The way some musicians play, you think they'll never die. Theodore "Sonny" Rollins was such a man: A saxophonist revered for his huge tone and seemingly inexhaustible improvisations. Rollins died Monday afternoon at his Woodstock, N.Y. home at the age of 95.
Rollins was a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master, a recipient of a Kennedy Center honor and a recipient of the National Medal of the Arts. And he was the very incarnation of a modern jazz musician. His art was his life.
"All these prizes are nice, I appreciate them," he told NPR in 2007. "I don't go crazy about them — you have to do your work whether you're recognized or not. The real deal is doing it the best you can do it and that's it. That's its own reward."
For Rollins, the real deal was playing the tenor saxophone. He became beloved internationally as the last man standing, the reigning star of the generation that turned jazz from bluesy entertainment into a personally expressive, ever-changing art form — without losing its bluesy, entertaining side.
He was born Sept. 7, 1930, in New York City and grew up on Sugar Hill, Harlem's "strivers' row," where some of the most successful and daring jazz men of the era lived, with neighbors such as Jackie McLean, Art Taylor and Kenny Drew. Rollins was drawn to the experimentation and new style developing around him. Sonny's parents, who were from the Virgin Islands, were uneasy about his interests. But he was already on his way to one of the greatest careers in jazz history.
Rollins looked commanding, with a hearty build, strong features and a mohawk haircut long before it became a punk fashion. He was on the cutting edge of music — at the peak of the jazz world.
But in the late 1950s, Rollins withdrew. Seeking a new direction, he practiced his horn by himself, at night, on the city's Williamsburg Bridge. His return in 1962 — with an album titled The Bridge — was welcomed as a cultural event.
"I think when I'm playing completely spontaneous, just something comes out from somewhere, that's my best work," Rollins told NPR. "Say, for instance, if I'm doing a song, any song — I practice it, I learn it, I learn the lyrics, I learn everything that's possible to learn about the physical piece of the composition, or whatever it is. 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."
Rollins was no elitist or purist. He enjoyed blowing on calpysos as much as extending himself in unaccompanied cadenzas. He composed a jaunty theme for the movie Alfie, sat in with the Rolling Stones and recorded an exuberant version of Stevie Wonder's "Isn't She Lovely."
Whatever he played, Rollins was always identifiable, says his friend, pianist Joanne Brackeen.
"Well he's got this sound, it's like his sound," Brackeen told NPR in 2007. "He's got a sound that is him. And that's rare – it's funny, but that's rare. You hear just a couple of seconds and you know who that is. And not only who that is, but how he is? You can hear the whole energy of his being, in every note."
Rollins' repertoire and personal style were driven by his personal taste, not by commerce. Toward the end of his life, he ran his own record label, Doxy Records (though it was distributed by a much larger, corporate label, Sony Masterworks), and he was well aware of the tensions between business and art.
"The corporate culture is anathema to jazz," Rollins told NPR. "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. A different sunset every night, that's what jazz is about."
Sonny Rollins knew what jazz is about.
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