“Jeff knows just what to play, how to construct drum fills around the arrangement,” Willie Jones III says of Jeff Hamilton. “Very musical.”
(Photo: Anna Yayskevich)Jul 28, 2026 1:55 PM
A month before the June release of Memories Of You, the ninth leader album by Willie Jones III and the 34th release on his WJ3 label, the 58-year-old drummer, producer, educator…
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…
