Sonny Rollins Played Himself Free
Sonny Rollins was no revolutionary, yet he played himself free of every jazz convention. Now the last giant of the bebop era has died at the age of 95.
Even as a small boy, Sonny Rollins marched against racism—at least that’s how he once told it himself. Harlem in Manhattan, Lenox Avenue in the mid-1930s: Rollins is out with his grandmother, on the street that would keep pulling him back throughout his later career as an alto and above all tenor saxophonist. At 20 he lands in jail after a robbery, and shortly after comes the heroin, as with so many geniuses of bebop: Charlie Parker, Bud Powell, Miles Davis. Rollins plays with these men and belongs above all to the first in his league to get off the drugs. For the rest of his life, Rollins thinks about body, addiction, and health.
That thinking extends to his relationship with music. Rollins never stops practicing, sometimes doing so obsessively. The training leads him to spurn the obvious path in his solos again and again, simply because he can. This trait in his music makes it comparatively easy to follow Rollins even into the highest registers and tempos. And so beautiful to let his ballads come close.
One of his pieces still played to this day is “St. Thomas,” named after the Caribbean homeland of his parents. The original 1956 recording opens with 20 seconds of drums: a hint that rhythm matters enormously to Rollins, even by jazz standards, which you can also hear in his solos. Drummer Max Roach plays a kind of calypso entirely alone in “St. Thomas” before anything else happens. The theme that follows: a folk song. In the solo, Rollins juggles the beat, pushing it here, then there. It sounds simple, almost childlike, but is difficult. Then, over a few chord changes, come the bebop lines that only a handful could play so fluidly at the time (and only in New York) the way Rollins could. Jazz as fun and the highest art at once.
With “St. Thomas” begins the album Saxophone Colossus, which earns Rollins the status of a jazz star in 1957. The recording takes place a few days before his bandleader at the time, Clifford Brown, dies in a car accident. Brown had been on his way to a gig in Chicago with two other musicians who also perish; Rollins was already waiting at the hotel. His reaction to the news: first weep with Max Roach, then practice all night long.
Much revolves around strength among the Black stars of jazz in the late 1950s. Strength needed to master and push forward their high-pressure music. Strength, too, to kick the ubiquitous heroin that turns so many talents into casualties. And strength to openly confront the racism of the era and fight back. Just one year after Saxophone Colossus, Rollins releases the album Freedom Suite, recorded only as a trio and without harmonic instruments like piano or guitar. It is one of the first jazz albums to demand greater civil rights for Black Americans in a direct way.
But for Rollins, freedom is also a musical term. He claims for himself the right not to adopt the role patterns of the jazz world at the time. Shortly after Freedom Suite, he takes what is probably the most spectacular hiatus any jazz great has ever allowed himself. He disconnects the phone and spends two years playing on the Williamsburg Bridge between Manhattan and Brooklyn. Freedom through renunciation: Rollins becomes a jazz monk and the partner of his future wife Lucille Pearson, who feeds him through this period without record dates or paid gigs (and much later officially becomes his manager as well). Rollins writes Lucille letters every day before heading to the bridge; some of them can be read in an excellent biography by Aidan Levy.
Even before the bridge period, Rollins is considered the second giant of the tenor saxophone alongside his friend John Coltrane. You can hear the two of them together on just one track, “Tenor Madness” from the album of the same name in 1956—a blues with the band that at the time also backs Miles Davis. So the circus-like competition between the saxophonists never materializes, though Rollins still finds that aspect of jazz uncomfortable. His path after vanishing in the middle of the city runs entirely differently from Coltrane’s. Rollins, too, frees the music from overly tight constraints. Unlike Coltrane, though, he does not blow past every boundary.
Rollins still thinks about the harmony in the background and the rhythmic scaffolding even when he pushes both to the brink of collapse. And then suddenly plays a Caribbean melody he knows from his childhood, or veers into a blues. Rollins is tireless and incorruptible. In 2014, when lung problems make it impossible for him to play, he says something he would repeat in later interviews several times: “During my career I was blessed to be able to constantly be motivated and constantly be pushing myself, because otherwise I never would have achieved what I did.”
The music supplies proof, again and again, that such statements are not coy. Remarkable, really, how two Rollins albums so different from each other, recorded in quick succession, can both be driven by the desire to push into new territory without lapsing into self-intoxication: The Bridge and Our Man in Jazz, both from 1962. The Bridge is, for one, a clever title from producer and friend George Avakian, alluding to Rollins’s disappearance just over two years earlier. Everyone expects something spectacular when he returns in 1962. But the album The Bridge is, as the name suggests, not a break with tradition—it is tradition’s continuation.
Rollins’s tone sounds hard and powerful like the ship horns on the Hudson River. The bebop clichés that harden into mannerisms in many of his contemporaries vanish almost entirely in his playing. What takes their place, though, is not free playing but the ability to play anything at any time, in any tempo and any key, and immediately turn it on its head. Sonny Rollins does not become a brand through this—he simply becomes an ever-better musician who blurs the lines between composition and improvisation.
None of this means conservatism. On The Bridge in particular, you can hear his modernity especially well in the interplay with white guitarist Jim Hall. Rollins catches heavy criticism from his politicized friends for bringing a white musician into his band. His wife Lucille is also white, which, as Rollins once says, was conceivable in the 1960s only in New York, and even there only on the Lower East Side. Such are the times. But the best music tries to overcome them: Jim Hall keeps his guitar chords as open as only the best pianists of the era could manage. His solos, including in dialogue with Rollins, are as supple and abstract as the bandleader’s own. Rollins and Hall: a match made in heaven.
Yet Rollins stays restless. He is never able to hold a band together for long, constantly swapping out musicians. For his work, this one remaining volatile element in his life has spectacular consequences time and again. After the highs with Jim Hall, Rollins parts ways with the guitarist and records a completely different album with Don Cherry—the wayward trumpeter of Ornette Coleman’s legendary quartet (and later stepfather of musician Neneh Cherry). The way the two of them tear apart the Rollins classic “Oleo” over the harmonies of George Gershwin’s “I Got Rhythm”: maximum tension, with Cherry abandoning the chord sequence early while Rollins continues to modulate it abstractly for a long stretch. Cherry: revolution. Rollins: reform. Both happen simultaneously—a highlight of jazz history in which seemingly irreconcilable principles draw very close together.
The tradition he wants to honor and the urge toward the new: this force field keeps the thinking, dancing Rollins fit well past his 80th year. Then the lung ailment mentioned earlier makes continuing his career impossible. From 2014 on, Rollins no longer performs. He moves to the small town of Germantown in Upstate New York, where other musicians also live with whom the widowed Rollins is acquainted.
Family, you might call it. Rollins has no children, but a bond as close and long as the 43-year relationship between him and Lucille Pearson (she dies in 2004) is virtually unheard of among jazz musicians. When asks what advice he has for young people, the gentle, nervous, perpetually searching Rollins replies: not everyone can become Miles Davis or John Coltrane—he himself never managed it, after all. He doesn’t laugh for a second and adds: “But if all you’re thinking about is how to pay for a family and a house, then jazz is definitely not for you.” Now Sonny Rollins, a great saxophonist of the twentieth century, has died at the age of 95.