Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
Sonny Rollins, one of the greatest jazz musicians of all time, has died at the age of 95.
His death was he announced on his website Monday, “with great sorrow and great love”. Her publicist Terri Hinte confirmed the news.
No cause of death was given but the so-called “Saxophone Colossus” died at his home in Woodstock, New York, on Monday afternoon. The quote quoted Rollins’ words about death: “I think that when the creative person is gone, he continues to exist somewhere.” I am a person who believes that this life is not perfect for everything.
With more than 60 albums released since the late 1940s, including collaborations with Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane and others, Rollins was one of the last stars of the bebop generationwho took jazz from a group that was usually danced or danced into an exciting new dimension.
Rollins himself was a master of music, whose bright, catchy lines – whether jazz standards or self-penned – could be picked up, expanded and reworked into contemporary and sometimes classic music. Saxophonist Branford Marsalis has called him “the greatest in jazz history” along with Louis Armstrong; when presenting him with the 2010 National Medal of the Arts in 2011, Barack Obama said that Rollins inspired him to “take risks that I probably wouldn’t have taken”.
He was born Walter Theodore Rollins in New York City in 1930, and grew up in his neighborhood of Harlem, naming him Sonny after his grandfather. Inspired by a piano-playing sister and a violinist brother, as well as jazz heroes like Louis Jordan and Oil Waller, he started learning the saxophone at the age of 7. This was the excitement of the jazz scene in his area that his first group, in high school, had future artists. Jackie McLeanKenny Drew and Art Taylor; right out of school he started playing with local talents like Bud Powell and touring stars like JJ Johnsonand began to write his own work.
Rollins once called himself “a classic … Davis himself wrote about how Rollins quickly became a “legend, almost a god for many young musicians … For him, Rollins said in reminiscences of his life at a young age: “Jazz is nice. It’s not just music, it doesn’t rock your music. It’s everything. It doesn’t make you feel like fighting. It makes you feel that there is a God.”
However, he became addicted to heroin, and in the 1950s he stole weapons to finance his addiction, later calling himself “an ugly person…I excluded everyone except my mother”. He was imprisoned for 10 months at Rikers Island in New York, but was able to kick his addiction with a rehab program in 1955.
Purification contributed to a remarkable creation: Rollins released his first album as a group leader in 1953, and recorded 17 more at the end of the decade including signs such as. Saxophone Colossus (1956)which had a signature St. Thomasnodding to calypso and naming his mother’s Caribbean birthplace; the piano-less “traveling” style explored on Way Out West (1957); and Freedom Suite (1958)when his release notes on the 20-minute theme song became a beautiful libertarian argument among the growing civil rights movement. Contributors at this time include Dizzy Gillespie, Max Roach, Art Blakey and others.
In 1959, Rollins took a three-year hiatus from recording and performing on stage, honing his skills by exercising up to 15 hours a day on the sidewalks of the Williamsburg Bridge, in part to avoid disturbing his neighbors – it inspired his 1962 comeback album. The Bridge. Outside of one week between 1969 and 1971, when he went to an Indian ashram to study yoga, philosophy and meditation, these twenty years saw him joining avant-garde and fusion tours in the jazz scene, playing Latin American music on New (1962); free (yet very loud) on Sonny Meets Hawk! (1963) and East Broadway Run Down (1966); and, in the 1970s, R&B-inflected takes on things by Stevie Wonder, Patrice Rushen and others. He also wrote and sang the soundtrack for the 1966 Michael Caine film Alfie (minus the Cilla Black theme song).
In the 1980s, he continued to mix his playing with funk and calypso, adding unconventional songs to the Rolling Stones’ 1981 album Tattoo You. He looked closely at his lifestyle away from the “smoke-filled, cash-registered nightclubs” and onto the big stages, campaigning against the growing climate crisis with benefit concerts and his 1998 album. Global warming. “Right now, it’s like we’re on the Titanic, but everyone’s looking at the Titanic,” he said later.
Rollins was married twice, first (and briefly) to Dawn Finney in 1957. He met his next wife, Lucille Pearson, that year, and they married in 1965, staying together until her death in 2004. The couple was at home just six blocks from the World Trade Center on September 11 – they moved to upstate New York with Rollins carrying only his saxophone. Three days later, he went to Boston to have the famous songs that would be released as Without Music: The 9/11 Concertwhich earned him a Grammy for best jazz performance. Rollins later told the Guardian: “I lost a lot of valuable things in 9/11 and I learned something – wealth is not where it’s at.”
He received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2004, and after touring and performing throughout his life, retired in 2014 after being diagnosed with pulmonary fibrosis. “I went through a period of depression; I was really low“he said in 2017. “I wanted this life to try to achieve what I could do with music, and not being able to play meant I wouldn’t get the chance to do that. But eventually I came out of my depression when I realized that instead of being disappointed I should be grateful. I had the opportunity to make a living as a musician, which is what I always wanted to do. “
He once said that his goal was to “get to the next level where I will not stop moving forward” and even in 2013, when he was about to retire, he was saying he had a lot to do. Your place is safe. You’re a great Sonny Rollins; you’ve made it.’ I’m hearing this and thinking, ‘Okay, screw Sonny Rollins. Where I want to go is beyond Sonny Rollins. Onward.’”
