5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Sonny Rollins-OxBig News Network

Walter Theodore Rollins: the “saxophone colossus.” Jazz’s Prometheus, its Siddhartha and its heavyweight champ. Or, as Nate Chinen once put it in a New York Times review of one of Rollins’s marathon-like concerts, “the great unflagging sovereign of the tenor saxophone.”

Growing up in 1940s Harlem, Sonny Rollins idolized swing-era heavyweights like Coleman Hawkins and jump-blues saxophonists like Louis Jordan. But when he heard Charlie Parker and the torrid improvisations of Parker’s bebop revolution, which was overtaking Harlem’s clubs, Rollins’s world changed. “He was going against the grain,” Rollins is quoted saying of Parker in “Saxophone Colossus: The Life and Music of Sonny Rollins,” Aidan Levy’s authoritative biography. “Highly intricate, involved, complicated, intellectual.”

For Rollins, bebop’s emphasis on physical tenacity and fast-paced intellect became a personal religion. Many of the tunes he wrote have become jazz standards — including some on the list below, like “St. Thomas,” “Oleo” and “Airegin” — but as soon as he composed them, he invariably set about tearing them apart, recasting them, allowing the substance to push against the limits of its own form until it burst, and then to see how that bursting could be multiplied.

Sonny Rollins’s sound is as uncapturable as it is memorable, so you’re left with nothing to do except to keep on listening. In the same way that, over his seven-decade career and across more than 60 albums, Rollins wanted nothing more than to simply keep playing. Rollins, who will turn 95 this summer, has not performed publicly since 2012, for health reasons. But he remains indefatigable as a listener. Interviews with him are still liable to veer toward his favorite contemporary saxophonists — some of whom weigh in on the list below.

Read on for a ride through Rollins’s catalog, guided by a team of musicians, scholars and critics. Find playlists embedded below, and don’t forget to leave your own favorites in the comments.

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‘A Weaver of Dreams’ (live)

Melissa Aldana, saxophonist

One performance I keep coming back to is Sonny Rollins playing “A Weaver of Dreams” in this early video. There’s something so honest in his sound — it’s raw but lyrical, and you can feel that he’s already searching, even at a young age. What really speaks to me is his use of space and phrasing. He’s not trying to impress; he’s listening, reacting, letting the melody unfold in real time. That kind of patience and presence is something I strive for in my own playing. He finds depth in simplicity, and that’s so powerful. You hear the roots of what would become his voice: how he stretches time, how he plays with the changes, not just over them. For me, that performance is a reminder that expression doesn’t have to be big or flashy. Sometimes just one note, played with intention, can say everything. That’s what makes Sonny so special.

▶ Listen on YouTube

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‘St. Thomas’ (live)

Joshua Redman, saxophonist

Sonny Rollins, live in 1959 — phew! This trio performance (with Henry Grimes on bass and Pete La Roca on drums) is from a show in Stockholm during his last tour before the self-imposed two-year sabbatical of practicing on the Williamsburg Bridge. It’s Newk at the pinnacle of a certain set of his powers: the intensity, the muscularity, the humor, the rigor, the danger, the daring, the playfulness, the lyricism, the narrative flow, the thematic development, the architectural unity, the freewheeling abandon. The groove is so fierce, the swing so palpable, that you can’t help but feel it in your bones. And yet the melodies are so infectious, the ideas so clear, that you can’t help but sing (or, in the case of La Roca, shout!) along in unbridled joy. It’s a near-perfect, but still completely off-the-cuff, marriage of form and content. Anyone who claims not to “get” jazz might give this one a quick listen. Sonny is speaking to us, telling us a story, taking us on a journey. He’s making it up as he goes, but it makes total logical sense. It’s a trip full of twists and turns, bumps and jolts, surprise and intrigue; but with Rollins & Co. in the driver’s seat, it just feels so darn good. And we are oh-so-lucky to be along for this ride.

▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube

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‘The Freedom Suite’

Aidan Levy, Rollins biographer and scholar

Rollins composed “The Freedom Suite” in 1957, when he had reached the pinnacle of the jazz world, but couldn’t find a landlord who would rent him an apartment in New York. Sonny Stitt helped him find one in a multiethnic enclave on the Lower East Side. Yet the piece that this ordeal in housing discrimination inspired represents the only kind of “suite” where he found true freedom — a musical suite of Ellingtonian proportions. His childhood neighbor, W.E.B. Du Bois, motivated his self-penned liner notes, a 53-word exhortation with pithy parallelisms and rhetorical flourishes a la Frederick Douglass. Its epigrammatic concision belies the piece’s expansive four movements — a near-20-minute motivic journey built on a four-bar melody line resembling a propulsive mountaintop ascent, then descent, orchestrated for the bassist Oscar Pettiford and the drummer Max Roach in the liberating pianoless trio format Rollins made famous. This is the first major civil rights-themed concept album of the hard bop era, blazing a trail for Roach and Abbey Lincoln’s “Freedom Now Suite” in 1960. Still, 67 years after its revolutionary release, Rollins’s prophetic words have renewed resonance: How ironic that African American artists, who have “exemplified the humanities” in their very existence, are being “rewarded with inhumanity.”

▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube

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‘Oleo’ (live)

Jack DeJohnette, drummer

I like Sonny’s free, almost playful approach to improvising, and how he uses his composition “Oleo” as a vehicle here. I also like the combination of Don Cherry on trumpet and Sonny on saxophone, along with the bassist Bob Cranshaw and the drummer Billy Higgins. Everybody makes a unified contribution to this 25-minute version of “Oleo.” I mean, they wind up morphing into playing a blues, because Cranshaw and Billy keep changing tempos, and it just sort of ramps up! There’s continuous movement, and there’s always something interesting going on. Playing with Cherry especially brings out another aspect to Sonny’s playing. He sounds like he’s almost part of Ornette Coleman’s group, actually, in parts of this track. So you have Ornette’s influence there with Don Cherry, and I think that’s what Sonny was looking for. Because he liked Ornette’s playing too.

Sonny has called himself a free improviser, even though he could play in tempos. The way he plays is always interesting. He makes everything count. He’s making these statements continuously, and it’s like a stream of consciousness. That’s one of Sonny’s artistic gifts. And you know, he’s able to own what he plays — whatever he decides to play, he puts his stamp on it.

▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube

Find the playlist on Spotify and Apple Music:

‘Autumn Nocturne’ (live)

Nate Chinen, critic and author

When we hail Sonny Rollins as a master improviser, we often talk about his inarguable genius for motivic development over a form. But there’s another aspect to his mastery — a more volatile, Promethean quality, along the outside margin of control. You can hear him balance both sides of the equation on this version of the standard “Autumn Nocturne,” from a 1978 concert in San Francisco. Rollins opens with a spontaneous prelude, forecasting the song’s melody within the first 20 seconds. What follows is an existential hero’s journey, as Rollins pushes the limits of physical endurance and creative capacity, chasing the speed of thought. As always, he’s wittily allusive — among his partial quotations is the Civil War parlor ballad “Home, Sweet Home,” around 3:35 — and intently focused on the moment at hand. Four minutes in, he hits a high C and staggers down the chromatic scale, then up again, turning a simple exercise into a dramatic act. Then he cues the band and dives into the song, as if finally reaching a far-off destination. The spirit of release has everything to do with how we got there.

▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube

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‘St. Thomas’

Joy Bivins, Schomburg Center director

It may be a popular pick, but I have long been enamored with “St. Thomas.” On the studio version — that iconic first track from “Saxophone Colossus” — he takes us across his own generational history, builds on multiple melodies and carries us across the diaspora through his use of calypso rhythms. I think it’s gorgeous and essential listening for good reason — whimsical, energetic, beautiful and most of all masterful, which are defining words for Sonny Rollins’s career. The Schomburg Center holds the entire Sonny Rollins archive; this piece of music, which is included in our manuscripts collection, can easily become a gateway to the breadth of his incredible work.

▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube

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‘Airegin’

George Coleman, saxophonist

Sonny Rollins’s influence has been his delivery, and his harmonic expertise — you know, just the way he improvises. His improvisational acumen is just perfection. I’ve been wanting to talk to him recently, and what I want to tell him is this: All these years, we as musicians have been listening to “St. Thomas,” and I’ve played it — but I hadn’t really sat down and listened to his solo. The first verse, he played a calypso feel, and after that he soloed over a 4/4 swing — and each one of those choruses was brilliant! I just took it for granted. I never sat down and really listened to what he’d played. It’s magnificent — all over the horn, very inventive.

And he made his mark as a composer, as well as an improviser. “Airegin” was another one of his great contributions to the collective songbook — that’s “Nigeria” spelled backward, and it’s one of his great compositions. People have played it to the extent that it has become a standard, just like “St. Thomas.”

▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube

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‘He’s Younger Than You Are’

Carol Friedman, photographer

This track feels more like a poignant lament and contemplation than a straight-up ballad, and resides on my heavy-rotation list. Part of the soundtrack for the 1966 film “Alfie,” it has an interesting two-chapter provenance. The interludes that we hear in the actual film were composed by Sonny and recorded in London in 1965 with a small group of British musicians. These spare motifs (including the framework for this tune) were used as short scene segues. Three months later, Rollins went into Rudy Van Gelder’s studio to record the official album soundtrack. Akin to Picasso’s underdrawings as foundation for his paintings, Sonny’s original themes were expanded upon by Sonny with arrangements by Oliver Nelson for a stellar 11-piece band. “He’s Younger Than You Are” was transformed into a sublime, noirish tableau with a woodwind section (including Phil Woods) and Roger Kellaway’s delicate piano as perfect starlight/twilight. The convergence of Nelson’s lush orchestration and Sonny’s pure and mournful phrasing is as good as it gets. Pardon my foolish heart for the observation that Rollins’s plaintive voicings and his finale of bold anguish conjure a far more sophisticated movie with a proper denouement — perhaps even the late arrival of the conscience of the ever-shameless Alfie.

▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube

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‘G-Man’ (live)

Willard Jenkins, author and festival director

Experiencing Sonny Rollins live could often be an unparalleled, transcendent experience, unlike anything laid down in the recording studio. Sifting through memories of the Saxophone Colossus’ concerts that I’ve been privileged to attend, then carefully checking my personal stash of Sonny’s recordings, I kept coming back to one performance. As someone who’s had a weekly radio show for five decades now, I had assiduously marked off key tracks for airplay. But I kept coming back to Sonny’s incredible 1986 performance in Saugerties, N.Y., beautifully captured for posterity by the filmmaker Robert Mugge, and the subsequent Milestone album. The film includes Rollins’s miraculous, herculean improvisation on “G-Man.” That monument was followed by Sonny’s tune “Kim,” on which Sonny became so enraptured in an improvisational whirlwind that he somehow misjudged the distance from the stone stage to the surrounding moat, and leaped the nearly six-foot stage in such a state of apparent ecstasy that he suffered a broken heel! Miraculously, flat on his back, he continued improvising!

▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube

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‘Did You See Harold Vick?’

James Brandon Lewis, saxophonist

It’s the fall, September of 1999, the beginning of my junior year of high school. I would switch from alto sax in the band to playing tenor saxophone, a request made by my band director after a number of tenor saxophonists graduated the previous year. I was now a tenor player. As a high schooler I was moved that Sonny Rollins was still recording and speaking to an early-2000s generation and the music sounded as such, with funky grooves, etc. The record that had a profound impact on my life was “This Is What I Do,” released May 2000, the end of my junior year of high school. I was struck by the music, the title, and to a young 16-year-old J.B.L. the CD cover was as slick as the music: Sonny with some cool shades on. I was drawn to “Did You See Harold Vick?,” which is a master class in motivic development. The improvisation never repeats, keeping you on your toes while the melodic line twists and turns. Sonny proclaims with this album title and sound of this track the freedom of individuality. This is a freedom I reach for, one that asks: What is it that I do musically?

▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube

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‘The Moon of Manakoora’

Gary Giddins, critic and author

During his first 30 years on record and in concert, Sonny Rollins altered his tenor saxophone sound from craggy to smooth with a dozen gradations along the way, yet always remained distinct. But around 1978 (“Autumn Nocturne,” for example), he perfected a sound like no other, conversational, munificent, fueled by the cavernous echo of experience — a sound that chortles, croons and pulls you in. “Manakoora” was composed for John Ford’s 1937 film “The Hurricane” by Alfred Newman and the rookie lyricist Frank Loesser. Rollins used it as a kind of epilogue on his penultimate studio recording, the neglected masterpiece “This Is What I Do,” in 2000. He phrases the insistent theme like a Circean island-waltz, beginning his variations with fragments that are spun into an expansive veil, lifted on waves generated by Bob Cranshaw and Jack DeJohnette. His solo is complemented by a cunning, perfectly paired response by Stephen Scott, one of the most accomplished pianists of the ’90s, long since drawn into the groves of academe; Sonny returns for a final aloha. No thrill-ride here, no cadenza, just laid-back perfection.

▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube

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‘Sonnymoon for Two’ (live)

Giovanni Russonello, writer

Rollins liked to play (as the former Times critic Ben Ratliff would describe it) in a spirit of “praeceps”: the Latin word meaning “headlong” or “moving into.” He cultivated this not only in his own playing, with its jumping-the-beat, Antillean inflections, but also by shuffling up his bands constantly, and by springing new material on them often. On a Sunday evening at the Village Vanguard in 1957, performing in what was a still-new format for him, and for the world — just bass, drums and tenor sax — he grew unsatisfied with the musicians he had hired, and midway through the second set called the bassist Wilbur Ware and the drummer Elvin Jones up onstage. They sat down, played the rest of the night, and wound up making the definitive live recording of Rollins’s late-50s trio era: “A Night at the Village Vanguard.” Partway through the performance, he told Jones and Ware that he wanted to try a new tune over blues form. He sang them the melody and counted off, and they got going, cruising through its loping swing feel, crosshatched with sections of three-on-four syncopation. The tune, “Sonnymoon for Two,” became a jazz standard — but the melody he’d called out to them was only half the equation. When people cover “Sonnymoon,” he said, “I always felt that my solo should have been included as part of the melody.”

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