“A charmed life...”
REFLECTING on a career spanning eight decades, Sonny Rollins is thinking about the friends he has lost along the way. “All of these guys – Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Coleman Hawkins – their spirits are always with me,” he says. “They never leave. I feel them alongside me all the time.”
Inevitably, a conversation with Rollins comes freighted with history. The last living legend of bebop, Rollins, now aged 90, played eyewitness to many great revolutions in American culture, from music to the civil rights movement. His talents for melodic and thematic improvisation made him one of the greats of jazz, a powerful saxophonist in a medium dominated by many supremely gifted horn players.
Today, talking on the phone from his home in Woodstock, Rollins really does speak like he plays the saxophone. His voice dances around the sonic spectrum: a slippery, vibrato-free, Noo Yoik accent that darts mischievously from gruff baritone chuckles to squeaky soprano exclamations. There is a wheeziness that we can attribute to recent respiratory problems, but he speaks confidently and fluently, with frequent diversions and witty asides.
Almost entirely self-taught, Rollins started playing professionally in 1949, aged only 19. Over the next five years he built up a career as a sideman to many of his heroes, sitting in with the likes of Charlie Parker, Max Roach, Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk and Miles Davis. But it was an incredible run of more than a dozen albums recorded under his own name between 1956 and 1958 – including the classics Saxophone Colossus, Way Out West and Freedom Suite – that cemented his reputation. Miles Davis described Rollins’ output during this period as “something else. Brilliant.”
“I was seen as the hot new thing, and the pressure got to me,” Rollins recalls. “I never had any formal training, so I felt that I needed to work at my craft to keep up with everyone else. I dropped out for two years, went to the Williamsburg Bridge and just practised and practised. I could have stayed there forever.”
