Mar 30, 2026 10:30 PM
Flea Finds His Jazz Thing
In the relatively small pantheon of certifiable rock stars venturing into the intersection of pop music and jazz, the…
Onstage, Rollins would move about restlessly, thrusting his tenor sax in the air as he blew.
(Photo: Michael Jackson)Sonny Rollins, the iconic saxophonist, composer and improviser whose career stretched from the origins of bebop to 21st century free melodicism — encompassing calypsos, reshaping the blues, touching on rock and relentlessly reinterpreting the American songbook — died Monday, May 25, at his home near Woodstock, New York. Rollins was 95 years old and, suffering from respiratory illness, had retired from public performance in 2012.
Rollins was one of the last giants standing, the pre-eminent elder of the jazz generation including Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Kenny Clarke, Max Roach, Thelonious Monk and Miles Davis that developed the music from a danceable entertainment to a profoundly expressive, ever-evolving art form of intense personal meaning, challenging without losing accessibility. He was a creative force into his eighth decade, an international headliner and a spokesman for enduring jazz values, particularly the inspiration of the moment.
Nicknamed the Saxophone Colossus and “Newk” (after baseball’s Don Newcombe, to whom as a youth he bore some resemblance), Rollins was a towering presence in jazz from his 1949 debut recording with singer Babs Gonzalez to the very end of his life. During his glory days in the 1950s, when progressive jazz was the favored music of sophisticates, Rollins represented the cutting edge. With a hearty build, strong features and Mohawk haircut long before it became a punk fashion, he looked commanding.
Onstage, he’d move about restlessly, thrusting his tenor sax in the air as he blew, his tuneful vitality filled with surprising references to a vast range of themes and rich with infectious new ideas. Even after Rollins put down his instruments, he spoke of his memories, aesthetic and moral principles in a series of YouTube productions by Bret Primack. He also polished his legacy with the release of select live recordings, compiled in volumes of Road Shows on his own Doxy label.
Born Walter Theodore “Sonny” Rollins on Sept. 7, 1930, he was the youngest of three children in a family living in Harlem, steeped in music. His father, a career Navy man, was an amateur clarinetist; his mother, originally from the Virgin Islands, bought Sonny his first saxophone, an alto, when he was 7 or 8 (he initially studied piano, switching to tenor at age 16). Rollins was also influenced by his uncle who played saxophone and listened to jazz, his older sister who was a church singer and pianist, and his older brother, a violinist who became a physician rather than pursue symphonic opportunities, as well as his Sugar Hill neighbor Coleman Hawkins.
Sonny took private saxophone lessons on Manhattan’s 48th Street Music Row, and harmony classes in grammar school, but was essentially self-taught. He became a professional musician after playing tenor saxophone for two years, amid a cohort including drummers Arthur Taylor, Art Blakey and Roach, trumpeter Davis, alto saxophonist Jackie McLean, pianist Kenny Drew and vibist Milt Jackson — all of whom went on to establish high standards of jazz excellence and dedication. In 1949, after backing Gonzalez, he also worked with J.J. Johnson, Kenny Dorham, Bud Powell, Fats Navarro, John Lewis and Roy Haynes, and subsequently the Modern Jazz Quartet, Horace Silver and Clifford Brown’s quintet.
The saxophonist recorded with his mentor Coleman Hawkins, his friendly rival John Coltrane (on the acclaimed album Tenor Madness) and Branford Marsalis; with guitarists Barney Kessel, Jim Hall, Larry Coryell, Pat Metheny and Bobby Broom, pianists Herbie Hancock, Tommy Flanagan, Mark Soskin and Stephen Scott, vibist Bobby Hutcherson, bassists Stanley Clarke, Bob Cranshaw and Jerome Harris, trumpeters Don Cherry, Freddie Hubbard and Roy Hargrove, and drummers including Shelley Manne, Billy Higgins, Elvin Jones, Jack DeJohnette, Tony Williams and Jeff “Tain” Watts, and trombonist Clifton Anderson, his nephew. At his 80th birthday performance at the Beacon Theater, Rollins brought Ornette Coleman onstage to improvise with Roy Haynes and bassist Christian McBride. Rollins was the first speaker at Coleman’s final public appearance, hailing him as an innovator and humanist.
Rollins was originally identified with the bebop process of inventing new songs by extending basic and familiar chord progressions into atypical shapes, as on “Airegin,” “Doxy,” “Oleo,” and “Pentup House,” among his best known and most widely adopted compositions. That’s how he improvised, too. Composer and historian Gunther Schuller wrote an essay in the Jazz Review analyzing the thematic coherence of “Blue 7,” from Rollins’ 1956 album Saxophone Colossus. Rollins brought similar through-lines to his renditions of standards and novelties including “Moritat” (“Mack The Knife”), “There’s No Business Like Show Business,” “You Don’t Know What Love Is” and “How Are Things In Glocca Mora?”
Starting in 1958 with The Freedom Suite, Rollins used his music to express his social concerns, naming a 1998 album Global Warming and responding to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States with a concert recorded four days later in Boston and released in 2005 as Without A Song: The 9/11 Concert. His works gaining the greatest exposure, however, were probably his soundtrack for the film Alfie (Burt Bacharach wrote the title song) and cameos on two tracks of the Rolling Stones’ 1981 album Tattoo You.
