Black Music Sunday is a weekly series highlighting all things Black music, with over 260 stories covering performers, genres, history, and more, each featuring its own vibrant soundtrack. I hope you’ll find some familiar tunes and perhaps an introduction to something new.
Given that the month of June is Caribbean American Heritage Month, I thought it would be both fun and educational to explore jazz musicians who are from that heritage, especially because when we talk about Caribbean roots, many of us immediately think of musical genres like calypso, dancehall, soca, reggae, or reggaeton, which we covered here last Sunday, and not of jazz.
First and foremost, historically jazz has a foundational Caribbean connection. From the Jamaica Gleaner:
While jazz is generally associated with New Orleans as its birthplace, that American city, according to several cultural historians, myself included, it is geographically and culturally more Caribbean than North American. Furthermore, New Orleans was populated by a mixture of African, French, Creole, and Caribbean enslaved and free peoples who first innovated jazz. Indeed, in his allegorical account of jazz recorded on The Drum is a Woman, Duke Ellington acknowledges jazz’s Caribbean antecedence with the depiction of Carribee Joe as the drummer and Madam Zajj as the drum who arrived in New Orleans and produced a child called Jazz.
Give a listen to Ellington’s “Carribee Joe”
One of this generation’s greatest jazz musicians, saxophonist Sonny Rollins, is not only a child of parents from the Virgin Islands but also one of his most popular tunes, “St. Thomas,” pays tribute to that heritage:
Here’s a live version:
Jazz Video Guy has a series of Rollins interviews on his YouTube Channel. In this clip, he talks about his St. Thomas tune.
Rollins’ website has his bio:
Walter Theodore Rollins was born on September 7, 1930 in New York City. He grew up in Harlem not far from the Savoy Ballroom, the Apollo Theatre, and the doorstep of his idol, Coleman Hawkins. After early discovery of Fats Waller and Louis Armstrong, he started out on alto saxophone, inspired by Louis Jordan. At the age of sixteen, he switched to tenor, trying to emulate Hawkins. He also fell under the spell of the musical revolution that surrounded him, bebop.
He began to follow Charlie Parker, and soon came under the wing of Thelonious Monk, who became his musical mentor and guru. When he was living in Sugar Hill, his neighborhood musical peers included Jackie McLean, Kenny Drew, and Art Taylor, but it was young Sonny who was first out of the pack, working and recording with Babs Gonzales, J.J. Johnson, Bud Powell, and Miles Davis before he turned twenty. “Of course, these people are there to be called on because I think I represent them in a way,” Rollins has said of his peers and mentors. “They’re not here now so I feel like I’m sort of representing all of them, all of the guys. Remember, I’m one of the last guys left, as I’m constantly being told, so I feel a holy obligation sometimes to evoke these people.”
In the early fifties, he established a reputation first among musicians, then the public, as the most brash and creative young tenor on the scene, through his work with Miles, Monk, and the MJQ.
An excellent in-depth introduction to Rollins is this 2023 biography, by Aiden Levy, reviewed here by Lewis Wittington for Culture Vulture.
Aiden Levy’s “Saxophone Colossus” is an engrossing portrait of jazz musician Sonny Rollins. Rollins, now 92, stopped performing a decade ago after being diagnosed with pulmonary fibrosis, but his legacy and influence lives on. The book’s title was taken from Rollins’ breakthrough 1956 LP that defined his artistry as one of the most innovative jazz musicians of the 20th century.
Levy interviewed 200 people, including family members, friends, colleagues, and Rollins himself describing his life, in and out of music. And is completely forthcoming about his ups and downs as an artist. no need to embellish with jazz lore, the plain facts are compelling enough. Levy is a meticulous researcher, and an accomplished sax player himself has the technical skill to write about the instrument.
Rollins’ parents Valborg and Walter Rollins were from the Virgin Islands, had two children Gloria, and a son Valdemar. The Rollins had relatives in Harlem and in 1929 they moved there. A year later Sonny was born. His father was a chief steward in U.S. Navy frequently stationed away from home.
