Artist of the Week: Sonny Rollins

Over the last year I have really gotten into Jazz. I started out with the basics, Miles' Kind of Blue, Coltrane's A Love Supreme, and a series of collections for Monk, Bird, Mingus, Dizzy, Duke, and Coleman Hawkins in addition to the collections of Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, and Billie Holiday that I had for years.

Kind of Blue is certainly my favorite singular Jazz record but I've finally settled on who is my favorite Jazz artist and it's Sonny Rollins. Like Miles, Sonny could flow between different sounds and make them his own but that's about the extent of the analysis I am going to try because I don't consider myself anything close to a Jazz expert and it would be a fraud to try to write as if I knew what I was talking about. I can (and do) do that with rock music but not yet - and maybe never - with Jazz. So all I can simply convey is that Sonny is my favorite Jazz artist and let his music speak for itself: