(b New York, 9 Sept 1930). American jazz tenor saxophonist.
He first learnt the piano, studied the alto saxophone from about the age of 11, and took up the tenor instrument in 1946. In high school he led a group with Jackie McLean, Kenny Drew and Art Taylor. He rehearsed with Thelonious Monk for several months in 1948, and from 1949 to 1954 recorded intermittently with a number of leading bop musicians and groups. His most frequent associate during these early years was Miles Davis, with whom he introduced three compositions of his own which later became jazz standards: Airegin, Doxy and Oleo (all recorded on the album Miles Davis Quintet, 1954, Prst.). In December 1955 he joined the Clifford Brown-Max Roach Quintet. He remained with Roach until May 1957, then performed briefly in Davis’s quintet; thereafter, however, he has led his own groups.
In 1956 came the first of a series of landmark recordings issued under Rollins’s own name: Valse hot (on Sonny Rollins Plus 4, 1956, Prst.) introduced the practice, now common, of playing bop in 3/4 metre; St Thomas (on Saxophone Colossus, 1956, Prst.) initiated his explorations of calypso patterns; and Blue 7 (also on Saxophone Colossus) was hailed by Gunther Schuller as demonstrating a new manner of ‘thematic improvisation’, in which the soloist develops motifs extracted from his theme. Way Out West (1957, Cont.), Rollins’s first album using a trio of saxophone, double bass and drums, offered a solution to his longstanding difficulties with incompatible pianists, and exemplified his witty ability to improvise on hackneyed material (Wagon Wheels, I’m an old cowhand). It could happen to you (on The Sound of Sonny, 1957, Riv.) was the first in a long series of unaccompanied solo recordings, and The Freedom Suite (1958, Riv.) foreshadowed the political stances taken in jazz in the 1960s. During the years 1956 to 1958 Rollins was widely regarded as the most talented and innovative tenor saxophonist in jazz. Nevertheless, he was discontented: he could not find compatible sidemen, saw shortcomings in his own playing and suffered from poor health. For these reasons he voluntarily withdrew from public life from August 1959 to November 1961. During this period of retirement his habit of practising on the Williamsburg Bridge in New York became legendary.
On resuming his career Rollins had improved his already prodigious skills, but his style was now considered conservative. In an effort to rejoin the vanguard of jazz fashion he began, in mid-1962, collaborating with Don Cherry, Billy Higgins and other musicians playing free jazz; East Broadway Run Down (1966, Imp.) illustrates the furthest extent to which he incorporated noise elements into his playing. During these years, as Rollins continued to struggle with changing personnel and instrumentation, he focussed increasingly on unaccompanied playing, and by the end of the decade he had become famous for his extended ‘stream-of-consciousness’ extemporizations on traditional tunes and on his own calypso songs.
Rollins pursued spiritual interests in India for five months in 1968, and abandoned music altogether from September 1969 to November 1971. From 1972, when he resumed playing once more, he has led various groups of young, lesser-known musicians, performing in a commercial vein and making use of electronic instruments and black-American dance rhythms; a film made the following year, Sonny Rollins Live, captures the exuberance of a concert performance. Rollins has continued to experiment, recording on the soprano saxophone in 1972 and on the lyricon in 1979. However, touring the USA in 1978 as a member of the Milestone Jazzstars (with McCoy Tyner, Ron Carter and Al Foster), he demonstrated that, as an individual, he remained essentially true to the bop tradition, an aspect of his playing that was again especially apparent in an acclaimed solo performance at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1985. Except for a six-month hiatus in 1983, after he collapsed from exhaustion, Rollins has remained active through the 1990s, touring the USA, Europe and Japan, and recording a fusion of bop and soul music with his quintet.
