Sonny Rollins, Saxophonist Who Drew on Jazz History, Dies at 95

(Bloomberg) -- Sonny Rollins, the tenor saxophonist who played with bebop pioneers Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk in the 1950s and continued to perform for another half-century, has died. He was 95.

He died on Monday at his home in Woodstock, New York, the Associated Press reported, citing his spokesperson, Terri Hinte. 

Over six decades, Rollins made more than 60 albums and played on countless other “bootleg” recordings of his concerts. His Saxophone Colossus album with Max Roach became an instant classic in 1956. A hard bop saxophonist, he made forays — in concerts and records — into the calypso music of his Caribbean heritage. Though he played with pianists such as Monk, Hampton Hawes and Herbie Hancock, he promoted the pianoless trios that became popular in the 1960s.

“Sonny Rollins is one of our most beloved, inspiring, creative artists,” Bret Primack, a journalist, filmmaker and friend of Rollins, said years ago, adding that the jazz maestro provided listeners with “improvisational journeys of unprecedented harmonic imagination.” 

Whatever the music or groups Rollins accompanied, he never lost the infectious joy and energy that flowed from his horn.

In 1959, at 29 and the peak of his fame and creativity, Rollins suddenly stopped playing in public. He dropped out because he was unhappy with his performances, he said.

“I was playing before more and more people, and not being able to do my best,” he told critic Whitney Balliett. “I’d lost the ability to play what I wanted to play every night without the interference of emotionalism. I was filled with question marks.”

To get answers, he began “practicing and practicing,” he said. Anxious that his sax would disturb neighbors, he played not far from his Brooklyn home under the Williamsburg Bridge, where “you can blow as loud as you want,” he said.

He also studied piano, harmony and counterpoint, quit smoking, exercised and cut down on his drinking: “I have to have good lungs and quick fingers.”

‘Constantly Changing’

Whatever the cause, his self-imposed sabbatical and three-year recording hiatus didn’t hurt his popularity, musicians and critics said. “His once mannered and querulous tone had become larger and freer,” Balliett wrote, and his “approach to improvisation was a constantly changing delight.”

On his return, Rollins put together a small group, including guitarist Jim Hall. Jazz before meant “bars and smoke and drinking,” Hall said. “But his playing was so healthy that it planted a seed in me, and really helped me to get my own health together.”

Hall said Rollins could take a motif and put it through solos in ways that “linked up to the studying I had been doing in music school with classical composers.”

Not that Rollins pleased all the critics all the time. “He is either astounding or barely all right,” Stanley Crouch wrote in 2005. Rollins summons “the entire history of jazz” when he is on, Crouch declared, “but when Rollins is faced with a young crowd, he often resorts to banal calypso tunes.”

Theodore Walter Rollins was born in New York’s Harlem neighborhood on Sept. 7, 1930. His parents were immigrants from the US Virgin Islands. He played the piano before getting his first saxophone at 13, then shifted from alto to tenor sax. As a teenager, he recorded with J.J. Johnson and Bud Powell; soon he was playing with Monk, Davis and Parker.

In 1950, Rollins was arrested for armed robbery and spent 10 months in New York’s Rikers Island jail. Two years after his release, he was sent to an institution for drug addicts in Lexington, Kentucky, and managed to kick his heroin habit.

Early on, he fell under the spell of Coleman Hawkins, then drifted toward Lester Young’s cooler saxophone. In the end, his sax sounded like neither. He favored the lower register for his distinctive sound. A bebop stalwart, he held his own playing with Parker and Monk. He also sat in with the Modern Jazz Quartet, bringing a welcome jolt to the group’s oh-so-cool musical reveries.

‘Powerful’ Improviser

Over the years, jazz critics argued that Rollins’s studio records didn’t do justice to his talent. Ben Ratliff, writing in the New York Times in 2005, called Rollins “a powerful, grand-scale improviser who often needs half an hour or more to say what he wants on the horn and achieve his momentum.”

Such carping was hardly universal. The authoritative Penguin Guide to Jazz said Rollins had a “prolific and inspirational career in concert and on record. Although famously inscrutable at times, Rollins’s music has been — in its virtuoso command of the horn and in the caliber of his improvising — enormously influential.”

Even late in his career, Rollins played concerts lasting more than two hours. “That a saxophone player can still perform this kind of show in his 70s is remarkable,” Ratliff said in the Times. “That it’s expected of him makes one worry for his health.”

Rollins’s sets were packed with standards, calypso numbers and even a Hawaiian song. He stood in front of his six-piece band, legs apart, “moving his torso and the horn as if trying to shake surprises from it,” Ratliff said. Rollins showed how “startling improvisation can be carried out within smaller song structures.”

Calling Rollins “a volcanic improviser” in concert, another Times critic in 1996 said the saxophonist was “legendarily cowed by the recording studio.”

He panned an album that underlined “a heartbreaking sense of underachievement” by Rollins — criticism that aroused the ire of readers. To term “the great Sonny Rollins as an underachiever is a bit like describing Mount Everest as an underachieving mountain,” said one letter-writer.

Even sympathetic critics such as Gary Giddins held that he was one of “jazz’s most provocatively enigmatic” performers. Theatrical, loose and inventive in concerts, Rollins in the studio showed “more restraint and a veneer of professionalism that is not necessarily to the benefit of his instinctive way of playing,” Giddins said.

Outgoing onstage, Rollins was so self-critical he took two more breaks from performing in public, including one for three years at the end of the 1960s.

“Don’t ever shrink from the belief that you have to prove yourself every minute, because you do, and probably it’s a healthy thing,” he said, summarizing his philosophy. The desire to improve is “one of the natural things you can only get from yourself.”

Rollins was awarded the National Medal of Arts, was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and received the Kennedy Center Honors. He was also the subject of a documentary film, Sonny Rollins: Beyond the Notes. 

Rollins and his wife, Lucille, were married for 48 years. Lucille, who managed his business affairs, died in 2004. They lived in a small farmhouse in Germantown, near the Hudson River about 100 miles (161 kilometers) north of New York, for almost four decades, before Rollins relocated to Woodstock.

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