Sonny Rollins: A Free Spirit Steeped in Legends
By BEN RATLIFF
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
HIS face and neatly trimmed white beard shaded by a Filson hunting
cap, Sonny Rollins arrived for our appointment straight from a visit
to the dentist. The dentist is more or less the only reason for Mr.
Rollins to make the two-and-a-half-hour trip to New York City now
unless he's giving an infrequent concert.
Now 75, the tenor saxophonist whom many call the greatest living
improviser in jazz lives on a Columbia County farm in Germantown,
N.Y., that he bought in 1972 with his wife, Lucille. Until recently
they also kept an apartment in Lower Manhattan; after the World Trade
Center, six blocks away, was attacked, they had to leave their home
temporarily and then decided to let go of their pied-à-terre. His
wife, who was also his manager and record producer, died last
November. This is a period of transition for him.
Mr. Rollins had agreed to my request that he choose some music for us
to listen to together and discuss. In the elevator at The New York
Times, I asked him how his big concert had gone at the Montreal Jazz
Festival over the summer. "Well, I don't know," he answered in his
froggy voice. "I look at all that from the inside, so you'd probably
have to ask someone else."
But on the subject of music other than his own, the basis of our
meeting, he is more forthcoming. Mr. Rollins had chosen a short list
of pieces for our session, the point being to listen through his
sensibilities. He was careful to contextualize his responses, but
essentially remained open to exploring any idea. And his responses
were fairly fresh: he said, regretfully, that for 20 years he had not
really listened much to music, to protect himself from too much
information. "It's not healthy," he admitted. "I would like to be able
to listen to CD's. I enjoy it, you know." What we did not discuss much
was Mr. Rollins's new album, "Without a Song," released a month ago by
Milestone/Fantasy. It is a recording of a Boston concert four days
after the Sept. 11 attacks, and the first in a possible series of live
Sonny Rollins releases. Carl Smith, a 66-year-old retired lawyer who
also collects jazz recordings, has located (and in a few cases,
including the Boston concert, surreptitiously recorded) more than 350
Rollins performances, going back to a tape of a three-minute solo on
alto saxophone from 1948.
Were these performances to be made available, they would be taken very
seriously in the jazz world, especially because Mr. Rollins's studio
records of the last 30 years - some would argue 40 - scarcely indicate
the extent of his talent. Mr. Rollins is a powerful, grand-scale
improviser who often needs half an hour or more to say what he wants
on the horn and achieve his momentum. But he is also a paragon of
structure as he improvises. Almost every modern jazz musician is
fascinated by Sonny Rollins.
Yet he says he has an aversion to listening to himself play. He had to
force himself to listen closely to the tape of the Boston concert, a
process that he described as "like Abu Ghraib." "It's possible for me
to hear something I did and say, 'Yeah, I like that,' " Mr. Rollins
admitted. "Although it would probably never be a whole thing. It might
be a portion, a section of something, or a solo."
Mr. Rollins was born in New York City in 1930, of parents who had
immigrated from the Virgin Islands. He grew up in Harlem - first in
the lowlands around 135th Street and Lenox Avenue, and then, from age
9, in the Sugar Hill neighborhood, a locus at the time for jazz
musicians. He attended Benjamin Franklin High School in what was then
an Italian section of East Harlem, and lived through an early New York
experiment in bussing black students to white neighborhoods; he
remembers people throwing objects at the bus windows. But it was such
a high-profile case of school integration that Frank Sinatra and Nat
King Cole gave concerts to the students in the school auditorium to
promote race relations.
Thinking of his childhood, Mr. Rollins wanted to hear Fats Waller's
1934 recording of "I'm Going to Sit Right Down and Write Myself a
Letter." From the beginning of the song he looked as if he had just
stepped into a warm bath. A clarinetist began playing counterpoint
improvisations against Waller's piano and voice. "Who's the clarinet
player?" Mr. Rollins asked, coming out of his reverie.
It was Rudy Powell. "Isn't that something?" he said. "I went to school
with Rudy Powell's son." Mr. Rollins and Rudy Powell didn't know each
other, although they stood about three feet apart in Art Kane's famous
"Great Day in Harlem" photograph from 1958.
