Sonny Stitt
Sonny Stitt is one of the most-recorded saxophonists in jazz history and one of the most-debated. The Parker comparison followed him for forty years, and he answered it on every track. The catalog moves through three distinct phases: the early Prestige and Verve bebop years, the soul-jazz organ combos and tenor battles with Gene Ammons, and the late renaissance on Cobblestone and Muse in the 1970s. Thirty albums across three eras. Browse below.
Browse by Era
Each era page covers a distinct period in Stitt's career, with full reviews, personnel details, Apple Music audio previews, and album art for every record.
Ten albums covering Stitt's first decade on record. From the early Prestige sessions with Bud Powell and J.J. Johnson through the Verve years with Dizzy Gillespie and Oscar Peterson. The bebop vocabulary fully formed; the comparisons to Charlie Parker constant; the answer to those comparisons made on every track.
Twelve records covering the middle period. Soul-jazz organ combo sessions, the famous tenor-battle records with Gene Ammons, the Charlie Parker tribute album, and a brief but significant stint with Miles Davis's quintet in 1960. The transition years between bebop and the late-career renaissance.
Eight records from Stitt's late-career renaissance on Cobblestone and Muse. After a decade of journeyman work, he found a sympathetic small-label home in the 1970s that produced some of his most relaxed and substantial recording. These records are among the most highly regarded in his catalog.
Sonny Stitt, 1924–1982
Edward Hammond Boatner Jr. was born February 2, 1924, in Boston and raised in Saginaw, Michigan, the adopted son of an educator family in the Midwest. He took the name Sonny Stitt early. By his late teens he was working the Detroit and Newark scenes; by his early twenties he was on Tiny Bradshaw's road band, and shortly after that he was in Billy Eckstine's orchestra alongside Dizzy Gillespie, Fats Navarro, and Gene Ammons, the band that incubated much of the first bebop generation.
The Parker comparison was the central fact of Stitt's public reputation for his entire career. His alto playing in the late 1940s ran so close to Parker's vocabulary that critics couldn't tell the recordings apart, and the story went that Stitt had been listening to Parker records constantly. Stitt's own account, which other musicians broadly supported, was that he had developed independently and that the convergence was the natural result of two saxophonists working out the same harmonic ideas in the same scene. He moved much of his work to tenor in the early 1950s, in part to step out from under that shadow. The tenor playing was as fluent and harmonically deep as the alto.
The middle period brought the soul-jazz organ combo records and the tenor battle albums with Gene Ammons that anchor a lot of the popular reputation. The Ammons records, in particular Boss Tenors and the long sequence of two-tenor live and studio dates that followed, are some of the most enjoyable jazz records of the early 1960s. Stitt briefly joined Miles Davis's quintet in 1960 between the departure of John Coltrane and the arrival of Hank Mobley, a stretch that produced a handful of well-documented European concerts.
The late period on Cobblestone and Muse was a quieter renaissance. Producer Don Schlitten and label owner Joe Fields gave Stitt the kind of small-label home he hadn't had in years, and the records that came out of those sessions, Constellation, Tune-Up!, and the Muse dates that followed, are among the most highly regarded in his catalog. He died of a heart attack in Washington, D.C., on July 22, 1982, at age fifty-eight.