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 (Qwest Records) 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 recounts his childhood in the backwoods of Louisiana, his adolescence in the burgeoning Bay Area jazz scene and his star-studded life in New York playing alongside the greats: Sonny Rollins, Eric Dolphy, and John Coltrane. His testimonies from each time and place add up to a cultural history of the late twentieth century: Simmons saw Billie Holiday and Thelonious Monk at the Black Hawk, lived through the Watts riots, stashed guns for the Blank Panther Party, brushed shoulders with Jefferson Airplane and Jimi Hendrix, and toured Europe amid the multiculturalist boom of the nineties. But it’s his keen memory for the underdogs and up-and-comers that distinguishes Simmons’s voice. He talks plenty of shit on his rivals—Pharoah Sanders and John Handy were, in Simmons’s words, “hip … great players, but I was the cat who was moving.” Meanwhile, Miles Davis was “arrogant and blasé and talking shit,” and Prince Lasha “got scandalous with his lover-man shit.” But Simmons reserves his most ferocious loyalty for names elsewhere unremembered, like the altoist Alfred Franklin, the mononymous Hop, or the Wild Man, Stanley Willis. Of the "brilliant motherfucker" and tenorist Jewel Sterling, as of many others, Simmons declares, “I don't want to forget that brother. I want to resurrect him too.” 

Whether he’s writing about his many love affairs; his turbulent romantic and creative partnership with the accomplished jazz trumpeter Barbara Donald; the pain of seeing his friends and heroes laid low by addiction; or the racism he endured in evolving forms across decades and states, Simmons brings the ferocity of style that animated his music to every sentence. And underneath it all remains the electric charge of his artistic passion. “I think all I needed during them terrible periods in darkness and despair was to play,” he writes, of his hardest years in San Francisco. “To be able to express the music in me was like a cleansing ritual.” 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.