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The Prizewinners of 2007
Steve Reich and Sonny Rollins |
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Steve Reich |
Sonny Rollins |
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Citations |
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"The 2007 Polar Music Prize is awarded to the American composer and musician Steve Reich. The award recognises his unique ability to use repeats, canon technique and minimal variation of patterns to develop an entire universe of evocative music, endowed with immediate tonal beauty. Inspired by different musical traditions, Steve Reich has transferred questions of faith, society and philosophy into a hypnotic sounding music that has inspired musicians and composers of all genres."
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"The 2007 Polar Music Prize is awarded to the American tenor saxophonist and composer Sonny Rollins, one of the most powerful and personal voices in jazz for more than 50 years. Sonny Rollins has elevated the unaccompanied solo to the highest artistic level – all characterised by a distinctive and powerful sound, irresistible swing and an individual musical sense of humour. He is still active and the greatest remaining master from one of jazz’s seminal eras."
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| STEVE REICH With the release of his large-scale ensemble work Drumming on the prestigious Deutsche Grammophon label in 1974, Steve Reich, once one of many promising American composers, shot to the head of the field. When he had his breakthrough in Europe, it was with the group Steve Reich and Musicians and at a time when atonal post-war music dominated contemporary art music on both sides of the Atlantic. Reich, however, stood for something completely different: “The pulse, and the concept of clear tonal center will re-emerge as basic sources of new music,” as he wrote in 1970. When another label, ECM, released the hour-long Music for 18 Musicians, and launched it on the radio and in the shops as classical music, jazz and progressive rock, contemporary music gained a stylistic influence that stretched way beyond the confines of its own genre. Meanwhile, Reich’s colleague Philip Glass, was enjoying successes in opera and theatre. With that, Minimalism had finally had its breakthrough, and its influence has done nothing but grow ever since. There are now a great many composers with their roots in minimalism who are active in a wide range of genres: opera, dance, orchestral and sacred music, film, jazz, rock, mass spectaculars, computer games, and background music. Reich himself is one of the most discriminating composers, and releases work of only the highest quality. A modern dictionary defines minimalism as “a genre of visual art and music that seeks to produce works that are liberated from the artist’s own subjectivity and that use as few modes of expression as possible.” Reich himself hates the label ‘minimalism’, just like the American artist Donald Judd, who was a painter and sculptor when the term was first coined. The label does give a clue as to the departure point of Reich’s music, but hardly as to its destination. Time and again he stresses how important it is to make music that allows listeners to follow every detail of the process. And performing and listening to gradual musical processes “makes possible that shift of attention away from he and she and you and me towards it.” In the mid-sixties, Reich composed a number of pieces using tape-loops. He then realised the same concept on instruments, chiefly drums, the vibraphone, the marimba and the piano. His use of several similar instruments is of particular importance; as the name suggests Six pianos uses six baby grands, and was written and rehearsed in a piano shop on Manhattan. Textless voices are used to mimic the sounds of the instruments. This changed in the 1980s. Tehillim is three sung hymns from the Book of Psalms, revealing Reich’s fascination for Judaism and religion. In Different trains for string quartet and tape and the video operas The Cave and Three Tales from the past two decades, the perspective widens to reflect his interest in current affairs. In his early development, encounters with West African drum music and Balinese gamelan music were an important source of inspiration. However, he has never imitated or borrowed directly from ethnic music; instead, he became convinced that acoustic instruments were able to produce richer sounds than electronic ones and that percussion could form the instrumental bedrock of music. His simplest piece needs no instruments. Entitled Clapping music, it is simply the sound of two people clapping their hands. The pattern is in 12/8 time, 8 beats interspersed with four pauses. The duo start in unison, and then while one keeps to the pattern the other moves one step at a time within the pattern until they are once again clapping in unison. It takes three or four minutes, and the process is straightforward and easy to grasp. However, this description indicates none of the pleasure and satisfaction that the performance gives the listener. “Obviously music should put all within listening range into a state of ecstasy” (1969). Hans Gefors, 2007 Translation Neil Betteridge Steve Reich Web Site: www.stevereich.com |
SONNY ROLLINS When it comes to his music – and the business of music – Sonny Rollins, in the year 2006, is fully and firmly engaged. In the midst of a spate of honors, including a Grammy win for Best Jazz Instrumental Solo, as well as top awards (Artist of the Year and Tenor Saxophonist) from the Jazz Journalists Association and in the Down Beat Critics and Readers Poll, Rollins has just released his first new studio recording in five years on his own Doxy label. The new CD, Sonny, Please, captures his working band "at a good pitch," as Rollins puts it, shortly after they returned from a sold-out Japanese tour in November 2005. "Any time you do a string of performances, it tightens up the ensemble, and the band was playing well – very high-powered, if I may use that expression. Toward the end of the tour, the group really began to come together, and as a result I began to be able to play much more fluently. My mind was getting clear, and the whole thing was beginning to happen." "Sonny is really playing on this record," concurs Clifton Anderson, Rollins’s longtime trombonist who also served as the new CD’s producer. "Each track has its own beautiful distinction, yet there’s a clear continuity throughout the recording. I’m sure this is because Sonny was more involved at every level of this project than I’ve ever witnessed