On Sonny Simmons

The autobiographies of jazz musicians are their own siloed literary category, as the musicians themselves belong to an archetype that cannot be fabricated in fiction or imitated by wannabe bohemians; their ability to combine discipline and obsession with recklessness and self-destruction exists almost nowhere else in culture. In the case of Sonny Simmons, born in Sicily Island, Louisiana, in the summer of 1933, the eldest son of a preacher father who moved the family to Oakland when Sonny was a kid, his dictated and transcribed memories populate a new five-hundred-page biography, Better Do it Now Before You Die Later, so detailed and hyper-fixated on musical affiliations it’s part encyclopedia of black sound from the 1940s to ’90s. With the help of Marc Chaloin, the tales are organized chronologically, but you do get the sense Simmons has total recall and could share incidents in any sequence, especially those from the years before he began using heroin.