"I remember hearing that song around the house, and on the radio and
everything," Mr. Rollins said. "Wow, I haven't heard that record in so
many years. It's one of my earliest memories of jazz. I believe in
things like reincarnation, and it struck a chord someplace in my back
lives or something."
It's very restful, I said, as we listened to the song again. It's not
the other Fats Waller, the boisterous one.
"Yeah," Mr. Rollins agreed. "He could be raucous, but this is very,
very much - mmm." (Waller was singing: "I'm gonna write words oh so
sweet/ they're gonna knock me off my feet/ a lot of kisses on the
bottom/ I'll be glad I got 'em.")
"Yeah," Mr. Rollins said, still impressed by Powell. "But the thing I
want to stress is that this is evocative of the whole Harlem scene.
Where I was born, when I was born. And his playing, that stride piano
style, which of course comes from other people. It's overwhelming to
me, really. When I hear him, to me it just says the whole thing. It
encapsulates jazz, the spirit of jazz, what jazz is about. In a very
overall way."
Along Came Hawkins
We moved on to Coleman Hawkins. If Waller represents Mr. Rollins's
childhood, Hawkins represents his maturation. (An infatuation with
Louis Jordan came in between.) When Mr. Rollins became really
interested in the saxophone, as a teenager in the mid-1940's, Hawkins
was especially hot. In late 1943 the yearlong ban imposed by the
American Federation of Musicians, preventing commercial recordings,
had just been lifted, and Hawkins, nearly 40 and very competitive, was
making up for lost time, collaborating with the younger beboppers. (In
1963 Rollins would make a record with his idol, performing with a kind
of brave, modern idiosyncrasy.)
"The Man I Love," from December 1943, is one of the greatest
performances in jazz, though overshadowed by Hawkins's much more
famous recording of "Body and Soul." It was released on a 12-inch 78
r.p.m. record - a detail Mr. Rollins remembered - because Hawkins had
too much to say and started a second chorus. It ended at 5:05, too
long for the normal 10-inch format.
We listened to Hawkins's two voluminous choruses, ambitious from the
very opening phrase: an E natural chord jostling against an E flat.
"You know, he's doing a lot of stuff in there, man," Mr. Rollins said.
"Very far-reaching, too. Coleman was a guy that played chord changes
in an up-and-down manner. He sort of played every change, let me put
it that way. He had a phrase for every change that went by. So in that
solo he was not only playing the changes, he was also playing the
passing chords, which is another thing he was ahead of his time on.
And still, he was getting the jazz intensity moving, so he was
building and building and building."
"It's a work of art," he concluded.
When did he get around to Coleman Hawkins? "Well, 'Body and Soul' was
ubiquitous in Harlem, on jukeboxes. They could have turned me on to
him. But since I moved up on the hill, where so many of these guys
lived, I even had a chance to see him driving around. He had an
impressive Cadillac. He dressed well. And, you know, there were
certain other people that acted more on the entertainment side. There
was even a time in my life when I had a brief feeling about Louis
Armstrong, that he was too minstrel-y and too smiley. That didn't last
long. I was a young person at the time. But what impressed me about
Coleman was that he carried himself with great dignity."
A lot of Mr. Rollins's heroes lived in his neighborhood; the tricky
part was getting their ear. "There was a great photographer named
James J. Kriegsman, who used to make these pictures of musicians, and
he made a beautiful picture of Coleman. So I had my 8-by-10, and I
knew where he lived, up on 153rd street, and one day I knew when he
was coming home. He signed my autograph. I was 13 or 14."
"I was a real pest, as a young guy," he recalled. "It's sort of
embarrassing to think about it now."
Parker Cuts Loose
Inevitably, Charlie Parker was on Mr. Rollins's list. But the piece,
"Another Hair Do," from 1947, was an unusual choice. It is a 12-bar
blues. At the beginning, Parker and a very young Miles Davis play a
repeated line for the first four bars. But after that Parker cuts
loose and improvises at double-speed for the next five, before the
written part resumes and the theme-section ends.
"Another Hair Do" is nothing canonical in jazz history, but for Mr.
Rollins it was. "The thing about this song was that the form of it was
revolutionary even for bop," he said.
He backtracked a little. "First of all, this guy's rhythmic thing was
definitely on another planet. You don't find people doing that, the
way he was doubling up there. There was a lot of free improvisation in
the melody there." (By melody, Mr. Rollins meant the opening 12-bar
theme section.)
