What was the biggest challenge in your approach to the research? How did you plan it out? This past November, they published RJ Smith’s brilliant new biography, Chuck Berry: An American Life. Much of the Da Capo team stayed on through the transition, and Hachette Books has worked to preserve the Da Capo legacy. At around the time I signed the contract, Perseus was acquired by Hachette, and Da Capo was subsequently absorbed into the Hachette Books imprint.
Given the name, Da Capo was predictably known for music, and in particular jazz books-Arthur Taylor’s essential Notes and Tones, Val Wilmer’s The Face of Black Music, the English translation of Francis Paudras’s Dance of the Infidels: A Portrait of Bud Powell, and the venerable Da Capo Best Music Writing series, to name just a few. In December 2016, I accepted an offer from Da Capo Press, then an imprint of the Perseus Books Group. When I began the fellowship, the book was not under contract. I had a fellowship at the Leon Levy Center for Biography at The Graduate Center, CUNY during the 2016-17 academic year. How did you come to be published by Hachette? I began research in the fall of 2015 and made final revisions in September 2022, so seven years. How long from concept to completion of your final draft? Although presented chronologically, the reader can do their own improv and bob and weave throughout by experiencing Sonny Rollins’s life here in small bites.
Saxophone colossus full#
It is a well-considered accounting of the thoughts and wishes and travels, both to geographic places and through different life phases, one of our greatest natural treasures.Īt well over 700 pages, this book is rich and dense, too full a meal to digest quickly just to gain ground. The book doesn’t shy away from the grit and difficulties of life as a musician and issues like drug use and addiction, imprisonment, the toll that performing takes on musicians and their families, etc. The visceral feel of the clubs, the streets of New York City, the big band leaders and musicians of the era, the vocabulary of this world and the difficult life of a gigging musician-all is felt as if walking through and personally experiencing it.
Rollins is of course a man, a musician, but also a larger-than-life figure in the world of jazz Levy never lionizes him but rather tells a life story in detail. Perhaps its greatest strength is evoking the times he has lived (and continues to live) through and actually himself had a huge hand in creating. Aidan Levy has written a just-released book on living legend Sonny Rollins that deftly chronicles the life and music of the great tenor player and does so with an honest eye.
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