Word is coming through on US social media that Sonny Fortune (McCoy Tyner et al) died on Thursday 25 October. Now confirmed at Wiki.
RIP.
RIP.
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"Sonny Fortune, a saxophonist whose powerful sound and assured yet questing style made him a steadfast presence in jazz for more than half a century, died on Thursday in New York City. He was 79.
The cause was complications from a stroke, said his longtime booking agent, Reggie Marshall. Fortune had been at Mount Sinai Hospital since suffering a series of strokes in September.
Principally known as an alto saxophonist, Fortune also had an authoritative voice on soprano, tenor and baritone saxophones, as well as clarinet and flute. His body of work spans the spirit-minded avant-garde and the most swinging modern jazz, along with multiple strains of fusion — both as a member of a well-documented Miles Davis band and on his own albums....." (NPR Obit).
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"With Sahara, Tyner found the precise perfect "middle ground" on which to stand, more structured than late Coltrane, but exploding with a ferocity and freedom of sound that made it simply one of the greatest jazz recordings of the decade. None of the other members of his quartet ever sounded so inspired, so liberated as they do here. Sonny Fortune threatens to tear the roof off the joint on more than one occasion, Calvin Hill is more than rock-solid on bass, his roots arcing deeply into the earth, and as for Alphonse Mouzon, well, no one familiar with his later vapid meanderings in fusion would begin to recognize him here, so incendiary is his playing. And Tyner develops so much pure energy, channeled with such pinpoint precision, that one worries about the physical stability of any piano under such an assault" -
All Music Review of McCoy Tyner's "Sahara" album (Milestone 1972), which is held to be his best and includes the late Sonny Fortune.
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Originally posted by BLUESNIK'S REVOX View Post
I often wonder the extent to which our own Elton Dean was influenced by Fortune's playing on that album - the latter's way of creating repeated sinuous chromatic figures then, usiong them as a sort of launching pad, expanding them more and more before running freely away from them in ever-increasing convolutions. You hear that often in Elton Dean's playing from the mid-seventies on, when he developed his own style, away from Coltrane and Skid, while in the meantime Sonny Fortune turned back to a more bluesy beboppy way of phrasing in the more straight ahead settings where I've heard him. The energy from that and other Tyner recordings of that brief period when you wondered, would he go more in a jazz-rock direction or feel to restricted to do that, really burst out most excitingly from recordings, notwithstanding the poor rather muffled sound, said to have resulted from rock specialists who were employed having no clue how to record the stuff; Mouzon came across like a volcano about to blow apart.Comment
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