The first was his military-lifer father’s court martial and jailing for the crime of “teaching a white woman to dance” at an officer’s party he was managing, an event that made national headlines. Sonny’s passion for civil rights and justice was shaped by two early events. Courtesy of The Centre for Swedish Folk Music and Jazz Research and Inger Stjerna Sonny Rollins with Don Cherry and Henry Grimes at the Stockholm Concert Hall, January 17, 1963. Thomas” and “I’m An Old Cowhand.” With drawn-on moustaches, he and his original band formed while attending Franklin High, the Counts of Bop featuring Art Taylor, Walter Bishop, Jackie McLean and Kenny Drew, would head to Minton’s or the phalanx of jazz clubs on 52 nd St to watch and hopefully be invited to sit-in with idols like Coleman Hawkins. His youthful exposure to the Calypso music of his familial roots in the West Indies and love of classic Hollywood movies would bear fruit later in his career in respective classics like “St. Inspired by his Sugar Hill neighbor, tenor great Louis Jordan, he picked up the sax at 8 and landed, beginning as a teenager, on the bandstand and in the recording studio with greats like Bud Powell, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis and Dizzy Gillespie. Rollins was a child of the Harlem Renaissance. It was devoted to toggling between deep reading and deeper listening to the many corners of Rollins’ 60 solo and live albums, and the multitude of classics on which he guested with Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Clifford Brown and the like. I’m a pretty fast reader but I spent close to three months with Levy’s book. The depth of Levy’s astounding research is furthered by the more than 400 pages of footnotes available only online (including my story for NYSMusic on his legendary concert at Opus 40 in Saugerties). It pretty much traces every recording session and gig that the Saxophone Colossus participated in.
#Sonny rollins saxophone colossus archive#
The book is based on more than 200 interviews with Rollins, his family members, friends and collaborators, as well as the artist’s personal archive of letters, journals, photos and press clippings accrued over a career in which he has taken a few notable sabbaticals and sharp stylistic turns.
A concert in Boston five days later was eventually released as Without A Song: the 9/11 concert, winning Rollins another Grammy for his solo on “Why Was I Born.Levy devoted seven years to the task of capturing Rollins – the musician, the myth, the civil rights activist, environmentalist and wandering spiritualist – in a whopping 750 very readable pages. Later that year, just a few days after his 71 st birthday, Rollins had to evacuate his Manhattan apartment after the collapse of the World Trade Center. By the 1980s, Sonny Rollins was mostly headlining concert halls and theaters, performing solo saxophone concerts and even joining the Rolling Stones for three songs on their album Tattoo You.Īccolades and honors came to Rollins in the '80s and' 90s, and he won a Grammy in 2001 for his album This Is What I Do.
#Sonny rollins saxophone colossus series#
He also took up yoga and exercise at this time, emerging with the appropriately titled comeback album, The Bridge.Īfter a series of successful albums and world tours, Rollins took a second two-year break from music to visit Jamaica and continue his pursuit of yoga, meditation and Eastern philosophy. In the summer of 1959, Rollins took a famous two-year sabbatical to focus on his playing – which he did for up to 16 hours a day on the Williamsburg Bridge, connecting Manhattan with Brooklyn.
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