Excerpt from SAXOPHONE COLOSSUS: Booker Little & Sheet Music

I'm thoroughly enjoying Adan Levy's immaculately detailed biography of Sonny Rollins, Saxophone Colossus (the extensive notes are available for download for free). One passage of many so far that caught my eye, ca. summer 1955 in Chicago: At night, Sonny would practice in the basement of the Y, where they had a piano . One night, he heard someone playing a Clifford Brown record on repeat who turned out to be trumpeter Booker Little. [possibly Clifford Brown with Strings , per author note, which released that spring] "I was playing it over and over again, and I guess I was driving him mad, because he was trying to practice himself," Little recalled. At the time, Little was a seventeen-year-old sophomore at the Chicago Conservatory who had come from Memphis and was also living at the Y. Finally, Sonny decided to approach him. "He asked me what I was doing, and I told him I was trying to learn the melody," Little said. "He told me that it was probably b