Sonny’s mother made sure he was exposed to Harlem’s vibrant arts and music scenes and bought him a saxophone when he was 13 and paid for his lessons Rollins would practice hours (in his closet, no less) and decades later he would turn a Caribbean calypso song his mother sang him into his jazz hit ‘St. Thomas’ in honor of his family’s island heritage.
AllAboutJazz reviewer Ian Patterson wrote:
Rollins’ 1930s childhood in Harlem is evocatively recounted, the family, friends and neighborhood that nurtured and shaped him. Levy conveys the rich cultural milieu of the era well—the dance, music, art, theatre, literature and politics of the Harlem Renaissance—and how it impacted Rollins.
This is an important part of the book, as to understand Rollins’ formative years is to gain insight into his playing. From a young age, Rollins was exposed to his Caribbean-born family’s love of calypso, the music of cinema and the Sanctified church, and especially the joyous rhythm ‘n’ blues of Louis Jordan. From the radio, the young Rollins lapped up show tunes and program themes. All these musical tributaries would flow into his marathon improvisations. Then there was the comic duo Bob and Ray: “That informs my playing, I think,” Rollins reveals.[…]
In Levy’s rounded portrait Rollins does not come across as particularly outspoken, nor a rallying figure for black rights. His protests were personal—he refused to stand for the national anthem during the 1960 World Series. Jim Crow, clearly, affected him deeply, particularly when his father, Walter Rollins Sr.—a career navy man who ran an officer’s club—was discharged and imprisoned on trumped up charges of fraternizing with white women at an official party. As Levy notes, “the slow violence of witnessing the military’s failure to uphold justice communicated unequivocally to sixteen-year-old Sonny what it meant to be black in America.”
The school kid who aspired to be the next Paul Robeson (“my super-hero”) nearly always let his music do the talking. When racial prejudice prevented Rollins from renting an apartment in 1957, his response was Freedom Suite (Riverside, 1958), which Levy describes as “the first prominent civil rights-themed album of the modern jazz era.” Certainly, the album proved to be a catalyst, with Max Roach for one acknowledging its influence in pushing him to record We Insist! Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite (Candid, 1960), one of a raft of civil rights albums that appeared in those turbulent years.
Here’s the full “Freedom Suite” album, with Rollins on tenor sax, Oscar Pettiford on bass, and Max Roach on drums:
Writer and theater critic Hilton Als interviewed Rollins for Pitchfork in 2016, in which Rollins cleared up some misinformation :
I read that one of the first experiences of music that you loved was a concert that Frank Sinatra gave when you were in high school where he spoke about racial tolerance.
I’d like to address that. From the time I was a child my grandmother was an activist.
She was West Indian?
Oh yeah. My grandfather, her husband, was from Haiti, but my grandmother was from St. Thomas. Anyway, when I was a little boy I used to walk in parades up and down Lenox Ave. We would be marching for W.E.B. Dubois, Paul Robeson. I grew up with that. Through “Free the Scottsboro Boys.” Now fast forward to 1946, when they bussed us from where we lived on 175th Street. There was a new school opening up down in Italian Harlem, on 116th Street, off of the river. This was a new high school. We were met with a lot of hostility from the neighborhood. The people in the area figured it was some black kids coming into their neighborhood, and there were a lot of fights—people were throwing stuff out the windows as we were getting out. It was just a whole lot of violence. So Frank Sinatra came down to our school and did a concert. Naturally, he was an Italian hero. So he preached to the people that we shouldn’t fight with these kids, which was very helpful. Things straightened out after that. Now, I think that was great, but that was not my introduction to civil rights. I’ve been around it all my life. The wrong people have put on Wikipedia that Frank Sinatra came down, and it changed my life. That’s complete bullshit. And it’s very offensive.
