Featured Jazz Artist Sonny Rollins
Video ClipOne of the favorite musicians of the MCJC, Sonny Rollins has written and performed a wealth of music that has been emulated by musicians from many genres for over a half century. Rollins is considered by many in the jazz world to be one of the greatest masters of improvisation throughout the history of Jazz. His distinctive style, sound, innovation and consciousness of the music around him puts Rollins at a level that few Jazz musicians reach.
(My One and Only Love, right)
Songs in the MCJC BookSt. Thomas, Doxy, Tenor MadnessBiography
Theodore
Walter Rollins was born on September 7, 1930 in New York City (Sonny at age 16, left). He grew
up in Harlem not far from the Savoy Ballroom, the Apollo Theatre, and
the doorstep of his idol, Coleman Hawkins. After early discovery of
Fats Waller and Louis Armstrong, he started out on alto saxophone,
inspired by Louis Jordan. At the age of sixteen, he switched to tenor,
trying to emulate Hawkins. He also fell under the spell of the musical
revolution that surrounded him, Bebop.
He
began to follow Charlie Parker, and soon came under the wing of
Thelonious Monk, who became his musical mentor and guru. Living in
Sugar Hill, his neighborhood musical peers included Jackie McLean,
Kenny Drew and Art Taylor, but it was young Sonny who was first out of
the pack, working and recording with Babs Gonzales, J.J. Johnson, Bud
Powell and Miles Davis before he turned twenty.
"Of
course, these people are there to be called on because I think I
represent them in a way," Rollins said recently of his peers and
mentors. "They're not here now so I feel like I'm sort of representing
all of them, all of the guys. Remember, I'm one of the last guys left,
as I'm constantly being told, so I feel a holy obligation sometimes to
evoke these people."
In the early fifties, he established a
reputation first among musicians, then the public, as the most brash
and creative young tenor on the scene, through his work with Miles,
Monk, and the MJQ.
Miles Davis was an early Sonny
Rollins fan and in his autobiography wrote that he "began to hang out
with Sonny Rollins and his Sugar Hill Harlem crowd...anyway, Sonny had
a big reputation among a lot of the younger musicians in Harlem. People
loved Sonny Rollins up in Harlem and everywhere else. He was a legend,
almost a god to a lot of the younger musicians. Some thought he was
playing the saxophone on the level of Bird. I know one thing--he was
close. He was an aggressive, innovative player who always had fresh
musical ideas. I loved him back then as a player and he could also
write his ass off..."
Sonny
moved to Chicago for a few years to remove himself from the surrounding
elements of negativity around the Jazz scene. He reemerged at the end
of 1955 as a member of the Clifford Brown-Max Roach Quintet, (photo with Clifford Brown and Max Roach, 1956, right) with an
even more authoritative presence. His trademarks became a caustic,
often humorous style of melodic invention, a command of everything from
the most arcane ballads to calypsos, and an overriding logic in his
playing that found him hailed for models of thematic improvisation.
It
was during this time that Sonny acquired a nickname,"Newk." As Miles
Davis explains in his autobiography: "Sonny had just got back from
playing a gig out in Chicago. He knew Bird, and Bird really liked
Sonny, or "Newk" as we called him, because he looked like the Brooklyn
Dodgers' pitcher Don Newcombe. One day, me and Sonny were in a
cab...when the white cabdriver turned around and looked at Sonny and
said, `Damn, you're Don Newcombe!'' Man, the guy was totally excited. I
was amazed, because I hadn't thought about it before. We just put that
cabdriver on something terrible. Sonny started talking about what kind
of pitches he was going to throw Stan Musial, the great hitter for the
St. Louis Cardinals, that evening..."
In 1956, Sonny began recording the first of a series of landmark recordings issued under his own name: Valse Hot introduced the practice, now common, of playing bop in 3/4 meter; St. Thomas initiated his explorations of calypso patterns; and Blue 7Way Out West (1957), Rollins's
first album using a trio of saxophone, double bass, and drums, offered
a solution to his longstanding difficulties with incompatible pianists,
and exemplified his witty ability to improvise on hackneyed material (Wagon Wheels, I'm an Old Cowhand). It Could Happen to You (also 1957) was the first in a long series of unaccompanied solo recordings, and The Freedom Suite
(1958) foreshadowed the political stances taken in jazz in the 1960s.