When Parker comes back to play the theme again, I said, he's not going
to play that fast bit the same way. "No," Mr. Rollins said. "It's an
open space. See, Miles is trying to do a little bit of it, too" -
improvising in double-time over the steady pulse - "but he can't quite
do it yet. But, you know, Miles was a genius. He was playing with
Charlie Parker and not able to do some of the technical stuff, but yet
making it sound like he's in the same ballpark." He whistled, and
laughed, then went back to Parker's achievement.
"It's not just the computer saying four notes against two notes. It's
what Charlie Parker's doing within that thing. It's music that can't
be written down. You have to feel that to make it come out. So what
Charlie Parker accomplished was, he made an open-ended song which was
not open-ended. It wasn't like playing anything you want. But within
that there was so much freedom to play what you wanted to play. And
still he made it to sound like a regular blues song."
Mr. Rollins himself wrote some open-ended pieces, like "The Bridge."
"Well, I probably got it from my idol there," he responded. "People
playing jazz have to try to understand where he was coming from, what
that was, and emulate it and absorb it. This is what jazz is: jazz is
freedom. I don't think you always have to play in time. But there's
two different ways of playing. There's a way of playing where you can
play with no time. Or, you can have a fixed time and play against it.
That's what I feel is heaven - being able to be that free, spiritual,
musical. I would say that's an ideal which is underappreciated."
Here he seemed to sense that he was getting into rough waters. "I mean
playing free without any kind of time strictures - there's nothing
wrong with that either. I'm not saying that's inferior. But I guess
I'm getting older now, so I'm getting to be a person that's steeping
myself in the tradition of Fats Waller and all of these people we're
listening to today, who are playing time music. I'm probably going to
be dissing myself to the new guys coming up somewhere, but a lot of
our audiences still relate to time. I'm still in the era of time being
an important component of jazz. I'm still there, O.K.? So kill me."
The Storyteller
Finally, we got to Lester Young. "Afternoon of a Basie-ite" was
recorded in 1943 - five days after Hawkins's "Man I Love" session -
with a quartet including Johnny Guarnieri on piano, Slam Stewart on
bass and Sid Catlett on drums. It is almost lotus-eater music, light
and gorgeous, geared toward dancing. "Boy, I'm telling you," said Mr.
Rollins, smiling. "That's the Savoy ballroom there."
"It sounds very free and easy," Mr. Rollins said. "But we know it's
not, because what he's saying is deep as the ocean. There was a
beginning and an end. He was storytelling all the way through. So when
I first heard that, I mean, this cat was talking."
When you talk about improvised storytelling, I asked him, what are you
really talking about?
"Well, I guess it's making sense," he replied. "It's like talking
gibberish and making sense. That's on the very basic level. Then
beyond that, of course, it's a beautiful story. It's uplifting. It's
emotional."
He wanted to illustrate it further with an observation a writer once
made about his own playing, but then he stopped himself. "I don't want
this to sound self-aggrandizing," he said. "In my later years I've
become very self-effacing. I have decided that I know what greatness
is, and I don't want to put myself in that category."
Understood. "Anyway," he continued, "somebody wrote that what I was
doing in a certain song was asking a question and then answering the
question. I think he was talking about harmonic resolutions. So that
would be sort of what I think telling a story might be: resolving a
thought."
I asked if there were any of his own recorded performances he felt
comfortable with, that didn't pain him with thoughts of how it should
have been better. "It's hard to say, because I haven't listened to any
of my stuff in a long time," he said. "Unless it's on the radio, and I
can't leave the room. But I seem to like 'Sonnymoon for Two,' with
Elvin Jones and Wilbur Ware." (It can be found on Mr. Rollins's 1957
album "A Night at the Village Vanguard.")
I asked if the increasing self-effacement had any musical
implications. Does it come out in his work?
Mr. Rollins looked embarrassed and tickled by the idea; he started
smiling and looking at the corners of the room, as if wondering
whether there was an escape hatch. "Wow. Well, I hope that it's going
to be expressed in my work. But I don't know how. These things come
out, you know." His hands flew up to his face, and he twisted the
white strands of beard around his mouth, grinning.
