# Sonny Rollins as one of the greatest jazz saxophonists in history: Video, Photos

- Link: https://jazzblues.eu/2018/09/07/sonny-rollins07-09/
- Published: 2018-09-07T00:05:20+01:00
- Author: https://JazzBlues.EU

**07.09. – Happy Birthday !!! No one knows why exactly Sonny Rollins, the tenor 
saxophone colossus, hasn’t recorded a good studio album since the 1960s. Though 
he ranks alongside Charlie Parker and John Coltrane as one of the greatest jazz 
saxophonists in history, some say that his style was irreparably damaged by years
spent experimenting with funk, disco, and fusion in the seventies and eighties. **

Yet anyone who has seen Rollins perform on a good night knows that, even at eighty-
one, he is still capable of playing with the same brilliance that first made giants
like Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, and Thelonious Monk take an interest in him in
the 1950s. And if there were any lingering doubts, the news that Rollins won three
major jazz awards this summer should dispel the notion that his best years are behind
him.

In spite of his advanced age, Rollins remains one of jazz’s most talented improvisers.
He has almost inexhaustible stamina, complete control of his instrument, and a seemingly
bottomless reservoir of musical knowledge (ranging from jazz standards and pop, 
to folk songs and classical music), to say nothing of his decades of experience 
playing with almost every major figure in jazz. More important still, he has an 
impish sense of humor. He also has a keen appreciation of his audience; when performing
he often walks into the crowd as he plays, hoping to draw inspiration from them.

In his newest album of live performances, “Road Shows Vol 2,” there are moments 
when you can hear all this firsthand. A compilation of two recent live shows, including
his 80th birthday concert at the Beacon Theater in New York, the record captures
Rollins playing with the energy of someone half his age. Particularly noteworthy
is the twenty-minute version of his classic twelve-bar blues, “Sonnymoon for Two,”
on which he is joined by the multi-instrumentalist genius Ornette Coleman. This 
is the first time the two have been recorded together, and to hear Coleman’s chirping
free jazz side by side with Rollins’ more swing based playing is a historic occasion.
Perhaps more remarkable simply for the quality of playing is his performance on “
Rain Check,” an old Billy Strayhorn song. As he and the 42-year-old trumpeter Roy
Hargrove begin to trade fours—that is, exchange four bar improvisations—Rollins’
relentless exuberance overtakes the young trumpeter, whose playing improves audibly
the more he interacts with Sonny.

Ornette Coleman and Sonny Rollins, with Christian McBride and Roy Haynes, at Rollins’s
80th birthday concert, Beacon Theater, New York City, September 10, 2010

These kinds of moments should awaken listeners to a musician who is still, in Stanley
Crouch’s words, capable of “summoning the entire history of jazz.” He was born in
Harlem in 1930, the heyday of swing bands. Duke Ellington was a neighbor, and Louis
Jordan, the father of R&B, inspired Rollins to pick up the alto saxophone as a teen(
he would later switch to tenor). He grew up within walking distance of the Apollo
and Minton’s Playhouse, where Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, 
and the guitarist Charlie Christian held the all night jam sessions—Ralph Ellison
called them “a continuing symposium of jazz”—that were so central to the development
of bebop.

By the time he was 21, he was playing with Miles Davis. Within the next five years,
he achieved the kind of success that most jazz musicians might hope for in a lifetime:
he was leading his own groups and recording albums which were widely praised. Still
in his twenties, he had already developed an unmistakable sound, a caustic, sometimes
barking tone that _The New Yorker_’s jazz critic, Whitney Balliett, aptly described
as “bossy and demanding” (and, somewhat less charitably, “persistently goatlike”).
Here is Balliett on how Rollins melded his chief influences, the tenor saxophonist
Coleman Hawkins and Charlie Parker:

He extracted the muscle from Hawkins’ tone and left the velvet, lopped off Hawkins’
famous vibrato, and sharpened Hawkins’ method of melodic playing by making it parodic.
He learned Parker’s teeming disregard of bar lines, Parker’s way with rhythm (the
oddly placed notes, the silences, the avalanches of thirty-second notes), and Parker’s
trick of mixing surreal melodic passages with tumbling bursts of improvisation. 
And over all this he superimposed a unique and witty garrulity that made his immensely
long solos seem, paradoxically, like endless strings of epigrams.

