music
Sonny Rollins
Theodore Walter 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. 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.
"Of course, these people are there to be called on because I think I
represent them in a way," Rollins said recently of his peers and
mentors. "They're not here now so I feel like I'm sort of representing
all of them, all of the guys. Remember, I'm one of the last guys left,
as I'm constantly being told, so I feel a holy obligation sometimes to
evoke these people."
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.
Miles Davis was an early Sonny Rollins fan and in his autobiography
wrote that he "began to hang out with Sonny Rollins and his Sugar Hill
Harlem crowd...anyway, Sonny had a big reputation among a lot of the
younger musicians in Harlem. People loved Sonny Rollins up in Harlem and
everywhere else. He was a legend, almost a god to a lot of the younger
musicians. Some thought he was playing the saxophone on the level of
Bird. I know one thing--he was close. He was an aggressive, innovative
player who always had fresh musical ideas. I loved him back then as a
player and he could also write his ass off..."
Sonny moved to Chicago for a few years to remove himself from the
surrounding 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.
It was during this time that Sonny acquired a nickname,"Newk." As Miles
Davis explains in his autobiography: "Sonny had just got back from
playing a gig out in Chicago. He knew Bird, and Bird really liked Sonny,
or "Newk" as we called him, because he looked like the Brooklyn
Dodgers' pitcher Don Newcombe. One day, me and Sonny were in a
cab...when the white cabdriver turned around and looked at Sonny and
said, 'Damn, you're Don Newcombe!'' Man, the guy was totally excited. I
was amazed, because I hadn't thought about it before. We just put that
cabdriver on something terrible. Sonny started talking about what kind
of pitches he was going to throw Stan Musial, the great hitter for the
St. Louis Cardinals, that evening..."
In 1956, Sonny began recording the first of a series of landmark
recordings issued under his own name: Valse Hot introduced the practice,
now common, of playing bop in 3/4 meter; St. Thomas initiated his
explorations of calypso patterns; and Blue 7 was hailed by Gunther
Schuller as demonstrating a new manner of "thematic improvisation," in
which the soloist develops motifs extracted from his theme.
Rollins's first examples of the unaccompanied solo playing that would
become a specialty also appeared in this period; yet the perpetually
dissatisfied saxophonist questioned the acclaim his music was
attracting, and between 1959 and late '61 withdrew from public
performance.
Sonny remembers that he took his leave of absence from the scene because
"I was getting very famous at the time and I felt I needed to brush up
on various aspects of my craft. I felt I was getting too much, too soon,
so I said, wait a minute, I'm going to do it my way. I wasn't going to
let people push me out there, so I could fall down. I wanted to get
myself together, on my own. I used to practice on the Bridge, the
Williamsburg Bridge because I was living on the Lower East Side at the
time."
When he returned to action in early '62, his first recording was
appropriately titled The Bridge. By the mid 60's, his live sets became
grand, marathon stream-of-consciousness solos where he would call forth
melodies from his encyclopedic knowledge of popular songs, including
startling segues and sometimes barely visiting one theme before surging
into dazzling variations upon the next. Rollins was brilliant, yet
restless.
The period between 1962 and '66 saw him returning to action and striking
productive relationships with Jim Hall, Don Cherry, Paul Bley, and his
idol Hawkins, yet he grew dissatisfied with the music business once
again and started yet another sabbatical in '66. "I was getting into
eastern religions," he remembers. "I've always been my own man. I've
always done, tried to do, what I wanted to do for myself. So these are
things I wanted to do. I wanted to go on the Bridge. I wanted to get
into religion. But also, the Jazz music business is always bad. It's
never good. So that led me to stop playing in public for a while, again.
During the second sabbatical, I worked in Japan a little bit, and went
to India after that and spent a lot of time in a monastery. I resurfaced
in the early 70s, and made my first record in '72. I took some time off
to get myself together and I think it's a good thing for anybody to
do."
In 1972, with the encouragement and support of his wife Lucille, who had
become his business manager, Rollins returned to performing and
recording, signing with Milestone and releasing Next Album. (Working at
first with Orrin Keepnews, Sonny was by the early ’80s producing his own
Milestone sessions with Lucille.) His lengthy association with the
Berkeley-based label produced two dozen albums in various settings –
from his working groups to all-star ensembles (Tommy Flanagan, Jack
DeJohnette, Stanley Clarke, Tony Williams); from a solo recital to tour
recordings with the Milestone Jazzstars (Ron Carter, McCoy Tyner); in
the studio and on the concert stage (Montreux, San Francisco, New York,
Boston). Sonny was also the subject of a mid-’80s documentary by Robert
Mugge entitled Saxophone Colossus; part of its soundtrack is available
as G-Man.
He won his first performance Grammy for This Is What I Do (2000), and
his second for 2004’s Without a Song (The 9/11 Concert), in the Best
Jazz Instrumental Solo category (for “Why Was I Born”). In addition,
Sonny received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Academy of
Recording Arts and Sciences in 2004.
In June 2006 Rollins was inducted into the Academy of Achievement – and
gave a solo performance – at the International Achievement Summit in Los
Angeles. The event was hosted by George Lucas and Steven Spielberg and
attended by world leaders as well as distinguished figures in the arts
and sciences.
Rollins was awarded the Austrian Cross of Honor for Science and Art,
First Class, in November 2009. The award is one of Austria’s highest
honors, given to leading international figures for distinguished
achievements. The only other American artists who have received this
recognition are Frank Sinatra and Jessye Norman.
In 2010 on the eve of his 80th birhtday, Sonny Rollins is one of 229
leaders in the sciences, social sciences, humanities, arts, business,
and public affairs who have been elected members of the American Academy
of Arts and Sciences. A center for independent policy research, the
Academy is among the nation’s oldest and most prestigious honorary
societies and celebrates the 230th anniversary of its founding this
year.
“I am convinced that all art has the desire to leave the ordinary,”
Rollins said in a recent interview for the Catalan magazine Jaç, “and to
say it one way, at a spiritual level, a state of the exaltation at
existence. All art has this in common. But jazz, the world of
improvisation, is perhaps the highest, because we do not have the
opportunity to make changes. It’s as if we were painting before the
public, and the following morning we cannot go back and correct that
blue color or change that red. We have to have the blues and reds very
well placed before going out to play. So for me, jazz is probably the
most demanding art.” And Sonny Rollins – seeker and grand master – is
jazz’s most exacting, exhilarating, and inspiring
practitioner.