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Sonny Rollins

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An early Rollins picture graces the cover of Volume One
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An early Rollins picture graces the cover of Volume One

Theodore Walter (Sonny) Rollins (born September 7, 1930 in New York City) is an American jazz tenor saxophonist. Sonny Rollins has had a long, productive career in jazz, beginning his career at the age of 11 and playing with piano legend Thelonious Monk before reaching the age of 20. Rollins is still touring and recording today, having outlived several of his jazz contemporaries such as John Coltrane, Miles Davis, and Art Blakey, all of whom he recorded with.

He started as a pianist, then switched to alto saxophone, finally switching to tenor in 1946. He was first recorded in 1949 with Babs Gonzalez; in the same year he recorded with J. J. Johnson and Bud Powell. In 1950, Rollins was arrested for armed robbery, given a sentence of three years, spending 10 months in Rikers Island before he was released on parole. He was rearrested in 1952 for violating the terms of his parole by using heroin. Rollins however, attended an institution in Lexington for drug addicts, which administered dolophine, allowing him to kick his habit entirely. Rollins had began to make a name for himself as he recorded with Miles Davis in 1951 and Thelonious Monk in 1953.

Rollins joined the Clifford Brown–Max Roach quintet in 1955, and after Brown's death in 1956 worked mainly as a leader.

Rollins' most widely acclaimed album Saxophone Colossus was recorded on June 22, 1956, featuring Tommy Flanagan on piano, former Jazz Messengers bassist Doug Watkins and his favorite drummer Max Roach. This was only Rollins' third outing as a leader in the recording studio, but it was a date on which he recorded perhaps his best-known composition "St. Thomas", a Caribbean calypso-based on a tune sung to him by his mother in his childhood: "St. Thomas is a song my mother used to sing, it is a traditional tune." In 1957 he also pioneered the use of just bass and drums as accompaniment for his saxophone solos; two early recordings in this format are Way Out West (Contemporary, 1957) and A Night at the Village Vanguard (Blue Note, 1957). Coltrane had not yet become a major figure and Rollins was the leading modern jazz saxophonist in America.

By this time, Rollins had become well-known for taking relatively banal or unconventional material (e.g. "There's No Business Like Show Business" on Work Time, "I'm an Old Cowhand" on Way Out West, and later "Sweet Leilani" on This Is What I Do) and turning it into a vehicle for improvisation. He is quite well-known as a composer; a number of his tunes (including "St. Thomas", "Oleo" and "Airegin") have become standards.

By 1959 however, Rollins was frustrated with what he perceived as his own musical limitations and took the second – and most famous – of his musical sabbaticals. To spare a neighboring expectant mother the sound of his practice routine, Rollins ventured to the Williamsburg Bridge to practice. Upon his return to the jazz scene he named his "comeback" album The Bridge at the start of a contract with RCA Records.

Throughout the '60s Rollins remained one of the most adventurous musicians around. Each album he recorded differed radically from the previous one. Rollins explored Latin rhythms on What's New, tackled the avant-garde on Our Man in Jazz, and re-examined standards on Now's the Time. He also provided the soundtrack to the 1966 version of Alfie. His 1965 residency at legendary jazz club Ronnie Scott's has recently emerged on CD as Live in London, a series of releases from the Harkit label; they offer a very different picture of his playing from the studio albums of the period.

Frustrated once again, Rollins took his last (so far) sabbatical to study yoga, meditation, and Eastern philosophies. When he returned in 1972, it was clear that he had become enamored with R&B, pop, and funk rhythms. His bands throughout the '70s and '80s featured electric guitar, electric bass, and usually more pop- or funk-oriented drummers. It was during this period that Rollins' notoriety for unaccompanied saxophone solos came to the forefront. In 1985 he released his Solo Album, though many Rollins fans consider it something of a disappointment compared to his best solo work.

Rollins' most famous appearance to rock music fans was his appearance on the 1981 Rolling Stones album Tattoo You in which he plays saxophone on "Slave" and "Waiting on a Friend" and possibly "Neighbours". 

Although his recordings in the '70s, '80s, and '90s were not as critically acclaimed as his earlier recordings, he continues to be known for his powerful live performances. Critics such as Gary Giddins and Stanley Crouch have noted the disparity between Sonny Rollins, the recording artist and Sonny Rollins, the concert artist. In a May 2005 New Yorker profile, Crouch wrote of Rollins the concert artist:



"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."



On September 11, 2001, Rollins was almost under the World Trade Center when it was destroyed. A few days later he recorded the live album Without a Song: The 9/11 Concert.


Rollins remains a major figure to this day. He was presented with a Grammy Award for lifetime achievement in 2004.


After a highly successful Japanese tour in late 2005, Rollins returned to the recording studio for the first time in five years to record, "Sonny, Please."  At the same time, he launched his own website, and started his own label, Doxy Records.  The new CD will be available for sale on his website starting June 30th.  


Sonny Rollins fans who purchased the new CD during a recent European tour report that "Sonny, Please" is easily his best recording in nearly 40 years.





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Discography



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