Sonny Rollins, Jazz’s ‘Saxophone Colossus,’ Dies at 95
He was not on the list.
Tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins, the “Saxophone Colossus”
who was schooled by bebop’s legends as a prized sideman and became their peer
as a formidable leader, improviser and composer, has died, according to a
social media post from his family. No cause of death was cited; he was 95.
Sporting a burly tone, a tart sense of instrumental humor
and keen melodic and harmonic ingenuity, Rollins was acknowledged as a jazz
voice as groundbreaking as that of his friend and contemporary John Coltrane,
with whom he unforgettably locked horns on “Tenor Madness” in 1956.
He penned such now-standard entries in the jazz book as
“Airegin,” “Doxy,” “Oleo” and “St. Thomas,” the last of which was a calypso
adaptation (one of several he recorded) that reflected his family’s Caribbean
origins. He sported an all-encompassing knowledge of the standard repertoire,
and could wring highly personalized statements from such unlikely vehicles as
“Toot, Toot, Tootsie.” One of his most celebrated albums, 1957’s “Way Out
West,” was built around his interpretations of cowboy songs.
Imposing, customarily taciturn and somewhat eccentric — he
shaved his hair into a Mohawk style during the ’60s, long before punk fashion
adopted it — the musician nicknamed “Newk” (after a resemblance to major league
pitcher Don Newcombe) looked askance at the limelight, and took two protracted
hiatuses from recording and performing at the height of his powers.
Over the course of a career that stretched back to the late
1940s, his stature was acknowledged with a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award,
the Kennedy Center Honors and a National Medal of Arts.
Calling him “an invincible presence” on the 50th anniversary
of his professional debut, critic Gary Giddins said Rollins was “one of the
most cunning, surprising and original of jazz visionaries.”
He was born Theodore Walter Rollins in New York’s Harlem
neighborhood. He began playing piano and then alto saxophone, finally taking up
the tenor horn in emulation of his boyhood idol Coleman Hawkins, who lived in
his neighborhood. He learned his jazz craft at Benjamin Franklin High in East
Harlem, and played alongside such future stars as altoist Jackie McLean,
pianist Kenny Drew and drummer Art Taylor. Through a classmate, he met
pianist-composer Thelonious Monk, whose angular, puckish compositions would
have an impact on his own work.
He made his recording debut at 18 in 1949 for Prestige
Records in a band led by trombonist J.J. Johnson. In quick succession, he cut
dates with pianist Bud Powell, the Modern Jazz Quartet, Monk and trumpeter
Miles Davis, who recorded three of Rollins’ compositions at a 1954 session.
In spite of the attention his early work attracted in such
glittering hard bop company, Rollins recorded only intermittently in the early
’50s, for — like many other young jazzmen who fell under the spell of star
bebop altoist and notorious drug addict Charlie Parker — he had acquired a
debilitating heroin habit.
He was arrested and jailed on drug charges in 1950 and for
parole violation in 1953. At a ’53 Miles Davis date that paired him with
Parker, the bop elder himself urged the young musician to clean up. In late
1954, he checked into the federal drug facility in Lexington, Kentucky, where
he kicked his habit.
Rollins’ career took off in earnest in 1955 when he joined
the august quintet led by trumpeter Clifford Brown and drummer Max Roach (who
later appeared on a Prestige date led by the saxophonist). The year 1956 saw
his breakout as a leader: He fronted Miles Davis’ working band (minus the
trumpeter) on the Prestige album “Tenor Madness,” which featured the titular
battle with Coltrane, and recorded “Saxophone Colossus,” which contained the
lengthy, brilliantly imagined blues improvisation “Blue 7,” hailed by such
critics as Gunther Schuller and Martin Williams as a jazz high water mark.
He also recorded for Blue Note during this period, making a
mark with two volumes of “A Night at the Village Vanguard,” drawn from a pair
of forceful trio sets with cut with two different rhythm sections in November
1957 at the noted New York club.
As his star continued to rise, Rollins notably recorded for
a pair of West Coast-based labels, Orrin Keepnews’ Riverside and Lester
Koenig’s Contemporary. His work for the former company included sideman duty on
Monk’s “Brilliant Corners” (1956) and a storming trio session, “Freedom Suite”
(1958). His Contemporary sides included “Way Out West” and “Sonny Rollins Meets
the Contemporary Leaders” (1958), a satisfying collaboration with such
California players as Barney Kessel and Hampton Hawes.
The spotlight grew too hot, however, and after the latter
date Rollins dropped out of sight for nearly three years. He exercised and
woodshedded, and a story in Metronome magazine revealed that he could be seen
and heard playing on New York’s Williamsburg Bridge.
A 1977 television commercial for Pioneer Electronics
featured Rollins performing on the bridge and re-enacting that period, although
it mistook the Williamsburg Bridge for the Brooklyn Bridge.
He later told the New Yorker’s Whitney Balliett, “I found
it’s a superb place to practice. Night or day. You’re up over the whole world.
You can look down on the whole scene. There is the skyline, the water, the
harbor. It’s a beautiful scene, a panoramic scene…You can blow as loud as you
want. It makes you think. The grandeur gives you perspective.”
