Music Monday: Sonny Rollins and Miles Davis

It goes without saying that I’m listening to Sonny Rollins and Miles Davis this week.

The passing of Sonny Rollins led me to listen to his great album Saxophone Colossus (1957). It’s may well be the greatest hard bop album ever recorded. Everyone knows it, but it’s always worth hearing again:

As readers of this blog know, I love The Bridge (1962) and have posted about it multiple times. I’ve enjoyed Sonny Rollins’s work with Miles Davis in the mid-1950s (including The New Sounds). I marveled that Rollins worked with Don Cherry. And I enjoyed his 1970s output.

I’ve not dipped too deeply in Rollins 1980s and 1990s output, but like most people, I’ve listened to this 9/11 concert:

Rollins passing was not the only landmark this past week even if it overshadowed the most complicated legacy of Miles Davis on his centennial. For some reason I decided that I needed to listen to his Agartha (1975). This might be the greatest pseudoarchaeology themed album of all time and it just flat our rocks. Pete Cosey’s guitar is incredible, Sonny Fortune’s sax sounds like nothing he ever managed after he left Davis’s band, and Miles — despite being in debilitating pain — creates a sonic tapestry that never devolves into noise (ahem… Dark Magus)  because the groove is so locked in.

I know this is probably not the ideal album to listen to on Miles’s centennial, but there’s something about it that captures the complexity of his legacy in ways that his earlier classics do not.