Friday, December 22, 2017

Roswell Rudd (1935-2017)

The trombonist Roswell Rudd has died at the age of eighty-two. The Ottawa Citizen has an obituary. Like Jaki Byard or Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Rudd played the whole history of jazz on his instrument. A YouTube sampler, with music by Fats Waller, Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, Herbie Nichols, Rudd, and Traditional:

“Blue Turning Grey Over You” (with Lafayette Harris) : “Ko-Ko” (with Steve Lacy) : “Brilliant Corners” (with Steve Lacy) : “Twelve Bars” (with Lafayette Harris) : “Bamako” (with Toumani Diabaté) : “Dry Bones” (with Sonic Youth)

Bonus: Rudd appears in Jazz on a Summer’s Day (dir. Bert Stern and Aram Avakian, 1960) as a member of Eli’s Chosen Six, the Yale Dixielanders who motor their way through the film.

*

December 23: Francis Davis’s 1993 profile of Roswell Rudd, “White Anglo-Saxon Pythagorean,” is online.

*

December 26: The New York Times has an obituary.

comments: 0