You can parse the life and career of tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins as a sequence of entries and exits, some of them dramatic, theatrical even; all of them impactful and memorable.
The best-known entrance in this lengthy history – Rollins’ return to public performance after two years of practising to refine his art, most famously atop New York’s Williamsburg Bridge – had followed perhaps his most bewildering exit; a sudden, unexpected, retirement when, to all the world, he appeared to be at the very height of his powers.
But then Rollins had never placed much stock in others’ opinions of his work. Eccentric comings and goings weren’t solely reserved for his broader career path either. As patrons of Ronnie Scott’s original venue in London’s Gerrard Street discovered in the mid-1960s, in the saxophonist’s hands, the mere act of going on and off stage could be subverted. One night Rollins began his opening number descending the club’s staircase. On another he led a conga-line of willing followers out onto the street above. He’d often conclude his sets by wandering through the audience to Ronnie’s pokey band room, still blowing.
Music for Rollins then didn’t begin and end onstage. Later still, on and outdoor appearance in the US, he famously dove from a raised stage and fell so heavily he broke an ankle. The music didn’t stop, even then. And in the final years of touring he was still making unforgettable curtain calls, an electric shocked afro, brightly coloured silk shirts and wraparound sunglasses making his every move a thing of spectacle.
Rollins’ first entrance onto the jazz stage was no less dazzling. In the late 1940s, while still in his teens, he was such a precociously talented saxophonist that he could hold his own with some of bebop’s fastest company – pianist Bud Powell, trumpeters Fats Navarro and Kenny Dorham, trombonist J. J. Johnson - having cultivated a style that wedded the opulent contours found in the playing of his initial idol Coleman Hawkins with the fleet quixotic inventions of Charlie Parker. Over the first half of the fifties, he ran with the best; Thelonious Monk, the Modern Jazz Quartet, the co-led band of Clifford Brown and Max Roach, Horace Silver, even Parker himself. Yet it was to be his closest running buddy, the trumpeter Miles Davis who truly brought Rollins to the world’s attention.
It was Davis who also encouraged him to compose, the tenorist gifting three gnomic, sketch-like pieces – ‘Oleo’, ‘Doxy’ and ‘Airegin’ – to one recording session, a trio of themes soon to be jazz standards, an ironic fate since they at first appeared to be such highly personal reductions of their composer’s playing style as to be wholly unique. Within a couple more years Rollins had also given jazz ‘Valse Hot’ and ‘Sonnymoon For Two’, a brace of further indelibly memorable melodies that are played to this day.
Rollins however couldn’t be held as a sideman any longer. Nor, despite his early successes, was he much interested in formal composition. His strongest suit, as he revealed over a truly astonishing run of album releases taped between 1956 and 1958, among them ‘Tenor Madness’, ‘Newk’s Time’, ‘Way Out West’, ‘A Night at the Village Vanguard’ and the iconic ‘Saxophone Colossus’, was to take a standard song, be it a forgotten movie theme, a Broadway ballad, or even a bit of contemporary pop fluff, and twist it every way imaginable. The end result would elevate even Tin Pan Alley’s most flimsiest products into pure spun gold.
There are dozens of such alchemic examples from this period, but to choose just one, listen to ‘Come, Gone’, the tenorist’s wholly extemporised variant of ‘After You’ve Gone’, a song as old as the hills and which jazzmen had been playing since the 1920s. Rollins version is included on the 1957 album ‘Way Out West’, a reinvention at once oblique and hip yet magically entrancing, bending its source material into hitherto unheard shapes. One Rollins associate later went on to compare the saxophonist’s transformation of a song to Picasso’s subversion of the human face, an alignment that is as accurate as it is romantic. ‘Come, Gone’ is this in extremis; there’s little left of the underlying melody but somehow we understand exactly what it is we’re hearing. Consistency and cohesion are everywhere, even in that we’ve not previously encountered. Rollins’ iron-clad conviction has made believers of us all. For the saxophonist though, such an accomplishment was not enough. His music might have struck admiring chords in others; he however was reaching for the sublime, a lofty goal in America’s throwaway jazz club culture of the day.
The 1960s though, after that legend-building retreat, weren’t so easy for Rollins. He’d at first come back strongly with a best-selling LP (‘The Bridge’) and in a commanding financial position (his new record label affiliation had paid out a whopping $90,000 advance) but a largely press-manufactured ‘rivalry’ with his friend John Coltrane and the more obvious trappings of the fast-rising avant-garde soon tripped him up. Already a notably free-ranging player, less structure ironically made for an ill-fit, his more far-reaching performances of the decade denying him the framework that had always been present in his best work. Every so often, weirdness was the sole result of curiosity, and Rollins baffled as many as he delighted during these years. There were a few classic records, but unlike the late 1950s, when he was setting down definitive solo after definitive solo, there were no longer quite so many quotable choruses.
