His face and neatly trimmed white beard shaded by a Filson hunting cap, Sonny Rollins had just arrived from a visit to the dentist. The dentist is more or less his only reason to make the two-and-a-half-hour trip to New York City anymore, unless he’s giving an infrequent concert.
The tenor saxophonist—who is, according to semiregular consensus from the most authoritative sources, the greatest living improviser in jazz—lives on a farm in Germantown, in Columbia County, New York, a property he bought in 1972 with his wife, Lucille. They had once also kept an apartment on Greenwich Street, in lower Manhattan’s TriBeCa neighborhood, but his wife had come to enjoy the city less and less, especially after the destruction of the World Trade Center towers, six blocks away. (Rollins had been in the thirty-ninth-floor apartment during the attacks.) Lucille, who also acted as Rollins’s manager and record producer, died in November 2004—a little less than a year before I met with him in 2005—of complications from a stroke. He was going through a period of transition.
Rollins seems to have genuine humility, the private kind. In the high-ceilinged lobby of the old New York Times building on Forty-third Street, a staff photographer—who didn’t know him personally but had taken his picture before—greeted him in that reverent-but-familiar register that a long-standing fan can use with a great jazz musician. Rollins doesn’t need a street retinue as, say, Keith Richards might. But he inspires much the same kind of devotion. Admiringly, the man raised his hand to Rollins’s shoulder. Rollins shrank.
As we rode the elevator, I asked him how his concert had gone at that summer’s Montreal Jazz Festival, the week previous. “Well, I don’t know,” he answered in his froggy voice. “I look at all that from the inside, so you’d probably have to ask someone else.” He wore a wine-colored ascot, and though he kept his dark blue raincoat on indoors throughout the morning, he seemed relaxed. When he felt self-conscious, he talked about it.
For a musician who has lived under a nearly unshoulderable load of praise, Rollins’s tendency toward self-criticism appears paralyzing: if he can’t trust others, and he can’t trust himself, then what? But on the subject of music other than his own, his responses were undogmatic, free. And fairly fresh. He said, regretfully, that for twenty years he had not really listened much to music, so as to protect himself from too much information.
He had just released a live album, Without a Song, a recording of a Boston concert made three days after the September 11 attacks. It was the first in a possible series of live Sonny Rollins recordings to be released to the general market. Carl Smith, a retired lawyer from Maine who also collects jazz recordings, had located (and in a few cases, including the Boston concert, surreptitiously recorded) more than 350 Rollins performances, going back to a three-minute Rollins solo on alto saxophone from 1948. Were all of these performances to be made available, they would be taken very seriously in the jazz world, because Rollins’s studio records of the last thirty years—some would say forty—have scarcely indicated the extent of his talent.
A powerful, grand-scale improviser, Rollins often needs half an hour or more to say what he wants on the horn and get his momentum. Once, he recalled, he played a two-and-a-half-hour solo in a club, completely forgetting the house policy of clearing the audience for a second set. (He imagines a vocational link between himself and the whirling dervishes of Istanbul.) He has also been a paragon of structure as he improvises. Almost every modern jazz musician is fascinated by Sonny Rollins.
Rollins and Smith were able to reach a place of mutual trust, and in 2007 Rollins was persuaded to release tapes of his 1957 concert at Carnegie Hall, on his own label, Doxy. But, even after he went public with his decision about the Carnegie tapes, he still had not listened to them. Not long after, he scrapped the plan.
He has an aversion to hearing himself play. However, to make good on an agreement with his former record company, Milestone, he had to force himself to listen closely to the tape of his September 14, 2001, concert, a process that he described as “like Abu Ghraib.”
“It’s possible for me to hear something I did and say, ‘yeah, I like that,’ ” Rollins admitted. “Although it would probably never be a whole thing. Maybe a section of something, or a solo.”
Rollins was born in 1930 of parents who had come to New York City from the Virgin Islands. He grew up in Harlem—first in the lowlands around 135th Street and Lenox Avenue, and then, starting at nine, in the Sugar Hill neighborhood, a locus at the time for the city’s jazz musicians. He attended Benjamin Franklin High School in what was then an Italian section of East Harlem, and lived through an early New York experiment in busing black students to white neighborhoods; he remembers people throwing objects at the bus windows. It was such a high-profile case of school integration that Frank Sinatra and Nat King Cole gave concerts to the students in the school auditorium to promote race relations.
Thinking of his childhood, Rollins wanted to hear Fats Waller’s 1934 recording of “I’m Going to Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter.” (It was the top of a list of choices that he had sent me with almost automatic efficiency, ten weeks in advance.) From the beginning of the song Rollins looked as if he had just stepped into a warm bath. A clarinetist began playing counterpoint improvisations against Waller’s piano and voice.
