Sonny Rollins and Me

Sonny Rollins died the other day at 95. I grew up listening to his sometimes tender but more often churlish and irascible sound. I liked him, but I struggled to find an album of his that I really liked.

He came to town in the early seventies to play the Hole Coffeehouse in the basement of the U of Minnesota’s Coffman Union. There might have been thirty tables spread out in front of the stage. That’s the thing about jazz: world-class talent, yet very few people actually “dig” the music. As if Placido Domingo were doing a recital at your local Punch Pizza.

It was a memorable show, especially Rollins’ highly rhythmic rendering of a calypso number called “St. Thomas.” He stretched out for close to ten minutes and would have gone farther, I think, if some idiot in the back row hadn’t shouted out “HoHoHo.”

I heard him again, years later, at the State Theater in downtown Minneapolis as part of a “supergroup” tour with McCoy Tyner and Ron Carter. Sure, it was good. But it’s better when the ceiling’s low, you’re twenty feet from the bandstand, and everyone in the group isn’t trying to be a star.

Throughout his career, Rollins struggled to remain creative, choosing to go out on a limb, or muddy the waters, or rough up the texture, time and again, rather than return to the familiar riffs and changes of the post-bop world—the riffs and changes that most jazz aficionados love. In this he differed from his near contemporary Sonny Still, who seemed to come out with a new album every three months. Rollins quit playing for years at a time, famously practicing late at night on the Williamsburg Bridge, near his apartment on the Lower East Side.  

The legend I grew up with was that Rollins was freaked out by the appearance of “free jazz,” and especially by the exploratory sound of John Coltrane, who seemed to be usurping his position as “best tenor sax” in the minds of many listeners. The first album of his that I owned, East Broadway Run Down, contained a twenty-minute track with quite a bit of upper-range squealing—Rollins’s attempt to join in the movement toward “freedom” and noise. I found it embarrassing.

The album’s B-side had a twelve-minute Rollins original, “Blessing in Disguise,” full of repeated angular rhythms, and a ballad, “We Kiss in the Shadows.” Good stuff.

It’s true that Rollins’ star seemed to fade as Coltrane’s great brighter. It’s a classic trope, though the details don’t quite fit. In his recent book, Three Shades of Blue, jazz historian James Kaplan takes a closer look at the critical juncture when trumpeter Miles Davis replaced Rollins with Coltrane in his ever-evolving ensemble.

At the time, Miles had just returned to the States from Paris, and he wanted to form a new band. Coltrane was just finishing up a gig at the Five Spot with Thelonious Monk, and Miles wanted Coltrane back. Kaplan quotes trumpeter Wallace Roney:

One night [Miles] comes to Trane and says, 'Trane, come on back in the band, man.' Trane said, 'No, Miles—I like it here. I’m havin’ fun.' Miles said, 'You don’t want to play this shit—we playing some different shitl' Coltrane said, 'No, Miles, I’m enjoying this.'

Miles said, 'Come on. Come on back home.' He said, 'Philly’s back. Red’s back. And we got a little boy, Cannonball.' He said, “Just come on and play some with us.' 

In Roney's version, Miles hires Sonny Rollins on tenor and books a gig at Cafe Bohemia. Then one night Coltrane shows up, carrying his horn. Cutting a solo short, Miles goes off the bandstand to talk to him. Sonny takes the next solo, and then, (as Miles later told the story to Roney) “Trane got up there and played so much shit, took the championship belt away from Sonny. Made Sonny go to the bridge!”

It's a fine tale, the kind of insider scuttlebutt that those who love the music relish, Kaplan among them. But he prudently adds:

If the account is taken literally, it has a couple of chronological issues. For one thing, Sonny Rollins had left Miles’s band in September, while the Monk-Coltrane stand at the Five Spot was still in full bloom. For an­other, Rollins’s famous sabbatical from jazz, during which he practiced every day on the walkway of the Williamsburg Bridge, didn’t happen until the summer of 1959, and by his own account, a cutting contest with Coltrane had nothing to do with it. And Red Garland didn’t rejoin Miles until late December, at which point Rollins was long gone. 

So much for the details. The fact remains that Coltrane’s play­ing had developed exponentially during his time with Monk: “Working with Monk brought me close to a musical architect of the highest order," lie told Down Beat editor Don DeMicheal in August 1960. “I felt I learned from him in every way—through the senses, theoretically, technically....”

Rollins also played with Monk. Did his music develop? I don’t know. I don’t think that playing with the Rolling Stones helped him much. I could be wrong.

When I feel a yen to listen to Rollins, I’m likely to return to his albums from the 1950s: Tenor Madness, Sonny Rollins Plus 4, The Sound of Sonny, and Sonny Side Up, a great Dizzy Gillespie album featuring Rollins and Sonny Stitt as sidemen.

Are these his best albums? I couldn’t say. They just happen to be the ones I have.

One of my favorites among his tracks is a rendition of “My Reverie,” a boppish version of a big band number based on a famous tune by Claude Debussy. I find the restraint with which Rollins nurses the development moving, and appropriate to this solemn occasion.

You can listen to it here.