THE BRILLIANCE OF GOOD MANNERS:

"What made me withdraw and go to the bridge was how I felt about my own playing," reflects that saxophonist today, 91-year-old Sonny Rollins. "I knew I was dissatisfied."

He climbed the steep iron steps within two blocks of the apartment he shared with his wife, Lucille, at 400 Grand Street in Manhattan, and was thrilled by the space, light and noisy solitude they led to. Rollins was 28 and already one of the undisputed giants of the subtle and sophisticated modern-jazz advances known as bebop that had taken off in the 40s - even though Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman were close on his heels with radical new approaches to how melody, harmony and rhythm could dance spontaneously together.

Between 1956 and 1958, after a series of brilliant small-band albums including Saxophone Colossus and Way Out West, Rollins was acclaimed by the New Yorker's Whitney Balliett as "possibly the most incisive and influential jazz instrumentalist since Charlie Parker", while the jazz/classical musicologist Gunther Schuller wrote that the thematic fertility and coherence of the young genius's off-the-cuff improvisations "held together as perfect compositions".

In the summer of 1959, though, Rollins disappeared from the radar and stayed off it for the next two years - instead playing the saxophone on the bridge day and night, rain or shine, in solitary sessions of sometimes 15 hours or more. This month is the 60th anniversary of his return to the recording studio, when he entered RCA Victor's Studio B in New York on 30 January 1962 with a classy rhythm section and an even classier frontline partner in Jim Hall - one of the subtlest jazz guitarists of the era. That January session, and another a fortnight later, produced Rollins' eagerly awaited comeback album, The Bridge.

Down the phone from his home in upstate New York, Rollins sounds as sprightly as he has in the handful of conversations we have had down the years - always curious, sharp of memory and generous about everyone who makes music. He hasn't played the saxophone since 2014, due to a respiratory condition. But memories of the long days and changing seasons on the bridge are vivid, as are the reasons that propelled him there, when logic suggested staying in the public eye.

"I was getting a lot of publicity for my work at that time, but I wasn't satisfying my own requirements for what I wanted to do musically," he says. One of his neighbours at the time was an expectant mother, so "there was an immediate reason, too: it was difficult to practise a loud horn like the tenor saxophone in my apartment without disturbing somebody".

Rollins had withdrawn from jazz before, in the early 50s, when heroin addiction had taken him into a stretch of hard-labour rehab at the Lexington Narcotics Farm in Kentucky. In 1956, the year after he got clean, the exultant Saxophone Colossus session emerged. So Rollins understood the liberating potential of focused, relentless hard work, away from gigging and hanging out. But he also knew how fresh and different the new music of Coltrane, Coleman and Davis was sounding by 1959 (the year in which those three made the groundbreaking albums Giant Steps, The Shape of Jazz to Come and Kind of Blue) and felt he needed to provide answers of his own.

Did he worry about the disappointment his withdrawal might bring to his fans? "Am I playing music for other people, you mean?" Rollins inquires. "Yes I am, in a way. But I'm playing for myself. I have to sound good. I don't want to make my public feel I'm great if I don't feel like that. Also, I've always loved practising - as much as I did performing. Wherever I was, on tour or whatever, I always wanted to find some place to practise, because that's in my DNA, to keep improving myself."

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