For the 60th anniversary of the recording of Rollins’ Vanguard album, “A Night at the Village Vanguard,” jazz critic and author Nate Chinen dove into the history and interviewed the legend—then 87—for NPR in 2017.
“The Vanguard was sort of the premier room at that time,” [Rollins] recalls, speaking by phone from his home in Woodstock, N.Y. “A lot of guys played there, and they all seemed to express the music without any sort of impediment. I felt particularly comfortable.”
In the original liner notes to the LP, released on Blue Note Records in 1958, Leonard Feather notes that it “constitutes a double premiere.” He’s referring to A Night at the Village Vanguard being both the first live documentation of Rollins as a bandleader and the first album recorded the Village Vanguard, a wedge-shaped basement room regarded, then and now, as “one of New York’s foremost havens of contemporary jazz.”
Joseph Neff, senior editor at The Vinyl District, wrote his own paean to Rollins’ album in 2014.
What these musicians achieved is amongst the very greatest jazz ever laid to tape. Surely no release in Rollins’ discography ranks higher, with the horn solos in “Old Devil Moon” alone more than justifying the full cost of this LP. And as he plays, Jones and Ware are in constant communication with the saxophonist and each other. Rollins is still clearly the leader; he called the tunes and was the one who chiseled the marble of this splendid audio sculpture down to a three-piece in the first place.
But all it takes is a listen to the vibrant elasticity, the assured balance of the rhythmic imperative in tandem with the desire for melodiousness, in Ware’s opening bass-line on “Softly, as in a Morning Sunrise” to comprehend that in the creation of this music, hierarchy was on nobody’s mind. So logically Ware’s solos are ceaselessly interesting and never in service to formula, with this feature easily extending to Jones’ responsive work at the kit.
Over half a century later it’s Rollins that impresses most though, mainly because few have sounded this nervy while unfurling so naturally, his improvising free-flowing but reliant on vital swing. But while he was always connected to a savvy classicism, he also wasn’t chained to it. For example, by imbuing the concise “Striver’s Row,” the first of Rollins’ tunes, with increased freedom, the group simultaneously references bebop and transcends it.
Here’s the whole album—just 43 minutes long:
About a decade younger than Rollins, Jamaican-American pianist Monty Alexander was born on June 6, 1944, in Kingston, Jamaica.
Born on D-Day, June 6, 1944, Monty Alexander was playing Christmas carols by ear at 4, entertaining neighbors and relatives by 5, taking his first piano lessons at 6. He resisted formal instruction, but still, growing up in Kingston, absorbed all the musical flavors that comprise his mature sonic palette.
“I soaked up everything—the calypso band playing at the swimming pool in the country, local guys at jam sessions who wished they were Dizzy Gillespie and Miles Davis, a dance band playing Jamaican melodies, songs that Belafonte would have sung,” he recalls.
When Alexander was 9, his father, a Kingston merchant, brought him to hear and play for the legendary pianist Eddie Heywood. At 10, he saw Nat “King” Cole play at Kingston’s Carib Theater, the same venue where, at 13, he heard a concert featuring Louis Armstrong.
“I had one foot in the jazz camp and the other in the old-time folk music,” Alexander says. “One was not more valuable than the other. Boogie-woogie was important to me, too. I’d sit at the piano and think I was the Count Basie Orchestra or a rhythm-and-blues band. I automatically reached for anything I wanted to play on the piano, and just played it. It didn’t come with practicing. It came with playing, playing, playing all the time.”
This Downbeat article from Jazz journalist Ted Panken highlights a musical conflict for Alexander that I never thought about—the establishment of a “jazz identity.”
The adage “absence makes the heart grow fonder,” coined to convey the kindling effect of separation on romantic ardor, applies with equal measure to pianist Monty Alexander’s ongoing obsession with the music of Jamaica, his homeland, whence he migrated to Miami in 1961, at 17.
