Photos of great musicians often reveal the spiritual dimension of their quest, but one didn’t need to see a picture of Sonny Rollins to know that he was tall and muscular. Rollins, who died Monday, at the age of ninety-five, played the tenor saxophone, a big, heavy instrument. It’s made of metal, but it’s called a woodwind, and his sound—from the time of his first recordings, in 1949, at the age of eighteen, until his late, live albums, from the twenty-tens—seems hewn, with rugged textures to match. His full range of expression spanned whirlwind energy and intimate warmth, and this power felt natural and in contact with nature, connected to the deep-rooted vastness of jazz itself. His sixty-plus years of professional life covered crucial periods in the history of the genre, and he played key roles in all of them.
Born and raised in Harlem at a time when many of the era’s great musicians lived there, young Rollins was a fan of one of his neighbors, the tenor saxophonist Coleman Hawkins—widely considered the first, in the nineteen-twenties, to make that instrument a central, solo voice in jazz bands—and ultimately borrowed and transformed something of Hawkins’s deep, burly tone. But what Rollins learned from Hawkins, even more, was to advance in step with the most advanced new ideas and forms that jazz would take. Bebop flourished in Rollins’s youth: the music of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell (with whom Rollins made some of his earliest recordings), and others who distilled jazz into an art centered on solo improvisations and energized it with unprecedented harmonic intricacy and death-defying speed. It demanded physical and intellectual virtuosity, and Rollins bore its difficulty lightly, on broad shoulders, with a distinctive lilt of melody.
In the nineteen-fifties, he composed some of the most enduringly fruitful and popular jazz tunes, such as “Doxy,” “Oleo,” and “St. Thomas.” Where others relied on the tunes mainly as harmonic springboards, for Rollins they were touchstones, fundamental elements that echoed throughout his often extensive improvisations—fragments of songs recurred as baubles of sensual beauty to match the sophisticated excitement of his spontaneous inventions. His partnerships were illustrious. In 1951, he recorded with the trumpeter Miles Davis, who became an on-and-off collaborator through much of the fifties, as did Monk. In 1955, Rollins joined the band of the bright-toned, mercurial prodigy Clifford Brown (who died at twenty-five, in 1956, in a car crash, along with Powell’s brother Richie, the band’s pianist). The following year, Rollins invited John Coltrane, a contemporary whose genius was still inchoate and whose career was just rising, to record with him. Then, in 1957, in a stroke of collaborative genius, he made an album that turned out to be something more than a landmark in the history of jazz: it created a template, even a genre, that would stand as a challenge to saxophonists to this day.
The album is called “A Night at The ‘Village Vanguard’ ”; it features Rollins in a trio, with only bass and drums, no piano, the effect of which is to maximize the saxophonist’s solo time and to omit the pianist’s habitual chordal signposting during his solos. He had done this in a studio session, earlier that year, but this album was in fact a live date, or, rather, two: a cut from an afternoon set at the celebrated (and still-running) New York club, added to five tracks from a nighttime session with a trio that was assembled at the last minute, indeed between sets, with the bassist Wilbur Ware and the drummer Elvin Jones. Ware is himself a distinctively melodic bassist, and Rollins called Jones’s unique approach to rhythm “liberating” and “universal.” The coalescence of these artists, along with the stimulation of the concert setting, led to a musical conflagration of a rare intensity. Upon learning of Rollins’s passing, I recalled the opening track, “Old Devil Moon,” as the first Rollins recording I’d ever heard, on a jazz radio station in New York, around 1973; at just about the same moment, a younger friend e-mailed to let me know that the first Rollins he’d ever heard, years later, was “Softly, as in a Morning Sunrise,” from the same album. It can’t be everyone’s first Rollins, but it’s the archway into Rollins-ism, something like a concept album that defines both his ideal—the band as sustenance for solos of wide-ranging exploration—and a crux of his style, at once extending the complexity of bebop and untangling it in the lyrical declamation of a monologue-like solo voice. (“Old Devil Moon” is part of a playlist of Rollins favorites, linked below.)
