During a short visit to London in 1990, I made my way to Mole Jazz, a record collector’s mecca at the time. There, I chanced upon an unexpected CD by Sonny Simmons called Backwoods Suite. Although apparently just released, it had actually been recorded eight years earlier, in San Francisco, with a personnel mixing 'name' musicians – Billy Higgins, Herbie Lewis, Joe Bonner – and others unknown to me. In contrast to his recordings of the 1960s and early 1970s, Simmons’s alto here had a haunting, kind of drowned, at times almost imploring tone quality that seemed to bespeak bad times outweighing good news. Years later, I was to discover that Simmons hated that recording. He indeed associated it with very harsh circumstances and memories, maybe not unlike Charlie Parker vis-à-vis the 1946 Dial session that produced his famed rendition of “Lover Man”.

However, I would also come to realise that “the backwoods” was for Simmons a key expression encompassing all he felt had nurtured in positive ways during his early childhood in rural Louisiana. It stood for the hills, the dust roads, the creeks, the birds and lightning bugs, the mules, and the people around whom he grew up, a cluster of related families who mostly owned the land they farmed. It stood for the whole worldview of these people, their plain Baptist faith going hand in hand with voodoo-derived healing/cleansing rituals and magic. However idealised and reimagined those memories may have been – the issue of race could hardly have remained out of the picture for long – there is no doubting the sincerity of Simmons’s claim that “the backwoods” were a solid foundation on which he could always rely in later years when in need of restoring balance.

Here was an apparent paradox of the man. He had lived nearly his entire life in big cities, beginning with Monroe, northern Louisiana, and Oakland, California. As a youngster, he had been eager to fully embrace the potentialities and temptations offered within and outside the limits of the “black ghetto”. But he was carrying the backwoods all along, as both an emotional compass and a source of inner strength.

It could be argued that this paradox extended to a large share of the music known as free jazz. Generally thought of within a conceptual framework designed to account for various Western avant garde art movements, free jazz had, from Ornette Coleman on, always been a distant offshoot of the life and culture originating in what clarinetist John Carter has termed “The Fields period in American history”. It was at least as much so as it was a product of the urban, sophisticated settings with which previous stages of jazz modernity are commonly associated and where it itself blossomed.

Thus, Simmons could cite Coleman’s “Ramblin’” as a good example of backwoods music, adding that the same was true of much of Albert Ayler’s musical output. When Simmons’s first recorded effort The Cry! came out in 1963, the saxophonist was often perceived as a prime follower of Coleman. The association was facilitated by the fact that Prince Lasha, the nominal leader of the date, was as a youth a friend and partner of the Texas pioneer. Granted, there are unmistakable Ornettish strains in Simmons’s playing throughout the album, in the spacing and the asymmetry of phrases, in the unpredictable changes of melodic direction and sudden interval leaps… but the assertive tone, the thrust, and the momentum are distinctively Simmons’s, as exemplified by his brilliant improvisation on “Bojangles”, played in trio with bassist Gary Peacock and drummer Gene Stone. Emulation and logical convergence, certainly, not mere imitation or influence.

In fact, both Ornette and Sonny evolved early on idiosyncratic versions of Charlie Parker’s tightrope dance-like phrasing, dispensing with the constraint of a cyclically returning chord changes structure. If in subsequent stages of his musical life Coleman increasingly distanced himself from this type of playing, it remained a sort of underlying trademark resurfacing time and again throughout Simmons’s chaotic trajectory. It reached perhaps its most pared down form in the 1990s and 2000s output of The Cosmosamatics, the group resulting from the longest lasting collaboration Simmons ever had with a fellow musician, multi-reedman Michael Marcus. It was the early 1980s San Francisco beginnings of this association that Backwoods Suite documented, in a producer-inflected format. Whereas the original “American Jungle Band”, as Simmons used to call his rehearsal/working units of the era, often partly made up of supportive students, had been relegated to small Bay Area neighbourhood bars and clubs, The Cosmosamatics managed to tour abroad extensively, Western, Central and Eastern Europe included.

