It was the jazz saxophonist Sonny Rollins, who died on May 25 at 95. Rollins had practised on that massive bridge for up to 16 hours a day, for two years, calling it his sabbatical.
At the time, he had become the biggest sax star since Charlie Parker and his 1956 album Saxophone Colossus had established him as one of the leading figures in modern jazz, as well as earning him his famous nickname. Trouble was, The Colossus was never satisfied — that was his torment and his gift.
Aged just 29 and feeling trapped between his burgeoning success and displeasure with his playing, Rollins withdrew from public performance altogether.
He told New Yorker jazz critic Whitney Balliett he felt he hadn’t been achieving his best. He wanted to study and practise more at home but became concerned about bothering people, particularly the girl in the next apartment who was pregnant: he didn’t want to damage the baby’s ears, he said, so he found a spot on the massive bridge near his Lower East Side home, and got back to work.
He was born Walter Theodore Rollins on September 7, 1930 in Harlem, New York, into a neighbourhood where Thelonious Monk, Coleman Hawkins and Bud Powell were not distant legends but local presences.
An alto player, he later switched to tenor when he fell under the spell of Hawkins, the man who had first established the tenor sax as a lead instrument in American jazz.
His heroes were Hawkins and Lester Young but he carried Charlie Parker’s be-bop torch into what became hard bop; he has been described in recent obituaries as “the greatest living jazz improviser”. What distinguished him from the start was not merely technical brilliance — though that was formidable — but the clarity of his thinking. He didn’t just play notes; he constructed arguments.
In Saxophone Colossus, songs like St Thomas showcased his ability to combine Caribbean influences, blues and advanced jazz improvisation into a unique musical identity, drawing on his parents’ Virgin Islands roots.
He studied Eastern philosophy, lived in an Indian monastery, and kept returning to the music renewed. He was among the first to successfully improvise by alternately ignoring tempo and swinging within a single solo — a technique that sounds simple to describe and is nearly impossible to execute with grace.
The Boss has been rummaging through all his old papers to find a faded ticket to a memorable performance at Ronnie Scott’s jazz club in London, where he saw Sonny perform one of his favourite theatricalities: he started playing his tenor sax while still inside the upstairs band dressing room, then slowly walked down the stairs, blowing his way directly through the crowded audience, and stepped on to the stage without missing a single beat.
The Boss then unearthed another precious photo, taken by Art Kane for Esquire magazine in 1958 and called ‘A Great Day in Harlem’. They later made a documentary about it: the remarkable black-and-white photo shows 57 jazz legends sitting on the steps of a brownstone building.
It includes the likes of Count Basie, Dizzy Gillespie, Coleman Hawkins, Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk, Lester Young, Marian McPartland, Mary Lou Williams, Grene Krupa, Gerry Mulligan — and a 28-year-old Rollins. Until three weeks ago, Sonny was the only surviving member. Woof!