Upon emerging from his sabbatical, Rollins was signed to the
major RCA Records in a rare, and uncommonly lucrative, deal for a jazz
performer. His first two albums for the label, “The Bridge” and “What’s New?”
(both 1962), were energetic and uncommonly lyrical affairs that featured the
hushed guitar work of Jim Hall. The LPs also commenced his empathetic
association with bassist Bob Cranshaw, who appeared on Rollins’ albums for the
next half-century.
In his time off, Rollins had clearly cocked an ear to the
roaring “new thing” of such exploratory musicians as Coltrane and altoist
Ornette Coleman, and in the summer of 1962 he recorded a live album, “Our Man
in Jazz,” at New York’s Village Gate with trumpeter Don Cherry and drummer
Billy Higgins of Coleman’s group.
While Rollins more than held his own in this rarefied
company, his exploration of the “free jazz” terrain proved short-lived. His
other, more conservative but still expressive sets for RCA comprised a joint
project with Coleman Hawkins, a recital of familiar bop tunes and a collection
of standards.
A three-album stint for Impulse! Records followed; it was
highlighted by “Alfie” (1966), a U.S. studio re-creation of the score he had
composed and recorded with British sidemen for the soundtrack of Lewis
Gilbert’s drama starring Michael Caine.
Rollins dropped out of sight again for another six years, to
practice meditation and Eastern spiritual disciplines. He emerged again in
1972, when he began an association with Milestone Records that ran for nearly
30 years. While not entirely unrewarding, his time with the label found him
working not always comfortably in electric settings; numbers like 1979’s “Disco
Monk” did little to burnish his reputation.
Nonetheless, in 1981 he made a surprisingly fulfilling guest
shot on the Rolling Stones’ album “Tattoo You,” contributing a breathtaking
solo on the band’s “Waiting for a Friend.”
In 1986, filmmaker Robert Mugge released a documentary
profile of Rollins, aptly titled “Saxophone Colossus.”
In his latter-day eminence, Rollins received a pair of
Grammy Awards: His 2000 collection “This Is What I Do” was named best jazz
instrumental album, while his playing on “Why Was I Born?” — from “Without a
Song,” a live date cut shortly after the 9/11 attacks — was honored as best
jazz instrumental solo.
Rollins, who lived near the World Trade Center in New York
at the time, achieved a different kind of fame in the days after the 9/11
attack when CNN broadcast footage of him, horn in hand, and his neighbors
waiting to be evacuated; ironically, the newscasters didn’t recognize him but
some viewers did.
“I heard a big pow — I didn’t know what it was, but of
course I found out a few minutes later,” Rollins told Variety in 2021. “I was
living on the top floor, I think it was the 39th, and I went downstairs and
everyone was on the street watching it all, completely in shock. These things
like snowflakes began raining down — it was some kind of toxic stuff coming
from the buildings.
“When we were evacuated the next day, I had my horn with
me,” he continues. “People were looking at me strangely, because with all the
police and ambulances and trucks and the army, it was like a World War II movie
— and here’s me, this guy in a beret with a saxophone.”
Ironically, he nearly skipped the concert — in Boston, four
nights after 9/11 — that won him the Grammy. “I told my wife, ‘I’m too messed
up to make it,’ because along with everything else, I’d had to walk down 39
flights of stairs when we were evacuated,” he recalled to Variety. “But she
said, ‘No, no — you must!’ And I’m glad she persuaded me, because there were
other musicians from New York there, and the audience was very happy we did it.
I think we sort of brought back a little sanity in the middle of all that
madness.”
In 2008, he founded his own imprint, Doxy Records, which
documented several of his live performances, including one in tandem with
Ornette Coleman.
Rollins may have received the greatest attention of his
latter-day career in 2014, when the New Yorker’s “Shouts & Murmurs” column
ran a brief mock “profile,” unidentified as fiction, of the tenor player that
featured fabricated quotes condemning jazz as art and lifestyle.
The jazz community went up in arms about the piece, which
was quickly and apologetically relabeled as humor in the magazine’s Web
edition. In an online video interview conducted in his home, Rollins himself
called the story “scurrilous,” and compared it to something one might find in
Mad magazine — to which, he said, he subscribed.
Rollins continued to perform regularly into the 2010s, but
he was diagnosed with pulmonary fibrosis and suffered respiratory issues that
ultimately forced his retirement. His last public performance took place in
2012 at the Detroit Jazz Festival and officially stopped playing saxophone two
years later. However, he made an appearance as himself on a 2013 episode of
“The Simpsons” that also featured Tony Bennett.
In his later years, he received a National Medal of Arts
from former president Barack Obama, a Kennedy Center Honor, and a honorary
degree from the Julliard School in New York. His 1962 album “The Bridge” was
inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2015. In 2023, he sold the rights to
his publishing and recorded music to Reservoir Media for an undisclosed amount.
Rollins is survived by his nephew Clifton Anderson and his
nieces Vallyn Anderson and Gabrielle DeGroat. His second wife Lucille, to whom
he was married for nearly 40 years, died in 2004.
No public memorial is planned at this time, according to the
announcement.
Rollins said in 2009, “I think when the creative person
ends, he continues in the next existence. I’m a person who believes this life
isn’t the be-all and end-all of everything. A spiritual person doesn’t feel
like that.”
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