![Outtakes from Robin D. G. Kelley’s Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original:‘The original draft of Thelonious Monk was much longer than the published. In fact, I cut out some 70,000 at the behest of my editor, much of it focused on the music. Not surprisingly, a few critics and most of my friends wanted more discussion of Monk’s music, not less. So I decided to include a few excerpts from the original manuscript that might be of interest. Warning: these are unedited sections and I left them pretty much as is.’ [Read More]
–Robin D. G. Kelley](http://25.media.tumblr.com/f60c66e98757aba632449447d26d3191/tumblr_mfcehf6kV61qaq8flo1_250.jpg)
Gary Giddins interviews Sonny Rollins
April 14, 2008 | CUNY Lecture Series, Graduate Center
Jazz giant Sonny Rollins is routinely referred to as “the greatest living tenor saxophone” by his peers. National Book Award-winning jazz critic Gary Giddins has called him “jazz’s most provocatively enigmatic man.” The two come together in a rare conversation at the Graduate Center to talk about Rollins’ remarkable musical life, which has spanned six decades. Rollins, 77, recalls starting to play the sax at 7 years old and, by age 19, having recorded with such jazz legends as J.J. Johnson and Bud Powell. “I wasn’t intimidated by those guys,” says Rollins. “Somehow I always had a sense of my destiny.”
