Colossus Among Us

Sonny Rollins

by Peter Aaron, August 26, 2011

May 13, 2011. Sonny Rollins is about to step onto the stage of Newark’s immense, New Jersey Performing Arts Center. The air in the packed hall crackles with electricity. The jazz icon doesn’t play out as much these days, and everybody knows it’s going to be a great night for music. The creator of some of the most innovative, beautiful, and life-affirming sounds ever etched onto the canvas we call the universe, the titanic tenor saxophonist and composer of such jazz standards as “St. Thomas,” “Oleo,” “Doxy,” and “Airegin” is also, at 81, one of the last-standing figures of the original bebop and hard bop eras.

When the maestro at last appears it’s to the thunderous love of the audience, and he’s every inch the legend. Somewhat bent with time and carrying his horn as he ambles out, Rollins wears shades, a loose, white, smock-like shirt, and a wonderfully tousled head of pure white hair. As he arranges the band’s charts onto their music stands, the effect is that of a cool Albert Einstein handing out worksheets to his students.

But the professorial image soon evaporates when he puts the reed to his lips and kicks things off with an impossibly buoyant bounce through the calypso-tinged “Nice Lady.” As he propels the band, which tonight includes ace guitarist Peter Bernstein and longtime bassist Bob Cranshaw, through a nearly 20-minute version of the tune, as the leader dances around the stage, pumps the air with a fist, and blows one golden solo line after another. Then, with barely a pause, it’s straight into another long, up-tempo number, a goose bump-inducing “They Say That Falling in Love is Wonderful.” And, with a few heart-stopping ballads along the way, that’s pretty much how the show goes—and goes and goes. It closes with a reprise of “Nice Lady” that gets the audience out of its chairs and pressed against the lip of the bandstand as Rollins steps right up front to honk and wail above their bobbing heads. All of this from a man who reportedly said he’d planned to retire six years ago.

“Did I say that? I must’ve been having a bad day,” quips Rollins a few months later, adding that, despite the fact that the Newark concert ran nearly two hours, “At my age, I can’t play as long as I’d like to. The ideas in my mind might be flying, but my embochure [the lip technique of wind instrument players] might be giving me trouble on a certain day. But I’m still always trying to play something new. I’m still a student myself.”

“Sonny Rollins is arguably the greatest long-form improviser in the history of jazz,” says WKCR’s Phil Schaap, the “Dean of New York jazz radio” for over four decades and a Grammy-winning producer and archivist. “His influence is incalculable. There’s so much Sonny in other saxophonists’ sounds that they don’t even realize how much is in there themselves. [Rollins] is the primary reason many players have become improvisers. He’s truly one of the chosen few. And he represents the jazz story as well as any living person.”

Rollins’s parents emigrated from the Virgin Islands to Harlem, where he was born in 1930. Inside the household his mother would sing her native calypsos—a vein he’d later famously mine for “St. Thomas” and other compositions—and, outside, the Sugar Hill neighborhood was at the peak of the Harlem Renaissance that nurtured so much great art. “I used to listen to Fats Waller on the radio, he’s what first pulled my coat to the beauty of jazz, you might say,” recalls Rollins, who at a young age briefly took lessons on the family’s player piano. “Later on, my friends and I would go the Apollo Theater, which was very close by, to see all of the big bands: Jimmy Lunceford, Count Basie, Lionel Hampton, Billy Eckstine when Charlie Parker and Dexter Gordon were with him.” When he wasn’t watching bands Rollins was often in movie houses, where, via the big-production musicals of the day, he began to cultivate his legendarily voluminous repertoire of Great American Songbook classics.