First ever book dedicated to American saxophonist Sonny Simmons (1933–2021) by renowned free jazz writer Marc Chaloin. Thanks to him here we have his autobiography.

Simmons erupted on the New York jazz scene of the sixties with the album The Cry! (1962) and over the next decade played with greats like Sonny Rollins, Eric Dolphy, and his wife, the trumpeter Barbara Donald. But he nearly disappeared from jazz history by the eighties, which found him found him broke, heavily dependent on drugs and alcohol, busking on the San Francisco streets. Still, he never stopped playing, and in 1994, with the release of his critically acclaimed album Ancient Ritual, Simmons resurrected his career. He went on to found the popular group the Cosmosamatics, embark on several European tours, and record new albums at a prolific rate, including, notably, Mixolydis (2002), The Traveller (2005), and Last Man Standing (2007).
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 “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.”

Foreword by Marc Chaloin.

About the Author

Journalist and biographer Marc Chaloin has spent over thirty years writing about jazz history. He conducted an in-depth oral history of the saxophonist Albert Ayler (1936–70) and extensively documented the New York avant-garde jazz scene of the 1990s and 2000s, including dozens of biographical interviews and coverage of the first ten years of the Vision Festival. He lives in Chambéry, France.

Praise

Sonny Simmons’s alto—intensely lyrical, fiery yet sweet—was one of the defining sounds in free jazz. Students of the music revere his 1966 album Staying on the Watch. That he isn’t better known is an indictment of the country where, against all odds, he survived until his late eighties. The story of how he survived is in his music, but he also left it in a memoir—a crucial document of Black music history, and of the freedom impulse that he embodied. (Adam Shatz)

 

There are people whose footprints are embedded in the dust of a once fecund, and feral, American art scene. They have undertaken the task of transcending the artist’s role as flaneur, choosing instead to plunge into the comings and goings of the world around them. Their work gathers America’s crassness and sublimity and expresses it in the most intimate terms. What they make is important, but it is their existence as American artists that’s essential. Walt Whitman, Nikki Giovanni, Cecil Taylor, John Yau, Fred Anderson, they are America’s ghosts, treading reminders of how unique the American artistic mind can be. Sonny Simmons has been one of these stalking presences since the 1960s, and his life amongst the elite of the free jazz revolution is as important to hear as is Music from the Spheres or Burning Spirits. His memoir, Better Do It Now Before You Die Later is at 21st century Straight Life. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the history of American music and the iconoclasts, fire breathers, unreliable narrators, and saints who made it. (Nate Wooley)

Hardcover with dust jacket, published in 2025
English edition
17 x 24 cm, 560 pages