Sonny Rollins dies, legendary jazz saxophonist, at 95 years old

BarcelonaMusician Sonny Rollins, legendary jazz saxophonist, died this Monday at 95 years old at his home in Woodstock, New York, as reported by his publicist Terri Hinte in a statement, as collected by the Efe agency. Known as the Colossus of the Saxophone, Rollins developed a jazz career that spanned several decades and had his most productive period in the fifties, when he accompanied masters of the genre such as Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gillespie, Max Roach and Miles Davis. In that era, Rollins also recorded his most important albums.

Born in Harlem, New York, on September 7, 1930, Rollins was the youngest of three children of a couple of immigrants from the Virgin Islands. His start in jazz was first as a pianist and then with the saxophone. The instrumentalist was characterized by being able to emit a sound of "a tone with a slight vibrato," according to Efe. Throughout his career, he was compared to Coleman Hawkins, the first great tenor saxophonist of jazz. "The music I play is too big to be classified in any style. Every time I pick up the sax, I want to feel something fresh," Rollins expressed in an interview in 2002.

His first musical opportunities came in the fifties, when he played with prominent jazz artists such as Art Blakey, Bud Powell, and Miles Davis. Rollins, in fact, wrote some of Davis's best-known pieces, such as Oleo and Airegin. Rollins' solos, often marathon and powerful, earned him the reputation of being the best jazz saxophone improviser. A little earlier, things could have gone quite differently for him: in 1950 he was arrested for armed robbery and spent 10 months in prison. "It was a learning space. Prison is a brutal place, but luckily I was involved in music and largely avoided the brutality," he said in an interview with Uncut magazine.

Two years playing on a bridge

In the late 1950s, Rollins spent a very long time practicing in solitude on a windy New York bridge to reinvent his way of playing. By then, the musician had already recorded the album Jazz Colossus (1956), but he was still full of doubts about himself and his music. In the summer of 1959, he began playing on the Williamsburg pedestrian promenade in New York. That place became his private rehearsal space. He ended up spending more than two years there, often between 14 and 15 hours a day. "I knew I was dissatisfied – he recalled in an interview with the newspaper The Guardian in 2022–. Sometimes I would go to the bathroom, or to a bar for a cocktail, but then I would return to the bridge."

The album resulting from that experience, The bridge, took his solos and improvisation to another level. A review in Jazz Journal from the time said that Rollins was capable of "extracting the last ounce of meaning from a specific phrase taken from the song's melody". The album also set him on the path to becoming one of the most acclaimed performers of his generation, alongside John Coltrane and Wayne Shorter.

Rollins recorded more than 60 albums, performed with bands like the Rolling Stones, and improvised three songs for their 1981 album Tattoo You. Later, however, he told the New York TimesRollins explained that music is his "daily life"Alfie, in 1996.

The musician performed on several occasions in Barcelona. In 2010, when he was 80 years old, he was part of the Voll-Damm Festival de Jazz de Barcelona. Two years later, in November 2012, he returned to the Catalan capital with a tour. During a press meeting, Rollins explained that music is his "daily life", and also a tool in "understanding the meaning of life". "All my life I have tried to understand what life is. I have been to India studying yoga, and Zen philosophy in Japan. Now I am older, and also more mature, but I still try to be a better person and not do things that go against my conscience. We have to discover why we are here. I am not here to eat ice cream or go to the cinema, but to understand what the reason for our existence is. It is what I try to discover", he said at the time.

The Library of Congress of the United States included in the National Registry of Recordings in 2017 the album Sonny Rollins with the Modern Jazz Quartet, Moving Out, Work Time, Sonny Rollins Plus 4 and Tenor Madness, and stated: "For saxophonist Sonny Rollins, the recording of Saxophone Colossus did not seem very different from his previous albums. For jazz fans, however, it would become one of the most emblematic albums of his career". After winning two Grammy Awards from the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, as well as a career award from the same institution, a respiratory illness forced him to stop playing. He retired in 2014.