To celebrate the release of Better Do It Now Before You Die Later, the memoir of American saxophonist Sonny Simmons, Blank Forms brings together four essential players of the New York free jazz scene: Ras Burnett, Hill Greene, Michael Marcus, and Juma Sultan. As multi-instrumentalists, composers, educators, and community organizers, all four of these musicians have worked to ensure the continued vitality of this city’s avant-garde jazz practices and institutions. Their careers span Harlem lounges and downtown lofts, as well as countless Black musical traditions, from reggae to Christian spirituals to orchestral arrangements to harp blues. Whether they have shared stages, recording studios, or simply friends and influences with Simmons, each member of this quartet is tightly interwoven with the musical community Simmons commemorates in Better Do It Now Before You Die Later.

The quartet—Hill Greene on bass, Michael Marcus on soprano sax and tarogato, Ras Burnett on saxophone and flute, and Juma Sultan on percussion—will perform the music of Sonny Simmons. Beer, wine, and hardcover copies of Better Do It Now Before You Die Later will be available for purchase.

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 found him broke, heavily dependent on drugs and alcohol, and newly separated from his wife and kids. “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.”
The resurrection of Simmons’s career—upon the release of his critically acclaimed Ancient Ritual in 1994—has become a modern legend of the genre. In the last two decades of his musical career, Simmons broke through to a new echelon of recognition, embarking on successful European tours, leading new ensembles, and recording a series of twenty-first-century albums that inducted him, by his death at the age of eighty-seven, into the pantheon with the great innovators and masters of the music. But to this day he remains an undersung figure.
Here, in the first-ever book dedicated to his life, Simmons brings the ferocity of style that animated his music to every sentence. Like Charles Mingus’s Beneath the Underdog and Art Pepper’s Straight Life, Simmons’s Better Do It Now Before You Die Later delivers an unfiltered, firsthand account of life in the bebop business in all its brilliance and brutality, capturing the devastating lows of addiction, poverty, and obscurity and the ecstatic highs of a life dedicated to The Music.

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Saxophonist, composer, educator, and musicologist Ras Burnett was born in Brooklyn in 1968. He has been a performing artist since 1987, specializing in free jazz, new music, reggae, and funk. He has an MFA in Music Composition from the Vermont College of Fine Arts and teaches at The New School for Social Research.

Hilliard “Hill” Greene was born in Logansport, Indiana in 1958. He leads the ensembles In&Out Band, ZigZag Quartet, and The Jazz Expressions; his solo bass albums include Alone (Soulsearch, 2003) and Spirituals (Unseen Rain, 2020). Once the resident bassist at Minton’s Playhouse in Harlem, he is currently a faculty member at New York’s Bass Collective.

Born in San Francisco in 1952, Michael Marcus first played with Sonny Simmons on Backwoods Suite in 1982, the same year he moved to New York. In 2000, he and Simmons co-founded the Cosmosamatics, an ensemble that at various points included such luminaries as Art Lewis, Clifford Barbaro, Curtis Lundy, and William Parker, and which recorded nine albums in fifteen years.

Juma Sultan was born in Monrovia, California in 1942 and moved to New York in 1966 at the encouragement of Simmons; in 1969, the pair recorded together for the first time on Simmons’s Manhattan Egos (Arhoolie). Renowned for his yearslong collaboration with Jimi Hendrix, Sultan has also performed with Archie Shepp, Albert Ayler, Pharoah Sanders, and Joe McPhee; led the New York Musicians Organization (NYMO); and founded the jazz loft Studio We with James DuBois.