During the years 1956 to 1958 Rollins was widely regarded as the most
talented and innovative tenor saxophonist in jazz.
was hailed by Gunther Schuller as demonstrating a new manner of
"thematic improvisation," in which the soloist develops motifs
extracted from his theme.
Rollins's
first examples of the unaccompanied solo playing that would become a
specialty also appeared in this period; yet the perpetually
dissatisfied saxophonist questioned the acclaim his music was
attracting, and between 1959 and late `61 withdrew from public
performance.
Sonny remembers that he took his leave
of absence from the scene because "I was getting very famous at the
time and I felt I needed to brush up on various aspects of my craft. I
felt I was getting too much, too soon, so I said, wait a minute, I'm
going to do it my way. I wasn't going to let people push me out there,
so I could fall down. I wanted to get myself together, on my own. I
used to practice on the Bridge, the Williamsburg Bridge because I was
living on the Lower East Side at the time."
When he returned to action in early `62, his first recording was appropriately titled The Bridge.
By the mid 60's, his live sets became grand, marathon
stream-of-consciousness solos where he would call forth melodies from
his encyclopedic knowledge of popular songs, including startling segues
and sometimes barely visiting one theme before surging into dazzling
variations upon the next. Rollins was brilliant, yet restless. The
period between 1962 and `66 saw him returning to action and striking
productive relationships with Jim Hall, Don Cherry, Paul Bley, and his
idol Hawkins, yet he grew dissatisfied with the music business once
again and started yet another sabbatical in `66. "I was getting into
eastern religions," he remembers. "I've always been my own man. I've
always done, tried to do, what I wanted to do for myself. So these are
things I wanted to do. I wanted to go on the Bridge. I wanted to get
into religion. But also, the Jazz music business is always bad. It's
never good. So that led me to stop playing in public for a while,
again. During the second sabbatical, I worked in Japan a little bit,
and went to India after that and spent a lot of time in a monastery. I
resurfaced in the early 70s, and made my first record in `72. I took
some time off to get myself together and I think it's a good thing for
anybody to do."
In
1972, with the encouragement and support of his wife Lucille (Lucille and Sonny, right), who had
become his business manager, Rollins returned to performing and
recording, signing with Milestone and releasing Next Album.
(Working at first with Orrin Keepnews, Sonny was by the early ’80s
producing his own Milestone sessions with Lucille.) His lengthy
association with the Berkeley-based label produced two dozen albums in
various settings – from his working groups to all-star ensembles (Tommy
Flanagan, Jack DeJohnette, Stanley Clarke, Tony Williams); from a solo
recital to tour recordings with the Milestone Jazzstars (Ron Carter,
McCoy Tyner); in the studio and on the concert stage (Montreux, San
Francisco, New York, Boston). Sonny was also the subject of a mid-’80s
documentary by Robert Mugge entitled Saxophone Colossus; part of its soundtrack is available as G-Man.
He won his first performance Grammy for This Is What I Do (2000), and his second for 2004’s Without a Song (The 9/11 Concert),
in the Best Jazz Instrumental Solo category (for “Why Was I Born”). In
addition, Sonny received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National
Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences in 2004.
In June
2006 Rollins was inducted into the Academy of Achievement – and gave a
solo performance – at the International Achievement Summit in Los
Angeles. The event was hosted by George Lucas and Steven Spielberg and
attended by world leaders as well as distinguished figures in the arts
and sciences.
“I am convinced that all art has the
desire to leave the ordinary,” Rollins said in a recent interview for
the Catalan magazine Jaç, “and to say it one way, at a
spiritual level, a state of the exaltation at existence. All art has
this in common. But jazz, the world of improvisation, is perhaps the
highest, because we do not have the opportunity to make changes. It’s
as if we were painting before the public, and the following morning we
cannot go back and correct that blue color or change that red. We have
to have the blues and reds very well placed before going out to play.
So for me, jazz is probably the most demanding art.”
Biography courtesy of www.sonnyrollins.com.