Let Everything Change: On Sonny Rollins (Nate Wooley, July 31, 2026, n+1)
Rollins’s playing changed the shape of jazz saxophone. In high schools and colleges all over the country, neophytes are taught his technique of taking a small melodic cell and attacking it from every angle, until its entire musical energy has been expended. Young students learn by imitating his thick sound and teasing rhythms. They try to mimic his bravura, taking multiple long solos in search of whatever made his imagination so fecund.
We inherit much more from Rollins, however, than saxophone technique and broad stylistic memes. His example is not merely as a virtuoso, but as an artist, complete and self-realized. Like other masters of the form who passed before him, Rollins forged new paths without fear or apology. In his heyday, he was one among many, but jazz has changed. Like most art forms, jazz has solidified, and perhaps stalled, with age. It’s now a music of reverent reproduction, which praises young players not for audacity but for their skill in repeating history.
Rollins was the last feral master of an art that has become at least partly domesticated.