Two images stay in the mind after finishing Aidan Levy’s biography of the American jazz legend Sonny Rollins. Since I finished ‘Saxophone Colossus: The Life and Music of Sonny Rollins’, I have been listening to the music of its subject, much of which is lengthy, thorough, sifting, sorting, wending, quoting, implying an ongoingness and a disinclination to recognise the state of being finished — so in some sense I have not finished it: I am still inside the book.
But here are the two images.
One is an image of Rollins practising, or playing his tenor saxophone unaccompanied. Rollins (born in Harlem as Walter Theodore Rollins) is now 92, and had to give up playing altogether in 2014, because of pulmonary fibrosis.
Here is a Rollins boyhood memory: “I just loved to play and I would get in the closet and blow for hours — 9-10 hours, and I would get lost in my own reverie, in the sound.”
The other is an image of Rollins in company with others, such as singer Ahmad Basheer, euphonium player Kiane Zawadi, drummer Ike Day, trumpeter Charles Tolliver, and saxophonists Bennie Maupin and David S Ware. Take the time to know them, this book implies, because Rollins did. At least until the mid-1970s, after which he shifted into a quieter lifestyle in upstate New York with his wife. Even during busy periods he put in long hours jamming in lofts and rehearsal spaces, with musicians far below his level of achievement. Growth mindset, yes, this man had it.
Talking of his craft, Rollins’ notion of practising expanded into nearly all of his life — a gig, a recording, a new level of musical expression, a higher consciousness, the next life. Levy lingers over the most iconic version of Rollins’ practising, in a chapter called ‘The Bridge’.
The book talks of a story told several times already.
In 1960, when many considered him the greatest jazz musician of his generation, Rollins withdrew. He’d had a decade of extremes. He had experienced addiction, prison and rehab and endured the deaths of his mother and (jazz saxophonist) Charlie Parker, both of whose encouragement he depended on. Friends who wanted to see him were advised to send a telegram.
It wouldn’t be his only sabbatical. Later in the ’60s, he spent some months at an ashram in India.
After the ’70s his music bent toward funk and calypso-rhythm tunes, but in the telling his context becomes less inspired, out of the local and into the global, from one jazz festival to the next, through recordings whose new technologies deaden his sound, and with musicians, excepting the occasional all-star showdown, who for whatever reason are
in less of a position to challenge him.