A fine, fun memory of Sonny Rollins, circa 2009. Mrs. Amnesiac and myself attended a concert performance by the now passed on tenior saxophone titan at the Masonic Auditorium in San Francisco. He had a trio for the evening, one that featured Al Foster on drums. Wish that I could recall the bass player but that's just not happening. The group came out, briefly acknowledged the audience, and proceeded to play a looooooong piece. Seriously, they played for ages, with Sonny in particular going off on his horn, extending melodic fragments and twisting ideas until they became some other idea, spiraling off and out into zones of Jazz bliss. It drove the people in attendance wild, that's for sure. It's not recalled by me as to whether that one song took up the entirety of their first set: it may have. That was the one time that I saw Rollins live, for better or worse. He stayed admirably true to the music that he loved for decades, and now that he's left this place America has lost one of its last standing practitioners from that remarkably strong culture that developed in the 20th Century, if not the last. Thanks for sticking around for so long, Sonny, and thanks for all of that beautiful playing you laid on me and a couple of thousand others that night on California St. back in the aughts.
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