before." In addition to Anderson, the group is comprised of bassist Bob Cranshaw, an esteemed Rollins collaborator since 1959; guitarist Bobby Broom and drummer Steve Jordan, both of whom had worked with Sonny on prior occasions in the 1980s; and the percussionist Kimati Dinizulu, who joined the band about six years ago. The CD program is a fine mix of Rollins originals and indelible standards from his boyhood. The assertive title track takes its name from "something my wife [Lucille] always used to say: ‘Sonny, please!’"; "Nishi" was named for a bassist friend in Japan, and "Park Palace Parade" for a now-defunct Spanish Harlem dance hall where many calypso artists once appeared. "Remembering Tommy" was first written for a session with Tommy Flanagan about 15 years ago. While reading an article recently about the late pianist, Rollins reveals, "I got very nostalgic about Tommy and revisited the tune." "Serenade" comes from the Rollins memory bank: composed by Ricardo Drigo, it was the theme for a long-since-forgotten radio show. "I always remembered that melody," he says, "and finally brought it out of retirement some years ago." "Stairway to the Stars" is a favourite ’30s-vintage ballad, while "Someday I’ll Find You" – the theme from the 1930s radio program "Mr. Keene, Tracer of Lost Persons" – was previously recorded by Rollins in 1958, on Freedom Suite. As for the saxophonist’s somewhat surprising foray into record entrepreneurship with his Doxy label, he notes that "it seemed like the business was going in that direction. Since my contract was about to expire with Milestone [after 34 years], and my wife [who died in November 2004] was not here to handle my business, I realized I would have to take a more proactive stance, and I made the leap." ("Doxy," of course, is the title of a famous Rollins composition first recorded with Miles Davis in 1954.) Walter Theodore Rollins was born in Harlem, New York on September 7, 1930, of parents native to the Virgin Islands. His older brother Valdemar and sister Gloria were also musically inclined but only Sonny veered away from classical music after his uncle, a professional saxophonist, introduced him to jazz and blues. He gravitated to the tenor saxophone in high school, inspired in particular by Coleman Hawkins. "I always had a strong rhythmic thing," Sonny says. "That was there from the start." By the time he was out of school, Rollins was already working with big-name musicians such as Bud Powell, Fats Navarro, and Roy Haynes. In 1951 he debuted as a leader on Prestige; his affiliation with that label also produced classics such as Saxophone Colossus, Worktime, and Tenor Madness (with John Coltrane). In early 1956, until he went out on his own permanently as a leader in the summer of 1957, Rollins played in the Max Roach–Clifford Brown Quintet, one of the most definitive (and tragically short-lived) hard-bop ensembles of its day. Often with his own pianoless trio, Rollins then entered a tremendously fertile period during which he recorded major works such as A Night at the Village Vanguard, Way Out West, and Freedom Suite. In 1959, Rollins took the first of his legendary sabbaticals from music. Living on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, he was often spotted on the nearby Williamsburg Bridge at night, deep in a rigorous practice regimen. "I wanted to work on my horn, I wanted to study more harmony, I wanted to better myself," he told Stanley Crouch in The New Yorker, "and I wanted to get out of the environment of all that smoke and alcohol and drugs." When Rollins returned to performing in 1961, he recorded The Bridge with Jim Hall and Bob Cranshaw, led a quartet with trumpeter Don Cherry and drummer Billy Higgins, and recorded with his idol Coleman Hawkins. He also received a Grammy nomination for his score for the popular film Alfie. At decade’s end he undertook one final hiatus, studying Zen Buddhism in Japan and yoga in India. While living in an ashram, he considered leaving music permanently in order to pursue spiritual studies, but a teacher persuaded him that music was his spiritual path, and an uplifting force for good. In 1972, with the encouragement and support of his wife Lucille, who had become his business manager, Rollins returned to performing and recording, signing with Milestone and releasing Next Album. (Working at first with Orrin Keepnews, Sonny was by the early ’80s producing his own Milestone sessions with Lucille.) His lengthy association with the Berkeley-based label produced two dozen albums in various settings – from his working groups to all-star ensembles (Tommy Flanagan, Jack DeJohnette, Stanley Clarke, Tony Williams); from a solo recital to tour recordings with the Milestone Jazzstars (Ron Carter, McCoy Tyner); in the studio and on the concert stage (Montreux, San Francisco, New York, Boston). Sonny was also the subject of a mid-’80s documentary by Robert Mugge entitled Saxophone Colossus; part of its soundtrack is available as G-Man. He won his first performance Grammy for This Is What I Do (2000), and his second for 2005’s Without a Song (The 9/11 Concert), in the Best Jazz Instrumental Solo category (for "Why Was I Born"). In addition, Sonny received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences in 2004. In June 2006 Rollins was inducted into the Academy of Achievement – and gave a solo performance – at the International Achievement Summit in Los Angeles. The event was hosted by George Lucas and Steven Spielberg and attended by world leaders as well as distinguished figures in the arts and sciences. "I am convinced that all art has the desire to leave the ordinary," Rollins said in a recent interview for the Catalan magazine Jaç, "and to say it one way, at a spiritual level, a state of the exaltation at existence. All art has this in common. But jazz, the world of improvisation, is perhaps the highest, because we do not have the opportunity to make changes. It’s as if we were painting before the public, and the following morning we cannot go back and correct that blue color or change that red. We have to have the blues and reds very well placed before going out to play. So for me, jazz is probably the most demanding art." And Sonny Rollins – seeker and past master – is jazz’s most exacting, exhilarating, and inspiring practitioner. Copyright © www.tedkurland.com |
| Sonny
Rollins Web Site: www.sonnyrollins.com |
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Copyright © 1992-2008 Polar Music Prize. All rights reserved. The music on this web site has been made available with the due permission of STIM/NCB. Updated: 02/13/2008 | E-mail: webmaster@polarmusicprize.com | |