Performing for larger audiences overseas was an opportunity that never arose for Simmons’s previous long-standing musical – and conjugal – partnership with the brilliant trumpeter Barbara Donald (1942–2013). During their three year stint in New York between 1966 and 1968, at the height of the free jazz wave, concert or club dates were scarce in the extreme. But despite this low public visibility, Simmons’s effect on the musicians’ community was a reality to be reckoned with. His East Village woodshedding studio was a rallying point for players of varied statuses and abilities, from Dewey Johnson to Kenny Dorham, Jimmy Garrison being a regular. They came to trade musical ideas playing duets with Simmons, or to benefit from his expertise. The energy radiating from his powerful spirit was also being felt when he and Barbara spent time at the 212 Artists Colony in Woodstock, where guitarist Michael 'Sangeeta' Berardi was inviting New York free players of note: Pharoah Sanders, Burton Greene, Alan Silva, Mark Whitecage, Earl Cross, or bassist-percussionist Juma Sultan, then a frequent collaborator and in the process of developing his Aboriginal Music Society, named after a concept developed earlier on with Simmons.

Instead of following the path of the Great Migration of free jazzmen to Europe in 1969, Sonny and Barbara returned to the Bay Area where promoter Wes Robinson had some action for them at his bi-annual Berkeley Jazz Symposium events. They were also welcomed back at San Francisco’s Both/And club where their star had briefly shone before the New York move. Three recordings in two years ensued, against two ESP-Disk' dates in three years in New York. They culminated with the late 1970 double LP Burning Spirits: free jazz in achieved, 'classic' form, with Michael White’s violin complementing the frontline and the masterful bass teamwork of Richard Davis and Cecil McBee. It probably came too late, at least for America, where the free clamour was already dying down. The remaining musicians of the original free playing explosion and/or their record producers had by then been busy for a couple of years devising formulas that would appeal to a larger share of the LP buying, pop oriented public.

The beginning of the end for the husband and wife team came with their 1972 relocation to San Jose and the attempt, prompted by Barbara’s parents, to conform to the suburban lifestyle of a regular American family, Simmons having to work day jobs and his horns, in his own words, “collecting dust and cobwebs in his garage”. By 1978, they had reformed a good, local working band. According to cellist Kirk Heydt, who would go on to produce Simmons’s 1982 underground gem Global Jungle, their musical rapport was as impressive as ever. But the couple soon separated and from then on would only reunite intermittently, until repeated strokes brought Barbara’s musical career to a definitive halt.

Simmons began to get increasing media attention in the early 1990s, after years providing the material for a well-honed narrative of destitution, homelessness, street playing, and incoming resurrection. When Ancient Ritual came out in 1994 on Quincy Jones’s Qwest label, Europe finally awoke to Simmons, extending invitations to major clubs and festivals. Paris became his haven for the last years of the 20th century. Even after being offered a new secure home base in New York by Janet Janke, his partner for the rest of his life, he would sojourn annually in the French capital. There, a nucleus of devoted fans soon became the main purveyors of work opportunities that resulted in a string of highly unconventional recording projects. They included duo dates with harpist Delphine Latil and an 8-CD journey through aural autobiographical landscapes ranging from Eastern-flavored jams to noise and electronic-textured audiodramas released by the Improvising Beings label. Aside from these forays into the sonic frontier, Simmons would continue to honour his hallowed figures of Bird and Monk or just play the blues, with his two late-career pianists of choice, Bobby Few and François Tusques.

In Oslo, Norwegian saxophonist Jon Klette recorded enough studio material for three CDs pairing Simmons with young local talent, plus the live rendition of an Atomic Symphony that featured Simmons’s alto against a tumultuous orchestral background. Simmons himself was never able to fulfil his long-cherished dream of writing a “Backwoods Symphony”, but what would have constituted its basic materials without a doubt largely permeates the music he did write. Simmons only returned once to Sicily Island, Louisiana, where he was born on 4 August 1933. The occasion was the filming of a documentary about his life by Bob Brewster. Where some of his relatives’ shotgun houses had stood now was an abandoned gravel quarry. In nearby woods, remnants of the fireplace of his parents’ home could still be found amidst the scrub. Simmons picked up a brick for souvenir. He may also have caught glimpses of the “Ghost(s) Of The Past” lingering around…

In New York, on 6 April 2021, in Sonny’s 88th year, his indomitable spirit and strong body finally came to rest.

Wire subscribers can read a 2007 interview with Sonny Simmons in issue 285 via the digital archive.