Culture

THE LAST GIANT:

Sonny Rollins, Giant of the Jazz Saxophone, Is Dead at 95: Even by the standards of a music that prizes individuality, he stood out, as both a musician and a personality. (Peter Keepnews, May 25, 2026, NY Times)

In the late 1940s, when most young jazz saxophonists favored a light tone with minimal vibrato, he developed a fat, full-bodied sound that was a throwback to the older style of Coleman Hawkins, the first great tenor saxophonist in jazz. In the late 1950s, when his career as a bandleader was just getting off the ground, Mr. Rollins abruptly began a hiatus that lasted more than two years — mostly, he explained later, because he was not satisfied with the quality of his playing.

Mr. Rollins came of age when a new kind of jazz known as bebop was in ascendance, and from the start his playing was suffused with bebop’s harmonic sophistication and rhythmic daring. To classify him as a bebopper, however, would be an oversimplification.

Over the years he flirted with the avant-garde, jazz-rock fusion and other styles. But with his ferocious energy, his penchant for playing the unexpected note at the unexpected moment, and his unusual sound — sometimes harsh and mocking, sometimes lush and romantic — he was ultimately unclassifiable.

“The music I play is too big to be put into any one style,” he told an interviewer in 2002. “Every time I pick up the horn, I want to hear something fresh.”

That commitment to freshness was the key to Mr. Rollins’s approach, and to his appeal. The jazz critic Francis Davis wrote in 2000 that Mr. Rollins “is the greatest living jazz improviser, and if we redefine virtuosity to include improvisational cunning as well as instrumental finesse (as we probably should when discussing this music), he may be the greatest virtuoso ever produced by jazz.”

Mr. Rollins was rarely satisfied with his own playing; he often came away from a performance or a recording session proclaiming that he was sure he could have done better. He unquestionably did have his off nights, perhaps more than any other jazz musician of his stature, but some fans saw this as a positive sign: The occasional bad night, they argued, was a small price to pay for his willingness to take chances and his refusal to constantly play the same things the same way.

Sonny Rollins: 12 Essential Albums: The towering saxophonist, who died at 95, was a master of living in the moment. Listen to some of his most compelling work, onstage and in the studio. (Hank Shteamer, May 25, 2026, NY Times)

‘The Bridge’ (1962)
By 1959, Rollins was one of the most celebrated saxophonists in jazz, but he wasn’t meeting his own high standards. So he decided to take more than two years off from performing and recording, famously spending much of that time practicing on the Williamsburg Bridge, near the Lower East Side apartment he shared with his wife, Lucille. The album that commemorated his return made no radical break with the past, instead showcasing a warm, intimate sound built on the plush chording of the guitarist Jim Hall. Offsetting the relaxed mood was the title track, a Rollins original where he sailed over the brisk up-tempo swing of the bassist Bob Cranshaw and the drummer Ben Riley with marvelous agility.

Sonny Rollins – Stockholm – 1963 – (Sonny Rollins – 1930-2026) – Past Daily Tribute Edition

Sonny Rollins: One of jazz’s last living greats dies at 95 : Revered for albums including “The Bridge” and “Saxophone Colossus,” Rollins overcame addiction, prison and self-doubt to become one of jazz’s greatest saxophonists. (Shakeel Sobhan, 5/26/26, AFP)

Ever critical of his work, he once said in an interview, “I don’t consider myself a musician that has learned as much as I want to learn.”

At the height of his fame, he withdrew from performing in 1959 and spent more than two years practicing alone on New York’s Williamsburg Bridge, a period that inspired “The Bridge” and cemented his legacy.

Magic, mastery and magisterial power: 10 of Sonny Rollins’ greatest recordings: After his death aged 95, we look back at a remarkable catalogue of work that stretches from vivacious mid-50s sets to his evocative performance after 9/11 (John Fordham, 26 May 2026, The Guardian)

Sonny Rollins, colossus of jazz saxophone, dies aged 95: One of the last stars of the bebop generation, Rollins was a genius of melodic invention and improvisation, working with Davis, Monk, Coltrane and others (Ben Beaumont-Thomas, 25 May 2026, The Guardian)

‘I was so close to the sky. It was spiritual’: Sonny Rollins on jazz landmark The Bridge at 60 : It’s one of the most romantic stories in music: the jazz star rejecting fame to practise on a New York bridge for two years. Now 91, Rollins recalls those long cold days – and how he has coped after losing the power to play (John Fordham, 21 Jan 2022, The Guardian)

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.”

Every scrap of music Rollins heard from his youth in jazz-steeped Harlem onwards seemed to get stored in the random access memory of his mind, to be inverted and reshuffled on the fly in performance. His neighbourhood friend Thelonious Monk would smuggle him underage into clubs, he would pass the world-famous Cotton Club on his walk to school, and he would internalise it all, plus snatches of his siblings’ classical practice, jukebox hits and more. Reappraising and digging into all that material in his head, away from the pressures of gigging and travel, seems to have been a trigger for Rollins ascending to the bridge.

