Black Music Sunday is a weekly series highlighting all things Black music, with over 275 stories covering performers, genres, history, and more, each featuring its own vibrant soundtrack. I hope you’ll find some familiar tunes and perhaps an introduction to something new.
Welcome to another Black Music Sunday celebration. Today we celebrate the life and music of tenor saxophonist Walter Theodore Rollins, who you know as Sonny Rollins. Though he retired from performing in 2014 due to pulmonary fibrosis, his body of work, spanning decades, is impossible to cover in just one story. I’ll try to do the best I can.
In 2020, he talked to New York Times journalist David Marchese about his retirement:
You never made any formal retirement announcement. Did you ever want to say goodbye to the people who made up your audience?
Well, no. The reason my retirement happened quietly was because my health problems were gradual. I didn’t expect them. I wasn’t quite sure that I would never be able to play again. It took me a while to realize, Hey, that’s gone now. But the people? I’m glad for their love but I don’t feel that I’m worthy of anyone saying, “Wow, Sonny!” And this is going to sound funny, but my highest place musically was not about playing for a crowd. I played a couple of concerts early on where I was out in the open in the afternoon. I was able to look up in the sky, and I felt a communication; I felt that I was part of something. Not the crowd. Something bigger.
The Rollins official website has his entire biography.
Walter Theodore Rollins was born on September 7, 1930 in New York City. He grew up in Harlem not far from the Savoy Ballroom, the Apollo Theatre, and the doorstep of his idol, Coleman Hawkins. After early discovery of Fats Waller and Louis Armstrong, he started out on alto saxophone, inspired by Louis Jordan. At the age of sixteen, he switched to tenor, trying to emulate Hawkins. He also fell under the spell of the musical revolution that surrounded him, bebop.
He began to follow Charlie Parker, and soon came under the wing of Thelonious Monk, who became his musical mentor and guru. When he was living in Sugar Hill, his neighborhood musical peers included Jackie McLean, Kenny Drew, and Art Taylor, but it was young Sonny who was first out of the pack, working and recording with Babs Gonzales, J.J. Johnson, Bud Powell, and Miles Davis before he turned twenty. [...]
In the early fifties, he established a reputation first among musicians, then the public, as the most brash and creative young tenor on the scene, through his work with Miles, Monk, and the MJQ. [...]
Sonny moved to Chicago for a few years to remove himself from elements of negativity around the jazz scene. He reemerged at the end of 1955 as a member of the Clifford Brown-Max Roach Quintet, with an even more authoritative presence. His trademarks became a caustic, often humorous style of melodic invention, a command of everything from the most arcane ballads to calypsos, and an overriding logic in his playing that found him hailed for models of thematic improvisation.
Achievement.org continues his story:
In 1955, Rollins joined a quintet led by pioneering bebop drummer Max Roach, also featuring the gifted trumpeter Clifford Brown. In addition to recording under Max Roach’s name, the quintet produced an album as Sonny Rollins Plus Four, the first collection to feature Rollins as leader. The untimely death of Clifford Brown in a 1956 automobile accident was a blow to the entire jazz world. Rollins stayed with the Roach quintet through this difficult transition, but he was soon producing recordings of his own at an extraordinary pace.
[...]
Two hallmarks of Rollins’s career were now well in evidence. One was his penchant for “thematic improvisation,” in which the soloist performs a series of spontaneous variations on a single musical idea. Another was his affection for familiar popular songs and show tunes that other young musicians of the day had come to disdain. Rollins seemed to delight in showing that no melody was so shopworn that it could not be mined for new improvisational riches. A number of outstanding live recordings followed these studio sessions, including A Night at the Village Vanguard, which show Rollins in extraordinary form, supported only by bass and drums. This piano-less saxophone trio was a new concept in jazz. With no piano providing harmonic support, Rollins found unexpected melodic byways that lay beyond conventional harmonic structures.
[...]
As the 1950s drew to a close, Sonny Rollins was the most admired, talked-about, sought-after tenor player in jazz, the biggest sax star since Charlie Parker. But Rollins felt this acclaim was undeserved, that his playing did not meet his own high standards. At the height of his fame, he withdrew from public performance and recording. He remained in New York City, and found a congenial place to practice on the Williamsburg Bridge spanning the East River, not far from his home on the Lower East Side. Musicians and neighbors were surprised to find the one-time headliner standing on the bridge at all hours, playing for no one but himself, while he honed his technique and searched for a more spiritually meaningful form of musical expression.
While Sonny Rollins took his sabbatical, revolutionary changes were again shaking the jazz world. He emerged from his three-year exile with a strengthened technique — demonstrated on his comeback album, The Bridge — ready to adapt to all of the innovations that had taken place in jazz during his absence.
Give a listen to the aforementioned “A Night at the Village Vanguard”:
IMDb describes this must-watch 1986 documentary, “Sonny Rollins: Saxophone Colossus”:
Tenor saxophone master Sonny Rollins has long been hailed as one of the most important artists in jazz history, and still, today, he is viewed as the greatest living jazz improviser. In 1986, filmmaker Robert Mugge produced Saxophone Colossus, a feature-length portrait of Rollins, named after one of his most celebrated albums.
Here’s the 1957 full album from which the documentary takes its name:
Check out part one of the documentary:
How can one fail to be sensitive to this portrait of Sonny Rollins, an endearing personality who always seems to camp in an unstable balance between impetuosity and serenity, as if there were a physical, ethical and artistic refusal of immobility in him?
