After 60 years of playing tenor sax, Sonny Rollins thinks he just might be getting the hang of it.
Sonny Rollins, saxophone colossus, turns 80 on September 7. You wouldn't know it to see him standing at the front of the bandstand, one of the last of the jazz legends, unleashing his soul through the frantic force of brash and sinuous improvisations, much as expressionist painters once attacked their canvases with color. On his best nights, Rollins rides the rhythm for chorus after chorus, no two alike, exploring every avenue that a chord or melody opens up. Then, just as you think he's exhausted all possibilities, he darts into some uncharted alley and invents a whole new way of phrasing music—all the while never losing his grip on the pulse, shape, or swing of the song.
“I'm constantly thinking about music, all day long," says Rollins, who lives upstate in the woods of Columbia County. “I always have my mind-door open. I'm alert to everything that might turn into a song. I'm wrestling with a song at the moment." He practices each day for at least two hours. “I play songs, exercises, patterns, everything. You shouldn't put any limits on what you can do. Music is an open-ended thing." Often, he picks up the horn a few times more during the day, to work out an idea that's churning in his head. “I had my horn in my mouth just now," he says. “I put it down to answer the phone."
Rollins recorded his first albums in 1949, when he wasn't quite 19, as a sideman to Bud Powell and J. J. Johnson, then went on to play with Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Max Roach, and Clifford Brown before forming his own now-legendary bands. By the mid-fifties, he was widely heralded as the top tenor saxophonist alongside John Coltrane, and after Trane died a decade later, he towered unchallenged, as (despite the occasional lapses and sabbaticals) he has ever since.
Sonny Rollins, saxophone colossus, turns 80 on September 7. You wouldn't know it to see him standing at the front of the bandstand, one of the last of the jazz legends, unleashing his soul through the frantic force of brash and sinuous improvisations, much as expressionist painters once attacked their canvases with color. On his best nights, Rollins rides the rhythm for chorus after chorus, no two alike, exploring every avenue that a chord or melody opens up. Then, just as you think he's exhausted all possibilities, he darts into some uncharted alley and invents a whole new way of phrasing music—all the while never losing his grip on the pulse, shape, or swing of the song.
“I'm constantly thinking about music, all day long," says Rollins, who lives upstate in the woods of Columbia County. “I always have my mind-door open. I'm alert to everything that might turn into a song. I'm wrestling with a song at the moment." He practices each day for at least two hours. “I play songs, exercises, patterns, everything. You shouldn't put any limits on what you can do. Music is an open-ended thing." Often, he picks up the horn a few times more during the day, to work out an idea that's churning in his head. “I had my horn in my mouth just now," he says. “I put it down to answer the phone."
Rollins recorded his first albums in 1949, when he wasn't quite 19, as a sideman to Bud Powell and J. J. Johnson, then went on to play with Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Max Roach, and Clifford Brown before forming his own now-legendary bands. By the mid-fifties, he was widely heralded as the top tenor saxophonist alongside John Coltrane, and after Trane died a decade later, he towered unchallenged, as (despite the occasional lapses and sabbaticals) he has ever since.