Rollins was critically acclaimed for his lengthy, unaccompanied improvised codas, and recorded two such 27-minute endeavors live in the Museum of Modern Art’s sculpture garden in summer 1985 (issued as The Solo Album). He composed a formally long work just once: Concerto For Tenor Saxophone And Orchestra, in collaboration with Finnish arranger-composer-conductor Heikki Saramanto; his performance of it with the Yomiuri Shimbun Symphony Orchestra is documented in Robert Mugge’s 1986 film Saxophone Colossus, which also shows Rollins with his quintet in his a concert in Saugerties, New York, during which he leapt from the stage, broke his heel, yet kept playing to the end of his solo. That performance was issued as Sonny Rollins Plays G-Man.
In addition to the characteristic buoyancy and aggressiveness of his saxophone sound, Rollins had a reflective side, too. He studied Rosicrucianism, yoga and Zen Buddhism, and twice took sabbaticals from performance. From summer 1959 through fall 1961 he was only heard practicing (daily) on Brooklyn’s Williamsburg Bridge, next to elevated train tracks; his fans received his comeback album The Bridge ecstatically. His second withdrawal, from 1969 to ’71, ended with the release of Next Album, on which he first played soprano saxophone. Critics believed he’d backed off from the intense exploratory quality that had marked his most complex and abstract previous work, but Rollins was never accused of skating through a performance.
His wife, Lucille, became his manager at that time. Notoriously shy of the recording studio, preferring unselfconscious spontaneity and having worked with heralded producers including George Avakian and Orrin Keepnews, in 1981 Rollins enlisted Lucille as his co-producer, the role she served until her death in 2004. Although the quality of his later-period albums varied, there are gems including Easy Living, Milestone JazzStars (with McCoy Tyner, Ron Carter and Al Foster), Silver City and Sonny Rollins + 3.
Honored as a National Endowment of the Arts Jazz Master, a National Medal of the Arts, a Guggenheim Foundation fellow, Kennedy Center Award recipient and winner of innumerable polls, Rollins nonetheless told an interviewer in 2007, “You must remember, I’m a modest man. All these prizes are nice, I appreciate them, but I don’t go crazy about it, because you have to do your work whether you get recognized or not. If you’re recognized, fine, but don’t get too concerned about recognition. The real deal is doing it as best you can do it. That’s it’s own reward, you know.”
In 2006 Rollins had launched his own Doxy Records, with Sonny, Please (one of his wife’s favorite phrases) to institute greater control over that aspect of his career. “By having my own company, I’m fighting corporate in a sense, and joining with the young kids who are using the new technology to listen to jazz, which is what we have to do. The corporate culture is anathema to jazz. We don’t like the cookie-cutter everything exactly the same way. We’re about creation, freedom, thinking things out in the moment like life is. Life changes every minute; there’s a different sunset every night. That’s what jazz is about.”
Jazz musicians universally were enthralled with Rollins. “He’s got this amazing sound, his sound,” pianist Joanne Brackeen has said. “He’s got a sound that is him, completely, and that’s rare. You hear just a couple of seconds and you know who that is, but not only who it is, also how he is. You can hear the whole energy of his being, in every note.”
“I think when I’m playing completely spontaneously, when something just comes out from somewhere, that’s my best work,” Rollins has said. “If I’m doing a song, any song, practice it, learn the lyrics, learn everything possible about the composition, then, when I get on a concert stage, I forget about it. I try not to think about it. Then I let the music play me.” DB
CLICK HERE to read a Classic Interview with Sonny Rollins from the December 1992 issue of DownBeat.
“Cerebral and academic thought is a different way to approach music,” Flea says of his continuing dive into jazz. “I’ve always relied on emotion and intuition and physicality.”
Mar 30, 2026 10:30 PM
In the relatively small pantheon of certifiable rock stars venturing into the intersection of pop music and jazz, the…
Cécile McLorin Salvant busts out Jelly Roll Morton’s “The Murder Ballad” at Big Ears, here with pianist Sullivan Fortner.
Apr 7, 2026 1:21 PM
There’s pluralism, then there’s PLURALISM! — and then there’s Big Ears. Thurston Moore, who participated in…
Each of the 25 JAMs has delivered a poster featuring a jazz legend that is sent out to schools across the nation. This year’s poster features Tony Bennett.
Mar 30, 2026 10:20 PM
Every April for the past quarter century, something remarkable has happened across the United States and far beyond.…
“We thought it’s important that Ronin has a new statement,” said Nik Bärtsch of his band’s latest album, Spin. “The sound is differently produced, so it reflects more of who we are.”
Apr 21, 2026 10:00 AM
Nik Bärtsch cuts an imposing figure on stage. He’s unmistakable with his soul patch, shaven head and black attire.…
Dave King (left) and Reid Anderson offer insights into why The Bad Plus’ chemistry was cool, the accomplishments many and its longevity so fruitful.
May 12, 2026 11:42 AM
The scene still sticks with me. I had heard the oddball name of this new group being dropped around town, and…
