The Revolutionary Force of Sonny Rollins

Photograph by K. Abe / Shinko Music / Getty Save this story Save this story Save this story Save this story Photos of great musicians often reveal the spiritual dimension of their quest, but one didn’t need to see a picture of Sonny Rollins to know that he was tall and muscular. Rollins, who died Monday, at the age of ninety-five, played the tenor saxophone, a big, heavy instrument. It’s made of metal, but it’s called a woodwind, and his sound—from the time of his first recordings, in 1949, at the age of eighteen, until his late, live albums, from the twenty-tens—seems hewn, with rugged textures to match. His full range of expression spanned whirlwind energy and intimate warmth, and this power felt natural and in contact with nature, connected to the deep-rooted vastness of jazz itself. His sixty-plus years of professional life covered crucial periods in the history of the genre, and he played key roles in all of them.

Born and raised in Harlem at a time when many of the era’s great musicians lived there, young Rollins was a fan of one of his neighbors, the tenor saxophonist Coleman Hawkins—widely considered the first, in the nineteen-twenties, to make that instrument a central, solo voice in jazz bands—and ultimately borrowed and transformed something of Hawkins’s deep, burly tone. But what Rollins learned from Hawkins, even more, was to advance in step with the most advanced new ideas and forms that jazz would take. Bebop flourished in Rollins’s youth: the music of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell (with whom Rollins made some of his earliest recordings), and others who distilled jazz into an art centered on solo improvisations and energized it with unprecedented harmonic intricacy and death-defying speed. It demanded physical and intellectual virtuosity, and Rollins bore its difficulty lightly, on broad shoulders, with a distinctive lilt of melody.

In the nineteen-fifties, he composed some of the most enduringly fruitful and popular jazz tunes, such as “Doxy,” “Oleo,” and “St. Thomas.” Where others relied on the tunes mainly as harmonic springboards, for Rollins they were touchstones, fundamental elements that echoed throughout his often extensive improvisations—fragments of songs recurred as baubles of sensual beauty to match the sophisticated excitement of his spontaneous inventions. His partnerships were illustrious. In 1951, he recorded with the trumpeter Miles Davis, who became an on-and-off collaborator through much of the fifties, as did Monk. In 1955, Rollins joined the band of the bright-toned, mercurial prodigy Clifford Brown (who died at twenty-five, in 1956, in a car crash, along with Powell’s brother Richie, the band’s pianist). The following year, Rollins invited John Coltrane, a contemporary whose genius was still inchoate and whose career was just rising, to record with him. Then, in 1957, in a stroke of collaborative genius, he made an album that turned out to be something more than a landmark in the history of jazz: it created a template, even a genre, that would stand as a challenge to saxophonists to this day.