Jazz saxophone great Sonny Rollins lives lightly, looms large
by Seth Rogovoy

(WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., Aug. 21, 1998) -- If things had worked out differently, the world might know Sonny Rollins as a great watercolorist rather than as one of the all-time titans of jazz. And while it has been many years since the would-be artist put down his paintbrush in favor of the tenor saxophone, he still sees parallels between painting and music.

“I think that they’re similar, because when you do watercolors, you have the palette in front of you and then you begin to improvise," said the modern master of jazz improvisation in a recent phone interview from his home in Germantown, N.Y.

“Of course when you’re painting you can sort of fix it up as much as you want before you present the final product, and with improvising on stage you don’t really have that. It’s much harder to touch it up -- you sort of have to go with what it is. But the process is very much the same -- looking inward and trying to communicate on a spiritual level, and that’s very much like music."

Rollins will be communicating in his chosen medium when he brings his jazz sextet to the National Music Center in Lenox tomorrow night, Saturday, Aug. 22, at 8. The concert will be preceded by an invitation-only dinner-tribute honoring the legacy of the Music Inn and its founder, Stephanie Barber of Lenox. Attendees are expected to include such illustrious Music Inn veterans as Dave Brubeck, Jimmy Giuffre, Max Roach, Cecil Payne and members of the Modern Jazz Quartet, with whom Rollins recorded a live album at Music Inn in 1958.

For half a century, Rollins has been a professional musician, for most of that time widely hailed as one of the world’s greatest improvisers and tenor saxophonists. He is one of those rare figures in jazz -- a “colossus," as one of his album titles called him -- an overarching presence who has made his mark as a composer and innovator, but mostly as a player who continues to wow and astonish audiences with his dynamic, inventive and entertaining improvisations. And in a music and culture which has seen its fair share of greats burn out or fade away, Rollins’s longevity and endurance are equally remarkable.

“I’m very fortunate and very grateful that I have been able to maintain a career, because in jazz it’s very hard,’’ said Rollins. “Most guys just burn themselves out or get despondent and end up on alcohol and drugs and give up and die young. I’m just blessed by having something which the people would like to hear."

Since he began playing in the late-’40s with the likes of Babs Gonzales, J.J. Johnson, Bud Powell and Miles Davis, people have enthusiastically responded to the “something’’ in Rollins’s playing. Born in New York City in 1930 to music-loving parents of Caribbean ancestry, Rollins grew up in a Harlem that was ground zero for modern jazz, when neighborhood musicians included Coleman Hawkins and Thelonious Monk.

Before long he was playing alongside many of the greats of his time, including Davis, Monk, Bud Powell, the Modern Jazz Quartet and Charlie Parker. By the mid-’50s, he was gaining recognition as a leader in his own right, and by the close of the decade he was considered the equal of those greats with whom he began the decade as a sideman.

“I was fortunate to be there with those early guys, Monk and Miles and Bud and all those people," said Rollins. “But again, it’s jazz, and you can never be complacent. I still practice every day. I just came in from my studio to do this interview. I don’t take anything for granted. I’m a serious musician. I’m concerned with my work. I’m conscientious; I don’t compromise anything. I can’t compromise anything. I’m not a good enough musician to go out there and fake it. I can’t do that; I don’t have those kind of skills."

As these remark indicate, for better or worse, Rollins is a perfectionist, which to some extent explains the periodic, self-imposed sabbaticals that began in 1959. They have become the stuff of jazz-culture cliché -- the lone jazzman battling it out with his muse in the wee morning hours on a rainy bridge in New York -- but in the early-‘60s, that’s exactly where one had to go to hear Rollins play.

Not that anyone ever stopped to listen. On the particular expanse of the Williamsburg Bridge which Rollins made his practice room, not many people walked by, which made it perfect, said Rollins. “And the people who did walk over, very few of them paid me any mind. New Yorkers are very sophisticated people, and very few of them even gave me a second glance really," he said with a laugh half mischievous, half befuddled.

While Rollins hasn’t lost any of that perfectionist drive, he has learned to control it -- or not to allow it to control him. “I’m a perfectionist in the sense of being prepared, having my rudiments down," he said. But that perfectionism gets left behind when he gets on stage to play.