“Who’s the clarinet player?” Rollins asked, coming out of his reverie.
It was Rudy Powell. “Isn’t that something?” he said. “I went to school with Rudy Powell’s son.” Rollins and the senior Rudy Powell didn’t know each other, although they stood about three feet apart in Art Kane’s famous “Great Day in Harlem” photograph from 1958.
“I remember hearing that song around the house, and on the radio and everything,” Rollins said when it finished. “It’s one of my earliest memories of jazz. I believe in things like reincarnation, and it struck a chord someplace in my back lives or something.”
It’s very restful, I said, as we listened to the song again. It’s not the other Fats Waller, the boisterous one. There’s a little rude joke in the words, but he plays it subtle.
“Yeah,” Rollins agreed. “He could be raucous, but this is very, very much—mmm.” (Waller was singing: “I’m gonna write words oh so sweet/they’re gonna knock me off my feet/a lot of kisses on the bottom/I’ll be glad I got ’em.”)
“Yeah,” Rollins said, still impressed by Powell, after we listened again. “But the thing I want to stress,” he said, “is that this is evocative of the whole Harlem scene. Where I was born, when I was born. And his playing, that stride piano style which of course comes from other people. It’s overwhelming to me, really. When I hear him, to me it just says the whole thing. It encapsulates jazz, the spirit of jazz. In a very overall way.”
We moved on to Coleman Hawkins. If Waller represents Rollins’s childhood, Hawkins represents his maturation. (An infatuation with Louis Jordan came in between.) Around the time Rollins got keenly interested in the saxophone, as a teenager in the mid-1940s, Hawkins was especially hot. In late 1943, the yearlong ban imposed by the American Federation of Musicians, preventing commercial recordings, had just been lifted, and Hawkins, nearing forty and very competitive, was making up for lost time, collaborating with the younger beboppers.
“The Man I Love,” from December 1943, is one of the greatest performances in jazz, though overshadowed by Hawkins’s much more famous recording of “Body and Soul.” It was released on a twelve-inch 78 RPM record—a detail Rollins remembered—because Hawkins had too much to say and started a second chorus. It ended at 5:05, too long for the normal ten-inch format.
This part of Hawkins, his flow of ideas, has special resonance for Rollins. By 1957 or so, Rollins was using jazz to deliver a more accurate reflection of how his mind worked; the music wasn’t just tightly framed, mediated entertainment, but a record of everything he was thinking in a certain place at a certain hour, with all the surging ahead and backtracking and repeating that are natural pathways in everyday consciousness. He—along with John Coltrane, around the same time—changed the way jazz audiences listened; suddenly it was more possible to understand jazz from the musicians’ perspective.
We listened to Hawkins’s two voluminous choruses, ambitious from the very opening phrase: an E-natural chord jostling against an E-flat. “You know, he’s doing a lot of stuff in there, man,” said Rollins, at the end. “Very far-reaching, too. Coleman was a guy that played chord changes in an up-and-down manner. He sort of played every change, let me put it that way. He had a phrase for every change that went by. So in that solo he was not only playing the changes, he was also playing the passing chords, which is another thing he was ahead of his time on. And still, he was getting the jazz intensity moving, so he was building and building and building . . . Yeah”—he nodded—“it’s a work of art.”
When did he get around to Coleman Hawkins? “Well, ‘Body and Soul’ was ubiquitous in Harlem, on jukeboxes. They could have turned me on to him. But since I moved up on the hill, where so many of these guys lived, I even had a chance to see him driving around. He had an impressive Cadillac. He dressed well. And, you know, there were certain other people that acted more on the entertainment side. There was even a time in my life when I had a brief feeling about Louis Armstrong, that he was too minstrel-y and too smiley. That didn’t last long. I was a young person at the time. But what impressed me about Coleman was that he carried himself with great dignity.”
A lot of Rollins’s heroes lived in his neighborhood: Denzil Best, the drummer who played with Hawkins and composed the bebop standard “Move”; Eddie Lockjaw Davis, the saxophonist; the god Hawkins himself. The tricky part was getting their ear, to ask them questions about their playing, or just to be in their presence. “There was a great photographer named James J. Kriegsman,” he remembered, who used to make these pictures of musicians, and he made a beautiful picture of Coleman. So I had my eight-by-ten, and I knew where he lived, up on 153rd Street, and one day I knew when he was coming home. He signed my autograph. That was one of the first times I was that close to him. I was thirteen or fourteen.
“I used to go down to see him on Fifty-second Street,” he continued. “We had to put on eyebrow pencil to make it look like we had real mustaches, to look older. I was still strictly amateur; I wasn’t that good yet to play with those guys.