“I just happened to be out walking and I saw some steps and I thought: let’s see what’s up there,” Rollins says. “And when I got up to the top, I just saw all this fantastic open space. No one was up there. It was busy, sure – the subway trains and cars were going over and the boats going underneath – but there weren’t many people walking on it in those days; it’s much busier now. There were a lot of pillars and abutments back then, where I could find spaces where people couldn’t see me, though they could hear me. The only people who could see me were the few who were walking across the bridge. And not many of them would stop to talk. I guess they mostly thought: who’s that crazy guy?”

Presumably calls of nature and inhospitable weather must have intervened now and then? “Well, I would play for a long time every day, often 14 or 15 hours. Of course, sometimes I’d come down to go to the bathroom, or I’d go to a bar I liked where I might have a cognac, but then I’d go right back up. If it was cold, I’d play with gloves on; that was not a problem.

“It was so wonderful to be so close to the sky up there, any time of year. Maybe this might sound a little bit corny to people, but it was a spiritual feeling to me. Years later, I remember playing an open-air concert, somewhere in Buffalo or Maine, and I looked up at the sky and felt that communion with some kind of spiritual element. It felt great to me – that distance thing, reaching out to something beyond the people.”

INDEX: Sonny Rollins (The Guardian)

AUDIO: The Bridge (remastered) (You Tube)

Sonny Rollins Is at Peace. But He Regrets Trying to One-Up Coltrane. (David Marchese2/27/20, NY Times Magazine)

I’m working toward why I’m here — what it’s all about. At this point in my life I’m — well, I don’t want to say satisfied, but I feel that I’m closer to an understanding. It’s always been my idea that the golden rule is a good thing, but I wasn’t quite able to understand if the golden rule was possible. If somebody is playing music and I’m playing music and we’re in a saxophone battle, I still have to play my best, regardless of the other guy. It has nothing to do with my trying to make him feel bad because playing music is for a higher cause. So I believe living by the golden rule is possible. Not only possible but the reason we’re here.

An Uncanny Moment for Jazz Lovers: Sonny Rollins dies the day before the Miles Davis centenary (Ted Gioia, May 26, 2026, The Honest Broker)

STARKS TRUTHS:

The Ballad of Ollie Jackson: How the Baddest Man in the St. Louis Underworld Failed to Become a Folk Hero (Eric McHenry, North American Review)

Every character Starks was singing about had been a real person, and, remarkably, part of the same small community—the St. Louis vice district of the 1890s, which must rival the Mississippi Delta of the 1930s for per-capita contributions to the American musical canon. St. Louis also boasted half a dozen thriving daily newspapers, most of which are now digitized, allowing researchers to study the events that inspired those songs and see how much of a folkloric makeover they got. The real Frankie Baker shot her abusive boyfriend once in her apartment and successfully pleaded self-defense; in the “Frankie and Johnny” song tradition she became the jilted avenger, hunting down her two-timing lover in a barroom and blasting away. Harrison Duncan went to the gallows denying that he’d shot Officer Brady in a saloon melee; in song he became an enraged bartender who’d had enough of the cops busting up his gambling operation (“Brady said, ‘Duncan, you’re under arrest.’ / Duncan shot a hole in Brady’s chest”). “Stack Lee” Shelton was a gambler who shot a man for stealing his hat; in the “Stagolee” songs he became … pretty much exactly that. He didn’t need much revision to be the “badman” people wanted to sing about. This is all consistent with a pattern that folklorists have long observed: Unlike white outlaw ballads, which tend to airbrush their historical subjects, turning murderous thieves like Jesse James and William Quantrill into righteous Robin Hood figures, Black “badman” ballads push their protagonists in the opposite direction—toward antisocial rashness and self-interest, qualities for which the songs make no apologies. (In a racist society, self-interest is its own sort of righteousness.)

Starks’s repertoire also included “Ollie Jackson”—another badman ballad that recounts, with astonishing specificity, the 1901 killing of two brothers over a craps-game dispute in St. Louis. It must have been composed immediately after the shootings by someone impressively familiar with the facts. Four decades later and four hundred miles to the south, Starks sang the correct names of the killer, both victims, two witnesses, and the owner of the saloon, as well as the intersection at which it stood, the day of the week, and the contested amount of money (seventy-five cents).

Dick Carr had the dice,
Bet six bits he’d pass.
Ollie Jackson faded him
And that was poor Dick’s last.
When you lose your money, learn to lose.

It’s hard to overstate how lucky we are that Lomax recorded this performance. Of all the songs that survive from the era of Black ballad-making (roughly 1890–1910), it’s the only one that describes a real event so thoroughly and accurately, meaning that it’s probably the closest thing we have to a Black folk ballad in its original form. And that form challenges some common assumptions about Black songwriting.