The Revolutionary Force of Sonny Rollins

Sonny Rollins, who died at ninety-five, played tenor saxophone across more than sixty years of professional life. His sound, from early recordings in 1949 through late live albums in the 2010s, carried rugged textures and a wide range of expression. He combined whirlwind energy with intimate warmth, linking his music to the natural vastness of jazz. Raised in Harlem, he was influenced by Coleman Hawkins, borrowing and transforming Hawkins’s deep, burly tone. Rollins also kept pace with bebop’s rapid, harmonically intricate solo improvisation style, working with early collaborators such as Bud Powell. His career spanned crucial eras and he played key roles in each.

"Rollins, who died Monday, at the age of ninety-five, played the tenor saxophone, a big, heavy instrument. It's made of metal, but it's called a woodwind, and his sound—from the time of his first recordings, in 1949, at the age of eighteen, until his late, live albums, from the twenty-tens—seems hewn, with rugged textures to match. His full range of expression spanned whirlwind energy and intimate warmth, and this power felt natural and in contact with nature, connected to the deep-rooted vastness of jazz itself."

"Born and raised in Harlem at a time when many of the era's great musicians lived there, young Rollins was a fan of one of his neighbors, the tenor saxophonist Coleman Hawkins—widely considered the first, in the nineteen-twenties, to make that instrument a central, solo voice in jazz bands—and ultimately borrowed and transformed something of Hawkins's deep, burly tone. But what Rollins learned from Hawkins, even more, was to advance in step with the most advanced new ideas and forms that jazz would take."

"Bebop flourished in Rollins's youth: the music of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell (with whom Rollins made some of his earliest recordings), and others who distilled jazz into an art centered on solo improvisations and energized it with unprecedented harmonic intricacy and death-defying speed. It demanded physical and intellectual virtuosity, and Rollins bore its difficulty lightly, on broad shoulders, with a distinctive lilt of melody."

Read at The New Yorker