September 7th: 78 years of Sonny Rollins

Friday marked the seventy-eighth year of life and music for one of the most enduring jazz legends of our time-- the versatile and supremely gifted tenorman Sonny Rollins, a musician whose evocative improvisations contain all the power of John Coltrane's enraged meanderings and all the heartbreaking sensitivity of Billie Holiday's tearful wail. Into his singularly melodic lines, Rollins infuses a unique style of playful exuberance, a buoyant, excitable method of playing that is as welcoming as it is evocative. Rollins' playing is childish in its enthusiasm but entirely mature in its execution, and one need only hear the deliberately stumbling, drunken playing on his slurred interpretation of "On Green Dolphin Street" to become aware of the tremendous humanity evident in his music. Said esteemed critic Stanley Crouch of the still living giant:

"Over and over, decade after decade, from the late seventies through the eighties and nineties, there he is, Sonny Rollins, the saxophone colossus, playing somewhere in the world, some afternoon or some eight o'clock somewhere, pursuing the combination of emotion, memory, thought, and aesthetic design with a command that allows him to achieve spontaneous grandiloquence. With its brass body, its pearl-button keys, its mouthpiece, and its cane reed, the horn becomes the vessel for the epic of Rollins' talent and the undimmed power and lore of his jazz ancestors."

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Though his perpetual presence on the international stage is expected today (something quite astounding considering his age), Rollins made jazz history in the late 1950's when, at the height of his career, he abruptly dropped out of sight, retreating off the stages and away from the clubs that had been his haunting grounds throughout his entire adult life. Said Rollins later,

"People have speculated that the competition from John Coltrane was what drove me from the scene, and then hearing Ornette on top of that.... But it was really just my usual effort to improve my playing-- that was the main thing. I was suddenly getting a lot of publicity and being hailed my the critics, which is fine, except I almost felt like they were setting me up, because I felt like I wasn't delivering."

Rollins retreated into the privacy offered by the shocking anonymity of New York City (at one point, he enrolled in music classes at the New School, finding that only one of his professors recognized his name). Rollins found the privacy he needed to practice in the beautiful solitude and cathedral-like echo of one of the bridges over Manhattan's East River, blowing endless choruses among the silver beams and walkways of his metal hall. Jazz lore has it that during the years spent on the bridge, Rollins worked only on phrasing-- blowing a single line repeatedly and incessantly for days, reinterpreting it thousands of times with the subtle rhythmic manipulation so characteristic of his style.

Rollins' anonymity would be cut short after only several years when, in 1961, critic Ralph Berton published a supposedly fictional story in Downbeat magazine. In this story Berton described he and his wife stumbling upon "expert, first-class jazz tenor sax" while crossing one of Manhattan's bridges. The man Berton described

"paced as he blew, turning this way and that, bent his knees and spread his feet, blowing always, usually a single phrase over and over, smoothing out a sequence of triplets, superimposing a cresendo, riding the pulse of a non-existent rhythm section."

New York's jazz fans were not fooled by Berton's ambiguous information and use of a pseudonym, and Rollins returned to the recording studio shortly afterward, releasing the aptly titled "The Bridge". And Sonny Rollins, the master himself, has graced us with his music for almost half a century since.