“We have figured out our show, and people seem to be really connecting with it,” Emmet Cohen says of his band’s current tour, a tribute to Miles Davis and John Coltrane. “The audiences are large and exuberant. It feels like we’re doing what we’re meant to be doing.”
(Photo: Kevin Alexander)Jul 14, 2026 12:32 PM
The first thing people notice about Emmet Cohen, the thing his legions of fans cite most frequently, is his smile: broad, uninhibited, genuine. He flashes it frequently when he…
Sonny Rollins performing at the Chicago Jazz Festival in 1992
(Photo: Ronald Heard)May 26, 2026 11:21 AM
“Is this going to be another negative, punch-Sonny-Rollins-in-the-eye article for DownBeat?” the man asked with weary resignation as he plopped into a den chair. “Well, I agreed to do it. I know how it’s going to come out anyway. So, go ahead, ask me. I’m ready.”
It was a telephone interview. I imagined Sonny Rollins sitting there in his Hudson River Valley country home north of Rhinebeck, New York; sitting there in a nimbus of ennui waiting to be prodded and poked with an assortment of those unpleasant, blunt instruments we journalists…
