely aware of it. They thought they were out for an evening of fun and revelry.

Even Miles and Rollins understood that—they knew they were serious artists, but they never tried to demonstrate jazz history. They just embodied it. And brought it to life, night after night, on the road and in front of paying audiences.

So go ahead and listen to those classic records today and pay homage to the dearly departed. But if we really want to hold on to their gift from the past, the best way is by supporting jazz out in the wild—at the jam session, in the clubs, even out on the streets.

Even so, I will dwell happily in nostalgia for a little while longer today—and share two of my favorite videos of live jazz. They feature the two musicians I’m thinking about right now.

First, here’s a film of Sonny Rollins in full flight. This gripping performance from 1986 serves as the opening for Robert Mugge’s documentary Saxophone Colossus. When I first saw it, I was unaware of the injury Rollins had sustained during the filming. That only adds to drama.

And here’s a rare video of Miles Davis playing “So What” (from the iconic Kind of Blue album) alongside John Coltrane. As hard as it is to believe, this kind of music was once on television.

So today I celebrate these past masters, and invite you to do the same. Tomorrow let’s help build a musical culture for the future they would be proud of.