As a Kingston youngster, Alexander recalled, “I soaked up everything—the calypso band playing at the swimming pool in the country, local guys at jam sessions who wished they were Dizzy and Miles, a dance band playing Jamaican melodies, songs that Belafonte would have sung. I was fully aware of the rhythm-and-blues, my heroes on piano were Eddie Heywood and Erroll Garner, and, above all, Louis Armstrong was my king. I had one foot in the jazz camp and the other in the old-time folk music—no one more valuable than the other.”
Once in the States, though, Alexander compartmentalized, sublimating roots towards establishing a jazz identity. By 1970, he was a distinguished voice, with a c.v. citing long-haul trio gigs with various New York A-listers, as well as consequential sideman work in Los Angeles with Milt Jackson and Ray Brown. By the late ‘70s, when he closed the books on his 300-days-a-year-on-the-road trio with John Clayton and Jeff Hamilton, he was an upper-echelon stylist, referred to by Oscar Peterson, himself descended from St. Kitt’s and St. Croix, as “my little West Indian counterpart.”
“You come to America, you try to blend in and do what they do,” Alexander explained. “At first, I was even trying to speak like American people”—he demonstrated several voices—“so they wouldn’t keep asking, ‘Where do you come from?’ But as the years went by, I started expressing myself by claiming my heritage more. I said, ‘Wait a minute, home is as good as it gets.’”
AllAboutJazz featured Alexander’s 2008 concert series bringing multiple genres together.
On March 7 and 8, Jamaican-born pianist Monty Alexander brings a uniquely themed concert to Jazz at Lincoln Center, celebrating both his roots as a Jamaican and the cultural intersections of jazz and the West Indies. Alexander is a celebrated musician whose recording and performance history with Milt Jackson and Ray Brown alone places him squarely in the pedigree of jazz, but he has long embraced his roots in Jamaica and the islands of the English-speaking Caribbean.*
“Throughout my career, the music of Jamaica and Trinidad has remained very dear to me because of my fond memories of hearing Lord Kitchener, Harry Belafonte, the Mighty Sparrow, Lord Flea, Lord Melody, Alerth Bedasse, and scores of others as I grew up in Kingston,” explains Alexander. “These two styles of music, calypso and mento, express a joy and love of life that I hope to recapture during the performances at Jazz at Lincoln Center.”[…]
Throughout the 20th century, West Indian immigrants faced unique challenges in their process of assimilation in African American communities of New York City, often compelled to de-emphasize their heritage to avoid prevalent stereotypes. In the jazz community, the phenomenon was similar, as Alexander recalls: “I was happy to fit in for the most part, but something inside made me made me realize that I can tap into something really important in my own culture, from the deep in the country to the cities and everywhere in between.”
Through the years, Alexander and myriad jazz artists with West Indian roots made key contributions to jazz, bringing both subtle and explicit West Indian musical expressions. Among West Indian musicians whose careers included jazz was Trinidadian alto saxophonist Rupert Cole, who worked with Sam Manning before joining Don Redman in the 1930s and Louis Armstrong in the 1940s. Other Jazz musicians who were from the West Indies or whose families were from the West Indies include Blue Mitchell (Bahamas), Fats Navarro (Bahamas), Wynton Kelly (Jamaica), Kenny Drew (Jamaica), Oscar Peterson (St. Croix and St. Kitts), Carmen McRae (Jamaica), Art Taylor (Jamaica), Connie Kay (Montserrat), Randy Weston (Jamaica), Roy Haynes (Barbados), Dizzy Reece (Jamaica), and Sonny Rollins (Virgin Islands)
Sadly, that concert isn’t available on YouTube, but here’s an event from 2009: “Monty Alexander live from Jazz at Lincoln Center, ‘Harlem to Kingston Express.’”
In this more recent 2023 clip, Alexander introduces his performance of “Sweet Jamaica” as his journey from Jamaica to the U.S.
As mentioned above, there are numerous jazz musicians with Caribbean roots, and though I am out of space here, I’ll be featuring them in the comments section below, so be sure to join me!