Sonny Rollins, saxophonist who drew on jazz history, dies at 95

(Bloomberg) — Sonny Rollins, the tenor saxophonist who played with bebop pioneers Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk in the 1950s and performed for another half century, has died. He was 95.

He died Monday at his home in Woodstock, New York, the Associated Press reported, citing his spokeswoman Terri Hinte.

Over six decades, Rollins has made more than 60 albums and played on countless other “bootleg” recordings of his concerts. His 1956 album Saxophone Colossus with Max Roach became an instant classic. As a hard bop saxophonist, he tapped into the calypso music of his Caribbean heritage—in concert and on recordings. Although he played with pianists such as Monk, Hampton Hawes and Herbie Hancock, he pioneered the pianoless trios that became popular in the 1960s.

“Sonny Rollins is one of our most beloved, inspiring and creative artists,” Bret Primack, a journalist, filmmaker and friend of Rollins’, said years ago, adding that the jazz maestro provided listeners with “improvisational journeys of unparalleled harmonic imagination.”

No matter what music or bands Rollins accompanied, he never lost the infectious joy and energy that flowed from his horn.

In 1959, at the age of 29 and at the height of his fame and creativity, Rollins suddenly stopped performing in public. He dropped out because he was dissatisfied with his performances, he said.

“I was playing in front of more and more people and I wasn’t able to do my best,” he told critic Whitney Balliett. “I lost the ability to play what I wanted to play every night without emotionalism interfering. I was full of question marks.”

To get answers, he started “practicing and practicing,” he said. Worried that his saxophone would disturb the neighbors, he played near his Brooklyn home under the Williamsburg Bridge, where “you can blow as much as you want, as much as you want,” he said.

He also studied piano, harmony and counterpoint, quit smoking, exercised and cut down on drinking: “I have to have good lungs and fast fingers.”

‘Constantly Changing’

Whatever the cause, his self-imposed sabbatical and three-year recording hiatus didn’t hurt his popularity, musicians and critics said. “His once mannered and cantankerous tone became larger and freer,” Balliett wrote, and his “approach to improvisation was an ever-changing delight.”

Upon his return, Rollins put together a small group, including guitarist Jim Hall. Jazz used to mean “bars, smoke and drink,” Hall said. “But his playing was so healthy that it planted a seed in me and really helped me pull myself together.

Hall said that Rollins was able to take the theme and solo it in ways that “related to the studies I was doing in music school with classical composers.”

Not that Rollins pleases all critics all the time. “He’s either stunning or barely okay,” wrote Stanley Crouch in 2005. Rollins summons “the entire history of jazz” when he’s on, Crouch declared, “but when Rollins faces a young crowd, he often resorts to banal calypso tunes.”

Theodore Walter Rollins was born in New York’s Harlem neighborhood on September 7, 1930. His parents were immigrants from the US Virgin Islands. He played piano before getting his first sax at 13, then switched from alto to tenor sax. As a teenager he recorded with JJ Johnson and Bud Powell; he was soon playing with Monk, Davis and Parker.

In 1950, Rollins was arrested for armed robbery and spent 10 months in New York’s Rikers Island prison. Two years after his release, he was sent to a drug facility in Lexington, Kentucky, and managed to kick his heroin habit.

He soon fell under the spell of Coleman Hawkins and then moved on to the cooler sax of Lester Young. In the end, his sax sounded like neither. He preferred the lower register for his distinctive sound. A bebop devotee, he played with Parker and Monk. He also sat in with the Modern Jazz Quartet, welcoming the group’s oh-so-cool musical reveries.

“Powerful” improviser

Over the years, jazz critics have argued that Rollins’ studio recordings did not do justice to his talent. Ben Ratliff, writing in the New York Times in 2005, called Rollins “a powerful improviser on a grand scale who often needs half an hour or more to say what he wants and hit his stride.”

Such carp was hardly universal. The authoritative Penguin Guide to Jazz stated that Rollins had “a prolific and inspiring concert and recording career. Although Rollins’ music was sometimes famously erratic, it was – in its virtuoso command of the French horn and in the caliber of his improvisation – hugely influential.”

Even at the end of his career, Rollins played concerts lasting more than two hours. “That a saxophonist can still put on this kind of show at 70 is remarkable,” Ratliff said in the Times. “The fact that he is expected to do that raises concerns about his health.”

Rollins’ sets were packed with standards, calypso numbers and even a Hawaiian song. He stood in front of his six-piece band, feet apart, “moving his trunk and horn like he was trying to shake the surprise off him,” Ratliff said. Rollins showed how “surprising improvisation can be done within smaller song structures”.

Another Times critic in 1996 called Rollins a “volcanic improviser” and said in 1996 that the saxophonist was “legendarily intimidated by the recording studio”.

He pushed the album, which highlighted Rollins’ “heartbreaking sense of underachievement” — a criticism that drew the ire of readers. Labeling “the great Sonny Rollins as unattainable is a bit like describing Mount Everest as a mountain that has not achieved success,” said one letter writer.

Even sympathetic critics such as Gary Giddins claimed that he was one of jazz’s “most provocatively enigmatic” artists. Theatrical, relaxed and inventive in concert, Rollins has shown “more restraint and a touch of professionalism in the studio that doesn’t necessarily benefit his instinctive way of playing,” Giddins said.

When Rollins took the stage, he was so self-critical that he took two more hiatuses from public speaking, including one for three years in the late 1960s.

“Never back down from the belief that you have to prove yourself every minute because you do, and it’s probably a healthy thing to do,” he summed up his philosophy. The desire to improve is “one of the natural things you can only get from yourself.”

Rollins was awarded the National Medal of Arts, was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and received the Kennedy Center Honors. He was also the subject of the documentary Sonny Rollins: Beyond the Notes.

Rollins and his wife, Lucille, were married for 48 years. Lucille, who managed his business affairs, died in 2004. They lived on a small farm in Germantown, near the Hudson River about 100 miles north of New York, for nearly four decades before Rollins moved to Woodstock.

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