Sonny Rollins, one of the most influential saxophone players in jazz history, died at his home in Woodstock, New York. He was 95. The announcement was made on his official social media. The tenor saxophonist’s career spanned more than six decades and produced over 60 albums. Deadline
What Rollins left behind is not easily reduced to a catalog. His compositions “St. Thomas,” “Oleo,” “Doxy,” and “Airegin” have long been established jazz standards, played in clubs and concert halls around the world by musicians who were not yet born when Rollins first recorded them. In 1956 alone, he recorded Tenor Madness — his only documented collaboration with John Coltrane — and Saxophone Colossus, which set the standard for modern jazz saxophone of the era. The following year brought Way Out West, a trio session with no piano, which expressed his longstanding frustrations with incompatible pianists and demonstrated his gift for transforming even hackneyed material into something entirely his own. Then, in 1958, came Freedom Suite — the first civil rights-themed album of the hard bop era, a political statement delivered through music at a time when such things carried real risk.
These were not simply albums. They were arguments about what jazz could be.
Theodore Walter Rollins was born in Harlem on September 7, 1930, into a musical household. His father, a naval petty officer, played the clarinet; his sister played piano; his older brother was a violinist. Harlem in the 1930s and ’40s was home to the latest developments in jazz, and musicians were admired members of the community. The Apollo Theater was nearby, and Rollins had ample opportunity to hear Lionel Hampton, Fletcher Henderson, Duke Ellington, and Count Basie.
When he was eight, his parents pushed him toward piano, but as he later recalled, “it didn’t take.” He would rather have been playing baseball. It was the example of Louis Jordan that first drew the young Rollins to the alto saxophone. He switched to tenor when he fell under the spell of Coleman Hawkins. Miles Davis, in his autobiography, wrote that Rollins “had a big reputation among a lot of the younger musicians in Harlem… some thought he was playing the saxophone on the level of Bird.”
His first major break came when Thelonious Monk invited him to join his band in his late teens. He was soon jamming with Miles Davis and Bud Powell, who introduced him to the recording world before Rollins even finished high school.
But the rise was not clean. Like many jazz musicians of the late 1940s and early 1950s, Rollins’ ascending star nearly collapsed when he became hooked on heroin at 19. His addiction worsened until he served two stints in jail — ten months in 1950 and three months in 1953 — and eventually found himself living on the street. He fought his way back, and the albums that followed his recovery defined the era. ABC News
Then, at what many considered the peak of his powers, he vanished. In the summer of 1959, between a string of brilliant recordings that had led the New Yorker‘s Whitney Balliett to call him “possibly the most incisive and influential jazz instrumentalist since Charlie Parker,” Rollins simply disappeared from public life. He had grown dissatisfied with his playing and stopped performing for roughly two years in order to practice extensively and develop his musical vision. He was 28 years old and withdrawing from an Olympian peak of talent and fame. As he later put it: “I was getting a lot of publicity for my work at that time, but I wasn’t satisfying my own requirements for what I wanted to do musically.”
It was during this sabbatical that Rollins began practicing on the Williamsburg Bridge to avoid disturbing a pregnant neighbor. He played day and night, rain or shine, in solitary sessions of sometimes 15 hours or more. When he returned in late 1961, his first recording was titled, appropriately, The Bridge.
He would take another sabbatical in the late 1960s, retreating to study Zen meditation and spending time at a monastery in India. He returned again, as he always did, with something new to say. In 1972 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship in composition, and continued recording and touring well into the 21st century. Rock audiences encountered him through the Rolling Stones’ 1981 album Tattoo You, which features his wistful saxophone solo on “Waiting on a Friend,” a part he devised after watching Mick Jagger dance.
Rollins stopped performing in 2014. The years since were spent in Woodstock, where he had long lived. His extensive archive — more than 150 linear feet of written correspondence, handwritten essays, rehearsal tapes with detailed annotations, and photographs — was acquired by the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library.
He received a Lifetime Achievement Grammy in 2004 and a National Medal of the Arts in 2010. In 2011, President Obama awarded him a Kennedy Center Honor alongside Yo-Yo Ma, Neil Diamond, and Meryl Streep.
His survivors include a nephew, Clifton Anderson, and nieces Vallyn Anderson and Gabrielle DeGroat. Chronicle Online
In 2009, Rollins reflected on what it means for a creative person to leave the world. “I think when the creative person ends, he continues in the next existence,” he said. “A spiritual person doesn’t feel like that” — meaning they don’t see this life as the end of everything.
He was right, of course. The music continues.
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