For many, this period was Rollins at his best. He released a number of landmark 
albums, like _Saxophone Colossus_, which contains, among others, his famous Calypso
song, “St. Thomas.”

On _Way Out West_, another album released in these years, Rollins plays with a stripped
down, pianoless trio, using hackneyed songs from the cowboy movies he grew up watching
at the Apollo as vehicles for wonderfully complex improvisation.

In spite of this success, Rollins quietly withdrew from the jazz world in 1959, 
citing dissatisfaction with his playing. For two years he did nothing but practice
in his apartment. When a neighbor had a new baby, he moved his practice sessions
to the Williamsburg Bridge. When he returned to the scene in 1961, he released The
Bridge, one of his most beloved albums, which includes a gorgeous rendition of Billie
Holiday’s “God Bless the Child.” Yet though he had probably reached his technical
peak, in the time he had been gone Rollins had nevertheless been overtaken by two
towering figures of the avant garde. The first was John Coltrane, who released the
revolutionary Giant Steps—one of the most harmonically complex jazz songs ever written—
in 1960, and thereafter began an ascent that would stop only with his untimely death
in 1967. Second, and more radical still, was Ornette Coleman, the creator of free
jazz. Suddenly Rollins was regarded—unfairly—as a conservative, a remnant of the
old bebop and post bop tradition.

The irony of this conservative label is that Rollins embraced these new styles, 
recording albums with both Coleman’s and Coltrane’s band members (_Our Man in Jazz_
and _East Broadway Rundown_, respectively). But by the end of the sixties he told
Balliett in an interview that he was “[disillusioned] with the music scene” and 
again went on a sabbatical, much of which he spent in India. When he returned to
New York in 1972 he began what some have seen as the beginning of a long slow decline.

As rock’s influence grew and fusion became popular among jazz musicians, Rollins,
just as he had with Coleman’s “new thing,” once again attempted to meld elements
of the latest style into his music. Yet in this instance he seems to have gone too
far. He led ensembles structured more like rock groups, heavy on electric bass. 
His albums, incorporating not just rock, but funk, and disco, came to sound more
commercial, often resembling Gato Barbieri more than Sonny Rollins. Of course, these
records did not, as some have speculated, somehow impair Rollins’ ability to play
thoughtful music. In fact, if one listens closely Rollins can still be heard playing
at the same high level he always has. But his great moments of inspiration are fewer,
and seem to come in spite of their surroundings, cropping up unaccountably in the
middle of an otherwise insipid funk tune or disco track and just as quickly disappearing.

But in the eighties—even as he continued to release largely uninspired studio albums—
another Sonny Rollins emerged on stage. This was the musician who had learned the
art of crowd pleasing from Louis Jordan; who emerged years later from Charlie Parker’s
long shadow; and who had devoured and assimilated every avant garde idiom while 
still remaining, ultimately, himself. He can be seen in this video, shot in 1982,
playing an extemporaneous medley in which he weaves together about a dozen disparate
songs—including, but not limited to, the anvil chorus from Il Trovatore, the funeral
march from Chopin’s second piano sonata, “A-Tisket, A Tasket,” (or, perhaps, “Iko
Iko”), “Four,” “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” and the William Tell Overture. Then,
after playing a lick that seems to be a final nod to Louis Jordan, he jumps off 
the six-foot-high stage, breaks his foot, and then, supine, begins a lovely rendition
of “Autumn Nocturne.“

A clip from the 1986 film _Sonny Rollins: Saxophone Colossus_ by Robert Mugge

The exact causes of this renaissance remain something of a mystery. But the idea
that Rollins should in some sense rediscover his talents—especially while playing
alone—has a certain affinity with the simplifying drive of his earlier work, in 
which he stripped the traditional jazz combo unit of a piano, leaving only saxophone,
drums, and bass. Nor does it seem out of keeping with the multiple sabbaticals he
took when he felt that the world of professional recording and club performance 
had, in some sense, corrupted his music. Rollins seems always to have been most 
comfortable when on his own, playing what comes to him as it comes; the improvised
public performance may well be the ideal venue for him.

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