"A LOT OF STUFF IN THERE, MAN" (via Glenn Dryfoos):

Sonny Rollins: A Free Spirit Steeped in Legends (BEN RATLIFF, 9/30/05, NY Times)

HIS face and neatly trimmed white beard shaded by a Filson hunting cap, Sonny Rollins arrived for our appointment straight from a visit to the dentist. The dentist is more or less the only reason for Mr. Rollins to make the two-and-a-half-hour trip to New York City now unless he's giving an infrequent concert.

Now 75, the tenor saxophonist whom many call the greatest living improviser in jazz lives on a Columbia County farm in Germantown, N.Y., that he bought in 1972 with his wife, Lucille. Until recently they also kept an apartment in Lower Manhattan; after the World Trade Center, six blocks away, was attacked, they had to leave their home temporarily and then decided to let go of their pied-à-terre. His wife, who was also his manager and record producer, died last November. This is a period of transition for him.

Mr. Rollins had agreed to my request that he choose some music for us to listen to together and discuss. In the elevator at The New York Times, I asked him how his big concert had gone at the Montreal Jazz Festival over the summer. "Well, I don't know," he answered in his froggy voice. "I look at all that from the inside, so you'd probably have to ask someone else."

But on the subject of music other than his own, the basis of our meeting, he is more forthcoming. [...]

If Waller represents Mr. Rollins's childhood, [Coleman] Hawkins represents his maturation. (An infatuation with Louis Jordan came in between.) When Mr. Rollins became really interested in the saxophone, as a teenager in the mid-1940's, Hawkins was especially hot. In late 1943 the yearlong ban imposed by the American Federation of Musicians, preventing commercial recordings, had just been lifted, and Hawkins, nearly 40 and very competitive, was making up for lost time, collaborating with the younger beboppers. (In 1963 Rollins would make a record with his idol, performing with a kind of brave, modern idiosyncrasy.)

"The Man I Love," from December 1943, is one of the greatest performances in jazz, though overshadowed by Hawkins's much more famous recording of "Body and Soul." It was released on a 12-inch 78 r.p.m. record - a detail Mr. Rollins remembered - because Hawkins had too much to say and started a second chorus. It ended at 5:05, too long for the normal 10-inch format.

We listened to Hawkins's two voluminous choruses, ambitious from the very opening phrase: an E natural chord jostling against an E flat.

"You know, he's doing a lot of stuff in there, man," Mr. Rollins said. "Very far-reaching, too. Coleman was a guy that played chord changes in an up-and-down manner. He sort of played every change, let me put it that way. He had a phrase for every change that went by. So in that solo he was not only playing the changes, he was also playing the passing chords, which is another thing he was ahead of his time on. And still, he was getting the jazz intensity moving, so he was building and building and building."

"It's a work of art," he concluded.