In 1969 Rollins ‘retired’ again, as much tired by the physical demands of club sets as by jazz fashion.
He’d cleaned up is body years before (among the less-celebrated entries and exist of his life to date had been a stint in a narcotic rehabilitation programme) and now it was time for his soul, with yoga and meditation becoming serious disciplines. When he re-emerged again in 1971, onto a jazz scene very much fixated with melding itself with rock in order to keep relevant, he would enter into a stylistic pact that was to hold him for the remainder of his performing life; equal musical partners were from here on in largely a thing of the past, extended blowing over funk riffs began to dominate, electronic gadgetry appeared, there was even some vain dabbling with disco rhythms, all these things combining to make the saxophonist’s 1970s work some of the most dilute under his name.
If outstanding albums no longer conveyer-belted into view, Rollins’ live remained as captivating as ever. No more stylistically seminal (Coltrane’s syntax – harmonic, more overtly technique-based - was far more easily codified than that of a soloist who still built largely from melody), Rollins remained one for the most powerfully protean examples of the masterful horn player, arguably the last in the line that ran from Louis Armstrong through Charlie Parker and onwards. He became a festival favourite, a veteran able to winningly negotiate the tradition-tethered values of the Marsalis-spun 1980s with something more populist.
And as the end game of his performing career drew nigh, he gave the jazz world a welcome reminder that classic albums cannot outweigh a classic modus operandi. Indeed, even as late as the early 2000s, and well beyond the age at which many of his close contemporaries had begun to slow down, Rollins was still capable of epic, 100% committed improvisation. What he extolled as a survivor from a quite different era was essential; jazz was a soloist’s art, an expression of charisma and character rather than a mechanical construction. ‘Jazz means no barriers’ he once said, leaving it up to the world to appreciate how layered a statement this was.
After the penultimate exit came – ill-health forcing him to give up playing in 2012 – Rollins succeeded in pulling off what was in some regards his most surprising reinvention yet, becoming a figure part guru, part griot, a gentle giant’s gravitas-aura around him as he gave forth memories and reflections on his past, his art, his life and life in general in a series of deep-diving online interviews. Sonny the saxophone colossus had become Sonny the sage. The music wasn’t over yet though; his final album releases were a series of recordings made live across the globe during the past twenty or so years, their blanket title ‘Road Shows’ a reminder that it was out there, touring, in front of an eager crowd that he delivered his finest work. With supreme irony, these releases finally silenced those who had mistaken the Sonny Rollins of the 1980s onwards as a spent sideshow. The playing was strong, wilful, driven, in retrospect now sounding like a joyous, benign rage against the darkness soon to fall.
It may seem glib to state that life was at the core of Sonny Rollins’ music, yet think back to almost any stage of his sixty-plus year career – to the heart-stopping daring of those fifties albums, to the pulsing calypsos of the 1960s, even to the funk borrowings of those patchy intermediate years – and you’ll feel an undeniable physicality within those memories. Sonny Rollins moved us in all manner of ways – intellectually, spiritually, as an exemplar, an elder, a humanitarian role model even – but he never moved us so powerfully as when he took to the stage, poured himself into a tenor saxophone and made our world vibrate.
His death, that final, irreversible exit, also has within it two elements that were intrinsic to his DNA; timing and wit. Indeed these two qualities come together in the story of a remarkable coincidence.
Back in the 1970s, there were those who accused Rollins of envy over the immense popularity that his old Harlem pal Miles Davis had secured following his adoption of the codes of rock. Some even accused Rollins of a cynical cash-in on these trends, an argument that still holds some water when listening to some of his output in these years. It’s true; latter Rollins did have something of the sense of showbiz gloss seen in Davis. Thankfully although the saxophonist never went as far as his old friend in the realms of sartorial debasement, there was a suspicion that somehow something had been corrupted during these years.
That was until you truly listened to how Rollins played.
What remained was an aspect of performance both he and Davis had recognised in each other back at the end of the 1940s; a melodic sense, a natural understanding of pacing, the talent to turn a solo into a statement. Occasionally, when you listen back to the recordings that they made together in the 1950s, you might be forgiven you’re hearing a battle for who’s the hippest, who has the grooviest time, who can make their very entrances and exits into things of unmistakable, vital, beauty. Passing away one day ahead of what would have been Davis 100th birthday you could argue that Rollins has undercut his former boss once more, tying up the stretched-out improvised riff that was his life with a final, ‘beat that’ bow. The truth is less fantastic; Sonny Rollins’ death is no parlour game for jazz-heads. It is the stilling of a voice, the halting of a force, and maybe just maybe the last rite of a music that will never see his like again.
Rest easy, colossus.
Walter Theodore ‘Sonny’ Rollins
b. New York City, September 7 1930
d. Woodstock, NY, May 25 2026