Some musicians evolve, others effect personal revolutions. Rollins is in the latter category, and his work bears the shuddering force of his drastic, self-imposed transitions. To hear Rollins in the late fifties is to hear the lion roar. He sat in with the Modern Jazz Quartet in 1958 and tore through a couple of modern classics with an understated, seemingly effortless ferocity. He went on a European tour as part of a trio in 1959, and the resulting bootlegs reveal that he played with similar fervor—yet, after he returned to his Lower East Side home that summer, he went on a hiatus and didn’t play in public again until late 1961, didn’t record until 1962. The story is amply unfolded in Aidan Levy’s meticulously detailed biography of Rollins, “Saxophone Colossus”: Rollins wanted both to study music and to stop drinking. The New York jazz world was rocked by the arrival of Ornette Coleman and his quartet, whose efforts to detach improvisation from songs’ harmonic patterns opened vistas of instant modernism akin to the bebop transformations of the early forties, and Rollins was jolted. The times would not pass him by, even if it took him a few years of rigorously disciplined self-transformation to catch up with them.
He did his practicing on an underused walkway on the Williamsburg Bridge, near the apartment where he lived with his wife, Lucille. Eventually, some fellow-musicians joined him; the saxophonist Jackie McLean recalled, “Sonny could blow these low blasts that had tugboats answering him from down below in the water.” His time there was already a prime jazz myth as it was happening. (Amanda Petrusich wrote, for this magazine, about an effort to rename the bridge for Rollins.) When he emerged, his sound was starker, its textures even rougher, with far more weight on the isolated, monumental power of individual notes. Yet his method was also more freely associative, his phrases both rhythmically looser and more abrupt. It was music of profound searching, its bold assertions tempered by self-questioning, and, as a result, it was thrillingly risky, impetuous, uncertain. Inspiration arose in wildly different contexts. A 1965 European tour, again in a trio, turned gigs into largely uninterrupted monologues à trois, with Rollins launching into tunes as abruptly as he departed from them, shifting tempi on the fly, guiding his accompanists as if conducting an orchestra. On the other hand, he composed and played the score for the 1966 British movie “Alfie,” then recorded an album of those tunes with a near-big band—and, within that restrained context, unleashed solos of resonant, full-voiced, loftily declamatory ardor.
Yet Rollins’s trio recordings from May, 1966, again with Jones, felt like a breaking point. They were marked by a fragmentation, a dropping off into brief but vertiginous silences, that suggested new doubts and a yearning for new transformations. This time, the trouble was the world: with the rise of rock as the new mainstream music, jazz was losing its already slender commercial footing and its place in the culture at large. There are some great Rollins releases from the late sixties—live ones, with bands assembled for the occasion—but, after those 1966 recordings, he wouldn’t return to the studio until 1972, and his efforts to reëstablish himself were part of a contention with the status and essence of jazz itself. The results reached their apotheosis, both musically and symbolically, in solo performance: cadenzas, unaccompanied numbers such as a 1978 recording of “Autumn Nocturne,” and, above all, an entire 1985 summer-evening outdoor concert at MOMA’s Sculpture Garden, at which he played unaccompanied for about an hour. I was there, astonished and moved by Rollins’s heroic self-affirmation through an affirmation of jazz itself. (It was released as “The Solo Album.”) Without a hint of nostalgia, he reached deep into himself to gather the musical history that he’d lived, blending the skittery agility of bebop with the hectic fragmentation and the hot furies of sixties modernism that intimidated, intrigued, and inspired him; he turned splinters of sound into melodious fillips and blasts into caresses, and united the age’s many idioms and styles through the forge of his own experience.
Rollins was in a paradoxical position reached by many venerable masters of their art: their name became synonymous with the art itself, their person and their personality became emblematic. Representing jazz is a heavier burden than playing it, but he wasn’t done advancing it. In 2007, when he was nearing eighty, he played a fiftieth-anniversary celebration of his first performance at Carnegie Hall, opening the concert with his iconic format, a trio—this one featuring the bassist Christian McBride, then in his thirties, and the drummer Roy Haynes, born in 1925, with whom Rollins had recorded in 1949 as part of Bud Powell’s band. Rollins seemed not so much rejuvenated as reignited, playing with a blend of note-shredding fervor and phrase-winding intricacy that, while unmistakable for anyone else’s sound, and coming clearly from his lifetime in the music, was still pushing it relentlessly, questingly, beautifully forward. ♦
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