Roswell Rudd

“You blow in this end of the trombone and sound comes out the other end and disrupts the cosmos.”
—Roswell Rudd

As a lapsed trombonist and a jazz fan for most of my adult life, I can’t help having a healthy respect for Roswell Rudd, even if his music rarely spends much time in my CD player. Known for his “free” playing, Rudd, who died Thursday, just a month after his 82nd birthday, was actually a musical omnivore with very big ears. In late life, especially, he made good on his work as a musicological researcher for Alan Lomax, collaborating with musicians from across the African diaspora. He never wrote anything even vaguely calypso-ish, as far as I know—Rudd fanatics, correct me if I’m overlooking something—though he did record with Puerto Rican cuatro master Yamo Toro. What I respect most about Rudd, maybe, is his lifelong championing of his mentor Herbie Nichols, whose music occasionally shows the oblique influence of his Trini and St. Kittian parentage (and of the San Juan Hill and Harlem neighborhoods where he grew up). Without Rudd’s evangelizing, Nichols’s work might still be languishing in the shadows.

Here’s Rudd, with Greg Millar and John Bacon, Jr., covering Nichols’s “Jamaica”:

---

More reading/listening:

• Giovanni Russonello’s obituary for the New York Times
• Appreciation by trombonist Jacob Garchik at Do The M@th
• 2013 interview with Rudd at Burning Ambulance (h/t for the photo above)
• Kevin Whitehead’s review (on NPR’s Fresh Air) of Rudd’s final album
• 2002 interview with Terry Gross (on NPR’s Fresh Air)
• Interview and Blindfold Test with Ted Panken
• “Mess-a-lypso“