“I was a real pest, as a young guy,” he decided. “When I found out we lived near Denzil Best, and that my mother knew a woman who knew him, I used to go by and ring his bell. One time, I knew the guy was there, so I just kept ringing and ringing. Finally, he opened it. He was half-sleepy. So I asked him some questions about playing with Coleman Hawkins. He was just”—he growled—“ ‘Get this kid out of here.’ ”
About twenty years later, in 1963, Rollins made a record with Hawkins, one of the most psychologically fraught records in jazz. It says something about Rollins’s self-possession, and the quality of his respect for his hero, that he didn’t just fold and defer completely to Hawkins. In fact, he did the opposite, playing around him.
“We had played together at Newport, and that sort of broke the ice. But when we made the record, I was particularly trying to sound different. I felt I had heard a lot of people play with Coleman, a lot of tenor players. I heard this thing with him and Ben Webster; they did some beautiful stuff. And one with Webster and Georgie Auld, three saxophonists. Anyway, I had a very contemporary band: I had Paul Bley; I had Henry Grimes. We considered ourselves to be breaking the envelope and doing very contemporary things,” he explained. “I didn’t want to change that with Coleman. I wanted him to relate to what we were doing, which was completely legitimate. A lot of younger guys—Miles Davis, Monk—had come up playing with Coleman. It was nothing he couldn’t handle.”
Rollins had asked to hear Billie Holiday singing “Lover Man.” I had brought it, but it wasn’t what he was looking for. I had a live version of the song, from a television show in 1955; Rollins wanted the one in his head, the studio version from 1944, her last hit. “Her voice was a little more worn on that one,” he said, after hearing the 1955 track. “But Billie Holiday worn is still great to me. It’s just that on that first ‘Lover Man’ her voice had a different quality—clearer, maybe.”
She did move, over time, toward sounding as if she were very conscious of her own stylization, I said. Earlier there had been more of a sense that it was just coming out of her.
“I’ve experienced this myself,” Rollins replied. “People expect you to play exactly like you made a record. In my case, I didn’t have to worry, because I never play anything the same anyway. But in Billie’s case, I could see where she was trying to sing like the record. I can see how, for her, it could have been a problem. Do you understand what I mean?” he asked, working to finesse what seemed like a simple point. “She was trying to do what she did on the record more precisely than other people might.”
I guessed that he was in there with her for the whole thing—even the recordings from the end of her career when her voice was much diminished, the albums like Lady in Satin, which some find almost morbid.
“Oh, yeah,” he said, with certainty. “I have to be. At the very end, I was definitely with her, because then I knew what was going on in her life. If anything, I felt so much empathy that I didn’t look at it so much as a musical thing; I looked at it more as a life thing.
“I always loved Billie Holiday,” he declared. “I had a crush on her as a younger person. She was really a beautiful woman, and I was around her a couple of times. And finally I got to play”—he corrected himself—“well, I never played with Billie Holiday. But I played at a place where I played opposite her,” meaning that his own band appeared on the same multiple bill. “We were working at this place out in New Jersey—it might have been the Cherry Hill Club, in Cherry Hill—and we were staying at the Walt Whitman Hotel, in Camden. So we had to drive to the club every day, and I got to know a lovely person.
“Oh, boy.” He sighed. “It was sad. Because of all her drug problems, everybody knew about all the stuff she was going through. She was actually being abused by some of these club owners and agents. Listening to these guys hollering at her about being on time—it really upset me.”
Rollins didn’t notice drug dealers closing in around her at that time. (I wasn’t thinking about it when we talked, but at the time he knew Holiday, Rollins might have been rigorously avoiding even looking at a drug dealer. He had had a heroin habit himself, which he finally kicked in 1955 at the federal narcotics hospital in Lexington, Kentucky.) “I remember, then, that she was moving up to one of those streets off of Central Park West. I took her home one time, and I didn’t see any drug people. But to me she was a sweet, vulnerable woman. She was gentle. She would cuss with everybody, but inside she was soft as a kitten.”
Inevitably, Charlie Parker had been on Rollins’s list. But the piece—“Another Hair Do,” from 1947—was an unusual choice. It is a twelve-bar blues. At the beginning, Parker and a very young Miles Davis play a repeated line for the first four bars. But then Parker cuts loose, improvising by himself at double-speed for five bars, before the written part resumes and the theme ends.
“Another Hair Do” is nothing canonical in jazz history, but for Rollins it was. “The thing about this song was that the form of it was revolutionary even for bop,” he said.
He started from the top. “First of all, this guy’s rhythmic thing was definitely on another planet. You don’t find people doing that, the way he was doubling up the tempo there. There was a lot of free improvisation in the melody there.” (By melody, Rollins meant the opening twelve-bar theme section.)