“When I say I’m a perfectionist, I’m not talking about the finished product, because that’s something over which I have no real control," he said. “My control is in the before-you-get-to-the-performing stage -- the preparation."

“But as far as soloing, it’s beyond my hands. It’s really spontaneous. It has you walking on the edge, walking a tightrope. The best that I can do is I can try to have all the bases covered, and then just hope things happen."

“You never know what makes a particular evening successful or not. These things are very difficult to pinpoint. Charlie Parker used to say that whatever he played at night was a reflection of what he went through during the day. In a broad sense that’s right. But even saying that, we don’t know what those experiences were that we could repeat them every night or every day."

This “in the moment" aspect, of course, is what distinguishes jazz from most other styles of music. The art of the jazz improviser -- to make meaningful, beautiful, spontaneous expression within the logic or framework of a given piece -- is the very essence of jazz and what gives it its intensely human quality. It is also perhaps its most difficult quality -- perhaps what, except for a brief period mid-century, has kept jazz from enjoying anything but mass popularity.

Rollins agrees in part. “Without a doubt, jazz is an intellectual music," he said. “It’s not as accessible to the average listener as pop music is. You have to cultivate a liking for jazz. You have to learn about it.

“I wish there was a national jazz show on one of the {TV} networks, maybe every week or something like that, so people wouldn’t be afraid of it. There ’s nothing to be afraid of. I think it just hasn’t gotten good press."

There is another reason that jazz, for all its populist inclinations, has eluded the pop-culture radar, according to Rollins, and that has to do with its African-American origins.

“Jazz represents a minority culture music. I think there’s a lot of conservative people in the United States who look down on jazz for a lot of different reasons, political reasons, trying to keep the underclass in its place."

“Jazz became tainted in that way. It wasn’t that the music wasn’t great; it was just that it had to be controlled by the larger establishment. Of course, we’ve come a long way and now people have had to accept the fact that jazz is a worldwide cultural benefit to the U.S."

For Rollins, these are more than just idle musings. He has always felt a strong connection between jazz and politics, racial or otherwise. And while he admits that the music itself can do little to directly address social or political issues, it is not for lack of trying. In 1958, he wrote and recorded “The Freedom Suite," a 19-minute piece whose thematic interpolations can be seen as prototypes of some of the more recent extended works based in African-American cultural history by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Wynton Marsalis.

And as the title track of Rollins’s most recent recording, “Global Warming" (Milestone) indicates, he continues to take the pulse of the world around him, unwilling to play the role of the romantic, self-absorbed artist.

“I feel that it’s very important for jazz to have some kind of a social voice and not just be a music of talent," he said. "It should be involved in things that are going on in the world today. It should not just be a matter of enjoyment, to sit in a concert listening to some guy play and exhibit great skills. That’s great, but jazz should always have some kind of a message, because it’s coming out of a disadvantaged group that’s had a lot of problems in this society and has made a lot of breakthroughs and contributed a great deal.

"Like I told somebody else, just by being black in America I’m political -- I already am looked on in a political sense. And that’s why I made the Freedom Suite some years ago. Today the environment is a very important, present-day crisis that people should address and look to."

In the course of conversation, Rollins comes across with a seemingly contradictory combination of strong self-awareness and Buddha-like humility. There is no false modesty in what he says about himself, yet there is no posturing, either. There is a remarkable lack of ego, perhaps suggesting the influence of his time spent in India and studying Eastern philosophy and yoga.

“I really don’t know what people think of me," said Rollins, letting out another laugh. “I guess a lot of people have respect for me, and I’ll accept a lot of that, because I am a survivor. I have been around with the superheroes of this music…and so if they want to look at me in awe, in that sense I guess it’s okay.

“But as far as I’m concerned, I’m a very down-to-earth person. I try to live a very simple life. I try not to bother other people. I try to live lightly on the planet, not consume a lot of goods and buy a lot of ostentatious stuff.

“People might think, `Wow, this Sonny Rollins, he’s really a legendary jazz figure,’ but I’m actually just a very self-effacing guy, really."

If you would like to purchase Sonny Rollins' latest CD "Global Warming" on-line, please click on the SoundStone logo to the right.

[This article originally appeared in the Berkshire Eagle on August 21, 1998. Copyright Seth Rogovoy 1998. All rights reserved.]