Better Do It Now Before You Die Later book launch (McNally Jackson Seaport)
Better Do It Now Before You Die Later book launch (McNally Jackson Seaport)
McNally Jackson Seaport
New York, NY 10038
To celebrate the release of Better Do It Now Before You Die Later, the memoir of American saxophonist Sonny Simmons, Blank Forms presents a reading from the book, followed by a panel discussion between musicians Ras Burnett, Michael Marcus, and Juma Sultan, moderated by Brent Hayes Edwards.
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Though his years in the New York free-jazz scene of the sixties cemented his reputation as “one of the most forceful and convincing composers and soloists in his field,” saxophonist Sonny Simmons (1933–2021) was nearly forgotten by the eighties, which found him broke, heavily dependent on drugs and alcohol, and newly separated from his wife and kids. “I played on the streets from 1980 to 1994, 365 days a year,” Simmons tells jazz historian and biographer Marc Chaloin in Better Do It Now Before You Die Later. “I would go to North Beach, and I’d sleep in the park. The word got around town that Sonny is a junkie, really strung out.”
The resurrection of Simmons’s career—upon the release of his critically acclaimed Ancient Ritual in 1994—has become a modern legend of the genre. In the last two decades of his musical career, Simmons broke through to a new echelon of recognition, embarking on successful European tours, leading new ensembles, and recording a series of twenty-first-century albums that inducted him, by his death at the age of eighty-seven, into the pantheon with the great innovators and masters of the music. But to this day he remains an undersung figure.
Here, in the first-ever book dedicated to his life, Simmons brings the ferocity of style that animated his music to every sentence. Like Charles Mingus’s Beneath the Underdog and Art Pepper’s Straight Life, Simmons’s Better Do It Now Before You Die Later delivers an unfiltered, firsthand account of life in the bebop business in all its brilliance and brutality, capturing the devastating lows of addiction, poverty, and obscurity and the ecstatic highs of a life dedicated to The Music.
Saxophonist, composer, educator, and musicologist Ras Burnett was born in Brooklyn in 1968. He has been a performing artist since 1987, specializing in free jazz, new music, reggae, and funk. He has an MFA in Music Composition from the Vermont College of Fine Arts and teaches at The New School for Social Research.
Born in San Francisco in 1952, Michael Marcus first played with Sonny Simmons on Backwoods Suite in 1982, the same year he moved to New York. In 2000, he and Simmons co-founded the Cosmosamatics, an ensemble that at various points included such luminaries as Art Lewis, Clifford Barbaro, Curtis Lundy, and William Parker, and which recorded nine albums in fifteen years.
Juma Sultan was born in Monrovia, California in 1942 and moved to New York in 1966 at the encouragement of Simmons; in 1969, the pair recorded together for the first time on Simmons’s Manhattan Egos (Arhoolie). Renowned for his yearslong collaboration with Jimi Hendrix, Sultan has also performed with Archie Shepp, Albert Ayler, Pharoah Sanders, and Joe McPhee; led the New York Musicians Organization (NYMO); and founded the jazz loft Studio We with James DuBois.
Brent Hayes Edwards is the Peng Family Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where he is also affiliated with the Center for Jazz Studies. His recent publications include Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination (Harvard, 2017) and Easily Slip Into Another World: A Life in Music (Knopf, 2023), the co-authored autobiography of the Pulitzer Prize-winning jazz composer Henry Threadgill, which was awarded the ASCAP Foundation Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Book Award in Pop Music and the American Book Award.