When Parker comes back to play the theme again, I said, he’s not going to play that fast bit the same way. “No,” Rollins said. “It’s an open space. See, Miles is trying to do a little bit of it too”—improvising in double time over the steady pulse—“but he can’t quite do it yet. But, you know, Miles was a genius. He was playing with Charlie Parker and not able to do some of the technical stuff, but yet making it sound like he’s in the same ballpark.”
He whistled and laughed. “It’s not just the computer saying four notes against two notes. It’s what Charlie Parker’s doing within that thing. It’s music that can’t be written down. You have to feel that to make it come out. But what Charlie Parker accomplished was, he made an open-ended song which was not open-ended. It wasn’t like playing anything you want. But within that there was so much freedom to play what you wanted to play. And still he made it to sound like a regular blues song.”
Rollins himself wrote some open-ended pieces, I said. Like “The Bridge,” or even “Oleo.” The melody of “Oleo” follows the chord changes of “I Got Rhythm,” but in the B section there’s no written melody; it’s a blank canvas every time it’s played.
“Well, I probably got them from my idol there,” he responded. “There’s a certain freedom within his playing which we have to strive for. People playing jazz have to try to understand where he was coming from, what that was, and emulate it and absorb it. This is what jazz is: jazz means freedom. I don’t think you always have to play in time. But there’s two different ways of playing. There’s a way of playing where you can play with no time. Or you can have a fixed time and play against it. That’s what I feel is heaven, being able to be that free, spiritual, musical. I would say that’s an ideal which is underappreciated.”
Here he seemed to sense that he was getting into rough waters. “I mean playing free without any kind of time strictures—there’s nothing wrong with that either. But I think that—gee, I don’t know—I’m probably going to be dissing myself to the new guys coming up somewhere, but a lot of our audiences still relate to time. I’m still in the era of time being an important component of jazz. So kill me.”
Finally we got around to Lester Young. “Afternoon of a Basie-Ite” was recorded in 1943—strangely enough, five days after Coleman Hawkins’s “The Man I Love” session—with a quartet including Johnny Guarnieri on piano, Slam Stewart on bass, and Sid Catlett on drums. It is almost lotus-eater music, light and gorgeous, geared toward dancing. “Boy, I’m telling you,” said Rollins, smiling. “That’s the Savoy ballroom there.
“It sounds very free and easy,” Rollins went on to say. “But we know it’s not, because what he’s saying is deep as the ocean. There was a beginning and an end. He was storytelling all the way through. So when I first heard that, I mean, this cat was talking.”
When you talk about improvised storytelling, I asked him, what are you really talking about?
He belly-laughed. “Well, I guess it’s making sense. It’s like talking gibberish and making sense. That’s on the very basic level. Then beyond that, of course, it’s a beautiful story. It’s uplifting. It’s emotional.”
He wanted to illustrate it further with an observation a writer once made about his playing, but then he stopped himself. “I don’t want this to sound self-aggrandizing. In my later years I’ve become very self-effacing. I don’t mean this to seem like I’m talking about great people. You must indulge me in that. I have decided that I know what greatness is, and I don’t want to put myself in that category.”
Understood. “Anyway,” he continued, “somebody wrote that what I was doing in a certain song was asking a question and then answering the question. I think he was talking about harmonic resolutions. So that would be sort of what I think telling a story might be: resolving a thought.”
I asked if there were any of his own recorded performances he felt comfortable with, that didn’t pain him with thoughts of how it could have been better. “It’s hard to say, because I haven’t listened to any of my stuff in a long time. Unless it’s on the radio, and I can’t leave the room. But I seem to like ‘Sonnymoon for Two,’ with Elvin Jones and Wilbur Ware.” (It can be found on Rollins’s album A Night at the Village Vanguard, from 1957.) “That’s not my optimum, but I like certain things I did on that.”
I asked if the increasing self-effacement he spoke about had any musical implications. Does it come out in his work?
Rollins looked embarrassed and tickled by the idea. He started smiling and looking at the corners of the room, as if wondering whether there was an escape hatch. “Wow. Well, I hope that it’s going to be expressed in my work. But I don’t know how. These things come out.” His hands flew up to his face, and he twisted the white strands of beard around his mouth, grinning.
Set List
Fats Waller, “I’m Going to Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter,” from The Very Best of Fats Waller (RCA/BMG), recorded 1934.
Coleman Hawkins, “The Man I Love,” from Coleman Hawkins, 1943–1944 (Classics), recorded 1943.
Billie Holiday, “Lover Man,” from Billie Holiday: Rare Live Recordings 1934–1959 (ESP-Disk), recorded 1955.
Charlie Parker, “Another Hair Do,” from The Complete Savoy and Dial Studio Recordings, 1944–1948 (Savoy Jazz), recorded 1947.
Lester Young, “Afternoon of a Basie-Ite,” The Complete Lester Young on Keynote (Polygram), recorded 1943.