Saxophone Colossus illustrates this ambivalence in two parts. If the second part sheds light on the mystical dimension of the character ("I studied Zen in Japan, Yoga in India and I was born a Christian in the USA" he says; one could also add that he is Rose - Cross), the first part sticks to the image of the artist as a "mad dog" overflowing with energy during the recording in a public park of a concert by his quintet. In an improvisation of which he has the secret, Sonny Rollins plays his favorite theme " Don't Stop The Carnival ", a calypso in which this son of Caribbean parents excels.
During the second part of the documentary, which is mainly set in Japan, the saxophonist confesses his predilection for this country where he has already been twelve times. In Tokyo, he will present the concerto for tenor saxophone and orchestra that he composed. The Yomuri Nippon Symphony Orchestra, whose first foray into this type of music is being conducted by the Finnish Heikki Sarmento. In this unfamiliar context, Rollins does not lose his identity as a composer (Caribbean rhythms and harmonies are underlying) nor as an instrumentalist (the sax hovers above the melee in a serene lyricism). It was like completing the puzzle of a sensitivity in action.
Though Part 2 is not available on YouTube, give a listen to Rollins in Japan:
Another fascinating dive into Rollins’ life and music is the film “Sonny Rollins Beyond the Notes,“ by director Dick Fontaine, which celebrates his 80th birthday.
Rollins biographer Aidan Levy is also well worth listening to:
Levy’s book, “Saxophone Colossus: The Life and Music of Sonny Rollins” is featured here:
The long-awaited first full biography of legendary jazz saxophonist and composer Sonny Rollins, chronicling the gripping story of a freedom fighter and spiritual seeker whose life has been as much of a thematic improvisation as his music
Sonny Rollins has long been considered an enigma. Known as the “Saxophone Colossus,” he is widely acknowledged as one of the greatest jazz improvisers of all time, winning Grammys, the Austrian Cross of Honor, Sweden’s Polar Music Prize and a National Medal of Arts. A bridge from bebop to the avant-garde, he is a lasting link to the golden age of jazz, pictured in the iconic “Great Day in Harlem” portrait. His seven-decade career has been well documented, but the backstage life of the man once called “the only jazz recluse” has gone largely untold—until now
A fascinating look into Rollins’ journey playing just for himself on the Williamsburg Bridge and the campaign to change the bridge’s name:
In 1961, Whitney Balliett published “Sabbatical” in The New Yorker about Rollins’ self-imposed exile:
When life becomes nothing but a bowl of clichés, how many young and successful people of non-independent means have the resilience and backbone to withdraw completely from the world and reorganize, refuel, retool, and refurbish themselves? Well, we know of one such heroic monk—Sonny Rollins, a thirty-one-year-old tenor saxophonist. In the summer of 1959, Rollins, finding himself between burgeoning success and burgeoning displeasure with his playing, dropped abruptly and voluntarily into oblivion, where he remained until this very week, when he momentously reappeared at the Jazz Gallery, on St. Marks Place, with a quartet. At the time of his self-banishment, Rollins was, among other things, the most influential practitioner on his instrument to come along since Lester Young and Coleman Hawkins; the unofficial head of the hard-bop school (a refinement of bebop); and one of the first of the now plentiful abstract or semi-abstract jazz improvisers. As a result, his Return—rumored for months—took on a kind of millennial air, which we got caught up in several days before the event by having a chat with the Master himself. Through an intermediary, Rollins, who lives on Grand Street and has no phone, unmillennially suggested that we meet him at a mutually convenient coffeehouse, and we did. A tall, broad-shouldered, thin-waisted man who resembles a genie, Rollins has a shaved head, a long, lemon-shaped face, slightly Oriental eyes, a generous nose, and a full, non-pointed goatee. He was wearing, from the skin outward, a gray turtleneck sweater, a blue-and-white-striped button-down shirt, open at the neck, and a handsome blue-gray V-neck sweater, above gray slacks. This ensemble was rounded out with shined black space shoes, a black porkpie hat with a medium brim, and a gabardine overcoat.
After coffee had been ordered, we asked Rollins why he had decided to retire and whether his sabbatical had been a success. “People are not doing things as well as they can do them any more,” he replied, in a deep, stately, Senator Knowland voice. “The par of products is not high enough, and in 1959 I felt that way about my playing. The extraneous things had gotten in the way of it. I didn’t have time to practice, and I wanted to study more. I was playing before more and more people, and not being able to do my best. There was no doubt that I had to leave the scene, and it was just a matter of when I could bring it about. I’d lost the ability to play what I wanted to play every night without the interference of emotionalism. I was filled with question marks. Also, as a leader, you have to keep the audience. You have to think about those people, and you have to fill the image the critics make of you. At the same time, you have to maintain your product. There is an almost invisible line there. But I’m no longer nervous about those things. I don’t read the critics any more. Something I want to know, I go and ask a musician I respect. I’m bringing a whole new understanding to the scene. If no one comes to the opening, if they don’t like me, if they rush out—I’m prepared for all those contingencies, and they would not influence me adversely.”
Jazz at Lincoln Center produced this animated look where Rollins talked to journalist Ben Sidran about his career and his time spent on the Williamsburg Bridge :
Rollins wrote important compositions which have gone on to become jazz standards. One that stands out for me is “Airegin” which is Nigeria spelled backward, which I was introduced to via the vocalese magic of Lambert, Hendricks & Ross:
Here’s Rollins playing his tune in 1954 as part of the Miles Davis Quintet.
As I mentioned in the beginning, there is simply too much amazing music from Rollins to cover in one story—just take a look at his discography—so I hope you will join me in the comments section below for more and please post your favorites.
In the meantime, join me in wishing him a blessed 95th birthday!
Denise Oliver Velez September 07, 2025 at 02:00PM From Daily Kos
0 Comments