SONNY ROLLINS
“A charmed life…” At 90 years old, SONNY ROLLINS is one of the last surviving jazz titans. As an album of previously unheard recordings sees the light of day, John Lewis enjoys a rare audience with the saxophone colossus. While tales of Miles, ’Trane and Bird proliferate, Rollins reveals his ongoing musical and spiritual quest: “What I’m trying to do is find a universal unity,” he explains. “Not a unity you hear on Earth, but the planets, the universe…” Photo by TAKEHIKO TOKIWA
TAKEHIKO TOKIWA/AFLO/SHUTTERSTOCK
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EFLECTING on a career spanning eight decades, Sonny Rollins is thinking about the friends he has lost along the way. “All of these guys – Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Coleman Hawkins – their spirits are always with me,” he says. “They never leave. I feel them alongside me all the time.” Inevitably, a conversation with Rollins comes freighted with history. The last living legend of bebop, Rollins, now aged 90, played eyewitness to many great revolutions in American culture, from music to the civil rights movement. His talents for melodic and thematic improvisation made him one of the greats of jazz, a powerful saxophonist in a medium dominated by many supremely gifted horn players. Today, talking on the phone from his home in Woodstock, Rollins really does speak like he plays the saxophone. His voice dances around the sonic spectrum: a slippery, vibrato-free, Noo Yoik accent that darts mischievously from gruff baritone chuckles to squeaky soprano exclamations. There is a wheeziness that we
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can attribute to recent respiratory problems, but he speaks confidently and fluently, with frequent diversions and witty asides. Almost entirely self-taught, Rollins started playing professionally in 1949, aged only 19. Over the next five years he built up a career as a sideman to many of his heroes, sitting in with the likes of Charlie Parker, Max Roach, Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk and Miles Davis. But it was an incredible run of more than a dozen albums recorded under his own name between 1956 and 1958 – including the classics Saxophone Colossus, Way Out West and Freedom Suite – that cemented his reputation. Miles Davis described Rollins’ output during this period as “something else. Brilliant.” “I was seen as the hot new thing, and the pressure got to me,” Rollins recalls. “I never had any formal training, so I felt that I needed to work at my craft to keep up with everyone else. I dropped out for two years, went to the Williamsburg Bridge and just practised and practised. I could have stayed there forever.” Career sabbaticals like this have defined Rollins’ career. His prodigious work rate has always been accompanied by a questing spiritual
side: he has studied eastern philosophies and practised yoga since the 1960s. For him, music has long been integrated into this cosmic journey. “I had a swami in Bombay when I was studying Shankara yoga,” he says. “He told me that the truest form of meditation came when I was playing my horn. He was right.” Such spiritual discipline has stood Rollins in good stead through the years. Although he stopped playing saxophone altogether in 2014, a result of pulmonary fibrosis, he looks at his situation from a unique perspective. “I went into a deep depression for many months,” he admits. “But I’ve learned how to deal with it. I’m resigned to this fate. These things happen for a reason. I’m not going to fight that.” But while ‘new’ music from Rollins is unlikely, there is at least new ‘old’ music, which ensures his legacy will grow. Recently, Resonance Records unearthed previously unheard live recordings from 1967, entitled Rollins In Holland. “I’ve always preferred live recordings to studio recordings,” he says. “Studio albums are like virtual sex, but live playing is the real thing. Ha ha!” While Rollins is pleased the Holland album is finally seeing the light of day, he remains