Rollins established himself as the outstanding jazz saxophonist between Charlie Parker and John Coltrane and a leading figure in the hard-bop style. The prevailing interpretation of his method of improvisation derives from Schuller’s ‘thematic analysis’ of Rollins’s celebrated solo on Blue 7 (1956); other writers, accepting and expanding on Schuller’s insights, have even declared thematic improvisation to be Rollins’s greatest contribution to jazz. This view demands reconsideration: Schuller’s analysis accounts for only part of Rollins’s solo, and several of the motifs in that part do not derive from the theme but occur elsewhere in Rollins’s earlier work (most obviously in Vierd Blues, which he recorded with Davis on the album Collector’s Items, 1953, 1956, Prst.). Rollins, like most bop musicians of the period, paid little attention to composed melodies, preferring instead to improvise athematic, ‘formulaic’ responses to underlying chord progressions. In slow ballads, of course, he often paraphrased the theme, and he occasionally developed motifs from his own calypso themes (as in ex.1, where the first two notes of the theme, inverted and rhythmically displaced, alternate with formulaic bop runs), but he rarely applied this technique to blues or popular songs. Similarly, he seldom used fragments from familiar tunes to anchor long stretches of newly improvised material; Wagon Wheels (on Way Out West, 1957, Cont.) provides the clearest example of this technique. In essence Rollins has adhered to the bop practice of varying and elaborating a large repertory of formulas and, in a wide range of material, shows a rhythmic imagination, harmonic subtlety and freedom of design that have perhaps been surpassed only by Charlie Parker.
N. Hentoff: ‘Sonny Rollins’, Down Beat, xxiii/23 (1956), 15–16
D. Cerulli: ‘Theodore Walter Rollins’, Down Beat, xxv/14 (1958), 16–17
G. Schuller: ‘Sonny Rollins and the Challenge of Thematic Improvisation’, JR, i/1 (1958), 6–11, 21
M. James: ‘Sonny Rollins on Record: 1949–1954’, JazzM, v/8 (1959), 7–11, 31
W. Balliett: Dinosaurs in the Morning (Philadelphia, 1962/R) [collection of previously pubd articles and reviews]
B. Coss: ‘The Return of Sonny Rollins’, Down Beat, xxix/1 (1962), 13–14
J. Goldberg: ‘The Further Adventures of Sonny Rollins’, Down Beat, xxxii/18 (1965), 19–21
B. McRae: ‘Sonny Rollins’, JJ, xviii/3 (1965), 6–7
I. Gitler: ‘Sonny Rollins: Music is an Open Sky’, Down Beat, xxxvi/10 (1969), 18–19
T. Fiofori: ‘Re-entry: the New Orbit of Sonny Rollins’, Down Beat, xxxviii/17 (1971), 14–15, 39
C. Berg: ‘Sonny Rollins: the Way Newk Feels’, Down Beat, xliv/7 (1977), 13–14, 38–41 [incl. discography]
C. Blancq: Melodic Improvisation in American Jazz: the Style of Theodore ‘Sonny’ Rollins, 1951–1962 (diss., Tulane U., 1977); rev. as Sonny Rollins: the Journey of a Jazzman (Boston, 1983)
M. Ullman: ‘Sonny Rollins’, New Republic (1 April 1978)
B. Blumenthal: ‘The Bridge: Sonny Rollins is a Tenor for All Times’,Rolling Stone (12 July 1979)
D. Baker: The Jazz Style of Sonny Rollins: a Musical and Historical Perspective (Lebanon, IN,1980) [incl. transcrs.]
E. Meadow: ‘Rollins Reflects’, JJI, xxxiii/6 (1980), 11 only
B. Blumenthal: ‘Sonny Rollins’, Down Beat, xlix/5 (1982), 15–18 [incl. discography]
M. Isherwood: ‘Sonny Rollins’, JJI, xxxvi/4 (1983), 8–9
T. Sjøgren: The Sonny Rollins Discography (Copenhagen, 1983, 2/1993)
F. Davis: ‘An Improviser Prepares’, In the Moment: Jazz in the 1980s (New York, 1986), 117–32
P.N. Wilson: Sonny Rollins: sein Leben, seine Musik, seine Schallplatten (Schaftlach, 1991)
BARRY KERNFELD