Sonny Rollins 1930 - 2026

Photo by John Abbott

By Martin Schray

There’s this scene that has gone down in the history of jazz. A tall, almost skinny, Black man playing his saxophone on Williamsburg Bridge in New York. The man was Sonny Rollins and already one of the biggest stars in the jazz world. At the age of 29 he had decided to take a break from playing live and making studio recordings. Rollins had rented a small apartment on Grand Street on Lower East Side, but the walls were paper thin and he couldn’t practice without disturbing the neighbors. One day he walked through Delancey Street, saw the steps up to the bridge and went up. He liked it there, he could play as loud as he wanted, with the Brooklyn-bound subway on one side and traffic on the other. From that moment on the bridge became his daily retreating room of sorts for two years, sometimes for 15 or 16 hours, in any kind of weather. Spring, summer, fall, and winter.

Rollins was a musician whose name stands in one line with the greatest ones of modern jazz - Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane. Monk was indeed his teacher and partner, he first almost imitated Monk’s formal musical principles (on Think of One in 1953) before he became his equal partner (on the Thelonious Monk/Sonny Rollins album from 1956, e.g.) and finally emancipated himself with the piano-less trio classic Way Out West. As a consequence of these outstanding and successful albums he was invited to play Carnegie Hall, the accolade for every American musician. But then he realized that all these things didn’t help him to rent an apartment - because he was Black. His response was Freedom Suite in 1958. In the liner notes he wrote: “America is deeply rooted in Negro culture: its colloquialisms; its humor; its music. How ironic that the Negro, who more than any other people can claim America's culture as his own, is being persecuted and repressed; that the Negro, who has exemplified the humanities in his very existence, is being rewarded with inhumanity.“ Freedom Suite is considered the first instrumental piece that accused racism and discrimination. Rollins however, had to face isolation after the release of the album. That’s why he took the Williamsburg-Bridge-break.

But on a grey November evening in 1961 he wanted to play again. He wanted to pay tribute to Booker Little, a talented young trumpeter, who died at the age of 23. The concert was to be a fundraiser for his widow. Rollins called the concert and the following album The Bridge, it was his comeback. In the 1960s he recorded more excellent albums like Our Man in Jazz (1963), Now’s the Time (1964), East Broadway Run Down (1966) and the soundtrack for the box office hit Alfie(1966). In the musical turmoil of the early Sixties Rollins remained clearly rooted in the jazz tradition, but he helped to pave the road to free jazz. His freest recordings are Our Man In Jazz from 1962, with Don Cherry on trumpet, Bob Cranshaw on bass and Billy Higgins on drums and 1963 Paris Concert with Henry Grimes on bass. Rollins was looking for new ways but he wasn’t as courageous as Ornette or Ayler (which isn’t meant in a negative way, he just wasn’t interested in harmolodics or crassly overblown sounds). The reason why his music cannot be characterized as free jazz has also to do with the rather “traditional“ playing of bass and drums on his compositions (in the end they still played time - again not meant in a negative way). However, it has always been marvelous to listen to him exploring, finding and dropping musical ideas. His saxophone sound is just gigantic, its elegant, deep, very articulate and free flowing, he really was a “saxophone colossus“ (the name of one of his most famous albums). He had a real lust for playing, every new idea he had led to new variations - everything was elaborated with an enormous ease, but he wasn’t interested in showing off. From the 1970s onwards Sonny Rollins tried to find new ways integrating funk, fusion and Latin elements in his music, like on Reel Life (1982). He played with bag piper Rufus Harley at the Berliner Jazztage in 1974 (and the audience booed them), he recorded with ragtime pianist Mary Lou Williams. Moreover, he went to Japan and India and became a buddhist, he discovered yoga and lived in a monastery. As to music he also featured new talents like Branford Marsalis on Falling in Love with Jazz(1989) and Roy Hargrove on Here’s to People (1991). Last but not least, he curated his favorite live recordings, the Road Show Series, which is a bonanza for die hard fans.

However, Sonny Rollins was more than his music. All his life he was a political person, respect and appreciation were very important for him. In an interview with German author Christian Broecking he spoke of himself as a “planetarian“, which is one of the reasons why he released Global Warming (in 1998), a harsh criticism of the US government’s environmental policy. On 9/11/2001 his flat was evacuated, his saxophone was the only thing he took with him. Only a few days later he played a gig in Boston which was to be released as Without a Song: The 9/11 Concert.

Rollins dedicated his music and his life to the fight against injustice and ignorance, and he wanted to express this just by musical means. He believed that music could make a difference. He was a visionary. About his time on the bridge he told the Washington Post in 2011: “I used to blow my horn back at the boats when the boats would blow. All of that was great. I was in a place where nobody could see me. This was heaven.” 

Musically, things had become quiet around him in his final years. Now the last great icon of jazz’s golden age has passed away. The world is a poorer place without him.

Watch him with Don Cherry (tp), Henry Grimes (b) and Billy Higgins (dr) in Rome 1962: