Sonny Rollins, the “saxophone colossus” who was widely considered America’s greatest living jazz musician and whose musical eloquence and inventiveness kept him at the creative forefront of jazz for six decades, died May 25 at his home in Woodstock, New York. He was 95.
His death was announced in a statement shared by his publicist, Terri Hinte. Mr. Rollins had stopped performing more than a decade ago because of pulmonary fibrosis.
Mr. Rollins embodied seemingly contradictory impulses: tradition and innovation, delicacy and strength, bravado and reticence. In concert, he sent a jolt of exhilaration surging through the crowd as he improvised intricate melodies without sounding trite or ostentatiously avant-garde. When he played a ballad, the firm, heavy tone of his saxophone softened to velvet.
He had been at the vanguard of jazz since the 1950s and performed alongside such seminal figures as Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk and Miles Davis. Mr. Rollins came to be recognized as perhaps the most influential tenor saxophonist of his generation, with the possible exception of his friend and musical rival John Coltrane.
Generations of musicians and fans listened to his concerts and recordings with undisguised awe. Many of his compositions became jazz standards — “Valse Hot,” “Airegin,” “St. Thomas,” “Oleo,” “Pent-up House” — but the bulk of his repertoire consisted of classic songs from Broadway and movies.
He played with an unfettered exuberance, yet he remained an enigmatic, even mysterious personality.
In his 20s, his budding career was interrupted by drug addiction and jail terms. He took several sabbaticals to focus on musical or spiritual self-improvement, only to return to the stage with renewed intensity. With each passing year, Mr. Rollins seemed to grow in stature and repute. Tall and regal, eventually possessing a full beard and a shock of white hair, he looked like a prophet incarnate.
“Sonny Rollins is the most commanding musician alive,” jazz critic Gary Giddins wrote in 1985. “Rollins reminds me why music is worth living for, and defines the distinction between musicians who play music and musicians who are music.”
Mr. Rollins received some of the country’s most prestigious awards in the arts, including Grammy Awards, a National Medal of Arts presented by President Barack Obama, the Kennedy Center Honors and the designation of Jazz Master by the National Endowment for the Arts.
A vibrant performer into his 80s, Mr. Rollins was among the few jazz stars of the pre-rock era to maintain a cross-generational appeal to people not usually associated with jazz — including the Rolling Stones, for whom he recorded saxophone solos for the band’s 1981 album “Tattoo You.”
In concert, Mr. Rollins prowled the stage like a force of nature, thrusting his saxophone ahead of him, filling the room with an insistent, sometimes piercing tone that commanded attention.
His very presence seemed to have a uniting effect on his listeners, never more so than in the days after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Mr. Rollins was in his 39th-floor Manhattan apartment, six blocks from the World Trade Center, when the hijacked airliners struck the towers. As the buildings collapsed, he sought solace in the best way he knew: He took out his saxophone and began to play.
“That’s how I’ve gotten through this life, by picking up my horn,” he later told the San Francisco Chronicle. “That’s my refuge, you know?”
With no electrical power in his building, Mr. Rollins walked down the stairs with his saxophone, then caught a ride to Boston, where he had a concert scheduled for Sept. 15. He wasn’t sure he was ready to perform, but his wife encouraged him to take the stage.
The concert was clandestinely recorded by a fan, who later gave the tapes to Mr. Rollins. When the resulting album, “Without a Song (The 9/11 Concert),” was released in 2005, it was widely viewed as a benchmark in musical healing.
Except for one original tune by Mr. Rollins (“Global Warming”), the album included four standards — none written after 1939 — that seemed to capture the fragile mood of the time. Mr. Rollins’s burgeoning solo on the plaintive standard “Why Was I Born?” won a Grammy Award.
One of the tunes he played that night in Boston, “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square,” seemed to come from subliminal childhood memories of newsreel footage of World War II.
“The scene when I was evacuated and I walked down those steps that day,” he told the NPR show “Fresh Air,” “was very reminiscent of those World War II pictures, when there was the Blitz of London, with all of the emergency vehicles … I’m trying to say that it’s stored someplace in my mind, so I guess since I’m still alive, I might have a way to turn it into some kind of a positive experience.”
Entering the jazz life
Theodore Walter Rollins was born Sept. 7, 1930, in New York. Both of his parents were from the U.S. Virgin Islands, and his father became a Navy chief petty officer, the highest rank that Black sailors could achieve at the time.
The family settled in the Sugar Hill neighborhood of Harlem, a hotbed of political and racial awareness and the home of many jazz musicians. His grandmother took young Sonny, as he was known from childhood, to civil rights speeches and demonstrations.
An older brother became a doctor, but Mr. Rollins was always fascinated by music, from the recordings of pianist-singer Fats Waller to the calypso music his parents brought from the Caribbean. Not far from Mr. Rollins’s school was a nightclub where the singer and saxophonist Louis Jordan performed.
“There was a picture of him in the window, wearing these cutaway tails and white tie — looking really sharp — and he had this gleaming King Zephyr saxophone,” Mr. Rollins told the Daily Telegraph. “I thought, ‘Wow, that’s what I’m going to do! Be like Louis Jordan and play saxophone.’ ”
Mr. Rollins practiced 14 hours a day, sometimes standing in a closet to muffle the sound. He was deeply influenced by the pulsing, heavy sound of Coleman Hawkins, who in the 1920s and ’30s became a major tenor star in jazz. (They recorded an album together in 1963.)
In his teens, Mr. Rollins formed groups with other young neighborhood musicians. They sometimes penciled fake mustaches on their upper lips in order to slip into jazz clubs to hear their musical idols.
Besides Hawkins, the musician Mr. Rollins admired above all others was Parker, the charismatic alto saxophonist and bebop pioneer. Like many other musicians, he also followed after Parker in becoming addicted to heroin. Mr. Rollins sometimes held up pharmacies to steal drugs and was jailed in 1951 after being convicted of armed robbery.
He later entered a federal drug treatment program in Lexington, Kentucky, kicked the habit as one of the first people to use methadone as a heroin substitute, and settled in Chicago, where he took menial jobs. If he wanted to return to the life of jazz, he knew he would have to stand up to his old friends who remained addicted.
“I resisted — my palms got sweaty and everything,” he later recalled. “But I resisted.”
Late in 1955, he joined a group led by trumpeter Clifford Brown and drummer Max Roach. Their records and nationwide tours made them a major force in the new blues-driven style of jazz known as hard bop.
The quintet was at its peak when Brown and the group’s pianist, Richie Powell, were killed (along with Powell’s wife) in a car accident in Pennsylvania on June 26, 1956. Mr. Rollins was disconsolate.
But he was already setting out as a solo artist during what would be the most fertile period of his career. Days before Brown’s death, Mr. Rollins recorded an album that became a landmark in jazz history, “Saxophone Colossus.”
Among other tunes, it contained one of Mr. Rollins’s best-known compositions, the calypso “St. Thomas,” and an 11-minute improvisation, “Blue 7,” that was immediately recognized as a jazz masterpiece.
“For all its subtlety ‘Blue 7’ is the kind of performance that almost anyone grasps immediately,” critic Martin Williams wrote in the liner notes to a reissue of the album. “That is, it is the kind of performance to use on the middle-aged uncle who wants to know, ‘Where’s the melody in jazz?’ It is also the kind of performance to use in introducing jazz to a complete newcomer. And at the same time it is the kind of performance one might use on the most sophisticated musician to show how excellent jazz improvisation can be.”
Between 1956 and 1958, Mr. Rollins released no fewer than a dozen albums. “Sonny Rollins Plus 4” was a hard-bop classic with Brown and Roach; “Tenor Madness” included a 12-minute duet with Coltrane; “Way Out West” and “Live at the Village Vanguard” stripped his supporting cast to the minimum, with just bass and drums, and brought a modern-jazz sensibility to dated movie tunes such as “I’m an Old Cowhand.”
With “Freedom Suite” in 1958, Mr. Rollins was ahead of his time in using music as a form of social protest. “Being a Black musician — in fact being a Black person — everything you do is political whether you want it to be or not,” he said decades later. “That’s the problem. I don’t want to be political, but the world puts me in that place.”
On the bridge
In 1958, Mr. Rollins was the youngest musician in Art Kane’s Esquire magazine photograph “A Great Day in Harlem,” depicting dozens of the brightest stars in jazz. (In the 1990s, he appeared in an Oscar-nominated documentaryabout the photo.) He was reaching a creative height and was acclaimed as one of the top tenor saxophonists of his generation, along with Coltrane and Stan Getz.
And then he disappeared.
Tired of nightclubs and dissatisfied with his playing, Mr. Rollins stopped performing for more than two years and was rarely seen in public. By chance, he discovered a new place to practice where he wouldn’t disturb his neighbors: the Williamsburg Bridge connecting Manhattan and Brooklyn.
“When you look back on it, it’s poetic and romantic,” he told the Telegraph in 2010. “One day I was walking by and I happened to notice these steps leading up to the bridge. So I walked up, and when I saw there was no one up there in the crowded city I thought, Wow! This is a place where I could practice.”
When Mr. Rollins returned to the music world in 1962, his new album — called “The Bridge” — became another part of his almost mythic story.
But much had changed in jazz during his self-exile. With a series of bold albums including “Giant Steps,” Coltrane — who would die of cancer in 1967 — had dethroned Mr. Rollins as king of the tenors. The growing popularity of rock-and-roll was driving jazz to an ever-smaller corner of the market.
Mr. Rollins moved in seemingly every musical direction during the 1960s, from frantic, near-abstract improvisations to albums of standards. He wrote and recorded the score for the 1966 Michael Caine film “Alfie” and, from 1968 to 1971, took another hiatus, studying Buddhism in Japan and yoga in India.
When he returned to music, he stopped performing in nightclubs and concentrated exclusively on concert halls. He signed with Milestone, a small jazz label from California that gave him artistic control. For the next decade, he experimented with styles including electronic music and funk. Band members came and went, except for bassist Bob Cranshaw, who stayed with him for 50 years.
By the 1980s, Mr. Rollins had returned to a style reminiscent of his work in the 1950s, balanced between original compositions and classic show tunes. He reasserted his position as the preeminent tenor titan of jazz. His wife, the former Lucille Pearson, managed his career, and he performed only when and where he wanted.
Lucille Rollins died in 2004. An earlier marriage, to model Dawn Finney, ended in divorce.
Mr. Rollins leaves no immediate survivors.
In his later years, he lived alone on a farm in Germantown, New York, following a simplified routine of practice, reading and solitude. Without announcing a formal retirement, he gave his final performance in 2012.
“Just because I’m able to touch people with my music doesn’t mean that what I’m looking for in my music has been met,” he said in 2008. “What I’m looking for perhaps is unattainable. I know that. But I certainly have a right to try to achieve it. It’s my duty to achieve it.”
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