STAR in the pages of and and increasingly a commercial success, Sonny Rollins made a perverse decision to put his career on hold from 1959 to 1961, giving up performing and recording in favour of cooking and cleaning for his wife Lucille, looking after their pets and – most famously – spending up to 16 hours a day alone, playing his saxophone on New York’s Williamsburg Bridge. “I’d get there early, practise, go back home to refresh myself, use the bathroom, get a cognac and then return to the bridge to. “The problem was that I really wasn’t good enough for myself.”
