R.I.P. Sonny Rollins, the Saxophone Colossus

4 Min Read

Welcome to the latest edition of All the Music of All the World, our weekly series where we aim to share music worth being passionate about. Consider us a guide who can help you get the most out of your Victrola by giving you new music to listen to, or new ways to think about music you already know.

Earlier this week, the jazz world lost one of its true titans: Sonny Rollins passed away on May 25, at 95-years-old. Rollins is well known in jazz circles—he’s been a famous sax player since the music was mostly just called bebop—but he’s maybe one ring outside the “I’m new to jazz” starter kit that most people start with that has records by Coltrane, Miles, Herbie Hancock, and Dizzy Gillespie, so it’s possible you’re reading this without ever knowing Rollins’ name. That’s totally great: the best time to start listening to Sonny is today. We’re here to help with that.

Born in New York City in 1930, and raised in Harlem and Sugar Hill, Rollins started playing sax as a preteen. At 16, he started playing tenor sax like Coleman Hawkins, who he’d consider his musical hero most of his life. In his late teens, he recorded with bop pioneers like Bud Powell, and was getting a name for himself when—like many jazzmen before him—his heroin habit got out of control, and in 1950, he was arrested for armed robbery and sentenced to 18 months in Riker’s Island. He wasted little time when he got out of prison: In 1951, he started cutting records with Miles Davis, who was just then ascending to be THE Miles Davis. In one session in 1954, Rollins cut three songs with Davis that would become jazz standards, played by high school jazz ensembles to this day: "Oleo," "Airegin," and "Doxy." Here’s “Oleo,” if you’re not familiar:

He went to a rehab facility, finally, in 1955, to kick heroin, worrying the whole way that he wouldn’t play the same without drugs. Little did he know that 1956 would be his creative breakthrough: He released the first of his masterpieces, Saxophone Colossus, an album that established him as the hottest—and best—tenor saxophonist in jazz. If you want to spend just 11 minutes hearing what made Rollins special, listen to his work on “Blue 7,” where he’s light, heavy, blue, red, and playing with immense feel.

The next year, he’d drop his second masterpiece: Way Out West, an album that found Rollins and bassist Ray Brown and drummer Shelly Manne deconstructing western, cowboy songs into a hard bop mode. It’s my personal favorite, and the vinyl editions released in the last few years by Craft Recordings are all superb.

That’d been enough great work for a 12 month period, but Rollins is also the saxophonist on the best Thelonious Monk album: Brilliant Corners during the same year. In 1959, after releasing the underrated Civil Rights jazz movement Freedom Suite, Rollins decided to take a sabbatical from jazz. In a move that would become familiar for the generation of artists coming up a generation behind him, he was always an inner and outer searcher, and after a rocketship ride of jazz stardom, he wasn’t sure he had anything left to play, and wanted to search for other ways of being, playing, and listening. Because he had nowhere private to play, he’d spend most of his days—sometimes 15 to 16 hours—playing on the Williamsburg Bridge. When he came back to jazz in 1962, it was The Bridge, an album that sounds like Rollins fighting through the din of traffic and a busy city, trying to be heard.

Rollins settled into an elder statesman role in jazz in the ‘60s as players like Coltrane, Ornette Coleman and Pharoah Sanders took his improv skills to newer, out there vistas. But he was always playing, recording albums for labels like Milestone and Impulse that pushed him into different territories. Throw a dart at his discography and find something to push your own listening. Why not start with his underrated soundtrack to Michael Caine’s Alfie from 1966.

Rollins would remain a New York resident for most of his life, evacuating his longtime Greenwich apartment on 9/11 with just his saxophone in his hand. He won Grammys, had albums put in the Library of Congress, and played publicly until he was 82, when in 2012 he had to retire due to pulmonary fibrosis. He was still the elder jazz statesman, someone who waves of new jazz lions looked up to, his standards played by novices the world over.

To go out, here’s one of Rollins’ most unexpected side quests: he played sax on three songs on the Rolling Stones’ massive Tattoo You. That’s him on the outro solo for “Waiting on a Friend.” RIP Sonny Rollins, long live Sonny Rollins.