Sonny Rollins obituary

Sonny Rollins was widely labeled the greatest living improviser, despite recurring themes across his concerts. He respected formal repertory but treated it as raw material rather than a fixed script. He kept hundreds of tunes in his head and used them as triggers for spontaneous imagination and technique. His improvisation depended on personal nuances, so no two performances were truly the same. He found potential for variation in Broadway show tunes, calypsos, and torch songs, blending dissonant, abstract-like ideas with precise returns to recognizable melodies. In later years he gained a worldwide audience, often performing without a support act and delivering long, continuous sets with minimal announcements. His ballads could begin gently before expanding into forceful, extended lines.

"The respectful treatment of formal repertory meant little to Rollins, who has died aged 95. He loved songs and kept hundreds of tunes in his head, but those materials were merely triggers to his extraordinary spontaneous imagination and technique. The personal nuances of improvisation meant everything to him and that was why no two Rollins performances were ever really the same."

"In any handful of Broadway showtunes, sketchy calypsos and torch songs, Rollins could hear the potential for spontaneous variations that would become the real material of the performance. His improvisations would mingle dissonant and almost abstract variations with a periodically injected canny precis of the original familiar melody like a conjuror spinning plates and racing back to the starting point to keep the faltering original in motion."

"Into his 80s, he still insisted on having no support act at his concerts and carrying an evening on his own frequently two hours of flat-out music in which each piece would be rapidly lit on the stub of the previous one and announcements kept to a minimum in his perfunctorily charming growl."

"A deceptively caressing ballad might open the show, but imperiously rolling long lines would soon burst out and turn into the big, braying acclamations, the reverberating throat-clearing slurs, the descents to floor-shaking be"

Read at www.theguardian.com