Late last month, one of the last connections to the classic age of American jazz passed away. Sonny Rollins was a tenor sax player who was one of the central figures in American music from early 1950s, through to 2014 when he retired due to health reasons.
When the news broke of his death, the French newspaper Le Monde hailed him as the “creator of some 20 landmark albums in jazz history and, for the last three decades of his career, inventor of a unique, marathon-style concert experience that brought him closer to his audience….”
Rollins released his album “Saxophone Colossus” in 1956 backed by a traditional jazz combo, but he was always interested in breaking with patterns and habits. The next year he began playing without a piano player to more fully explore what he could do as a soloist without another player putting in chords underneath him. In November, 1957 he recorded a live album at the Village Vanguard with just him, a bass player and a drummer. It was the first live album ever recorded there.
In 1959 however he abruptly stopped performing and withdrew from the scene. He spent the next two years simply playing his horn late at night, alone, on the Williamsburg Bridge in New York City. He was rarely recognized even by other night owls who happened across him. The solitary sojourn transformed his approach to music. “The freedom I experienced on the bridge is universal,” he later said. “It involves all other forms of freedom. Music must go beyond music. Otherwise, it's just notes.” He came back with a new focus and passion.
In November 1961 he started playing live again in clubs in Greenwich Village and then in 1962 released his comeback album fittingly entitled “The Bridge.” By the late 1970s he was getting interested in completely unaccompanied sax solos, and he played such performances both on The Tonight Show and at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.
In 1981, there came an unexpected invitation. The Rolling Stones asked him to play on three cuts on their “Tattoo You” album. Stones drummer Charlie Watts was a jazz fanatic and thought that Rollins would never want to do it. Mick Jagger was sure he would, was nevertheless nervous when Rollins appeared at the studio. The coolest thing from that is his great solo on the song Waiting for a Friend. Afterward he turned down an offer to tour with them. That could’ve been pretty amazing.
Sonny Rollins described his playing as a being a search— “both in the breath and in the sound – for everything I could offer from my own personality. That takes a lifetime,” he added. Over the course of his long career, he proved that abundantly.