jazz

September 30, 2005
Sonny Rollins: A Free Spirit Steeped in Legends
By BEN RATLIFF

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. Mr. Rollins had chosen a short list of pieces for our session, the point being to listen through his sensibilities. He was careful to contextualize his responses, but essentially remained open to exploring any idea. And his responses were fairly fresh: he said, regretfully, that for 20 years he had not really listened much to music, to protect himself from too much information. “It’s not healthy,” he admitted. “I would like to be able to listen to CD’s. I enjoy it, you know.” What we did not discuss much was Mr. Rollins’s new album, “Without a Song,” released a month ago by Milestone/Fantasy. It is a recording of a Boston concert four days after the Sept. 11 attacks, and the first in a possible series of live Sonny Rollins releases. Carl Smith, a 66-year-old retired lawyer who also collects jazz recordings, has located (and in a few cases, including the Boston concert, surreptitiously recorded) more than 350 Rollins performances, going back to a tape of a three-minute solo on alto saxophone from 1948.

Were these performances to be made available, they would be taken very seriously in the jazz world, especially because Mr. Rollins’s studio records of the last 30 years – some would argue 40 – scarcely indicate the extent of his talent. Mr. Rollins is a powerful, grand-scale improviser who often needs half an hour or more to say what he wants on the horn and achieve his momentum. But he is also a paragon of structure as he improvises. Almost every modern jazz musician is fascinated by Sonny Rollins.

Yet he says he has an aversion to listening to himself play. He had to force himself to listen closely to the tape of the Boston concert, a process that he described as “like Abu Ghraib.” “It’s possible for me to hear something I did and say, ‘Yeah, I like that,’ ” Mr. Rollins admitted. “Although it would probably never be a whole thing. It might be a portion, a section of something, or a solo.”

Mr. Rollins was born in New York City in 1930, of parents who had immigrated from the Virgin Islands. He grew up in Harlem – first in the lowlands around 135th Street and Lenox Avenue, and then, from age 9, in the Sugar Hill neighborhood, a locus at the time for jazz musicians. He attended Benjamin Franklin High School in what was then an Italian section of East Harlem, and lived through an early New York experiment in bussing black students to white neighborhoods; he remembers people throwing objects at the bus windows. But it was such a high-profile case of school integration that Frank Sinatra and Nat King Cole gave concerts to the students in the school auditorium to promote race relations.

Thinking of his childhood, Mr. Rollins wanted to hear Fats Waller’s 1934 recording of “I’m Going to Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter.” From the beginning of the song he looked as if he had just stepped into a warm bath. A clarinetist began playing counterpoint improvisations against Waller’s piano and voice. “Who’s the clarinet player?” Mr. Rollins asked, coming out of his reverie.

It was Rudy Powell. “Isn’t that something?” he said. “I went to school with Rudy Powell’s son.” Mr. Rollins and Rudy Powell didn’t know each other, although they stood about three feet apart in Art Kane’s famous “Great Day in Harlem” photograph from 1958.

“I remember hearing that song around the house, and on the radio and everything,” Mr. Rollins said. “Wow, I haven’t heard that record in so many years. It’s one of my earliest memories of jazz. I believe in things like reincarnation, and it struck a chord someplace in my back lives or something.”

It’s very restful, I said, as we listened to the song again. It’s not the other Fats Waller, the boisterous one.

“Yeah,” Mr. Rollins agreed. “He could be raucous, but this is very, very much – mmm.” (Waller was singing: “I’m gonna write words oh so sweet/ they’re gonna knock me off my feet/ a lot of kisses on the bottom/ I’ll be glad I got ’em.”)

“Yeah,” Mr. Rollins said, still impressed by Powell. “But the thing I want to stress is that this is evocative of the whole Harlem scene. Where I was born, when I was born. And his playing, that stride piano style, which of course comes from other people. It’s overwhelming to me, really. When I hear him, to me it just says the whole thing. It encapsulates jazz, the spirit of jazz, what jazz is about. In a very overall way.”

Along Came Hawkins

We moved on to Coleman Hawkins. If Waller represents Mr. Rollins’s childhood, 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.

When did he get around to Coleman Hawkins? “Well, ‘Body and Soul’ was ubiquitous in Harlem, on jukeboxes. They could have turned me on to him. But since I moved up on the hill, where so many of these guys lived, I even had a chance to see him driving around. He had an impressive Cadillac. He dressed well. And, you know, there were certain other people that acted more on the entertainment side. There was even a time in my life when I had a brief feeling about Louis Armstrong, that he was too minstrel-y and too smiley. That didn’t last long. I was a young person at the time. But what impressed me about Coleman was that he carried himself with great dignity.”

A lot of Mr. Rollins’s heroes lived in his neighborhood; the tricky part was getting their ear. “There was a great photographer named James J. Kriegsman, who used to make these pictures of musicians, and he made a beautiful picture of Coleman. So I had my 8-by-10, and I knew where he lived, up on 153rd street, and one day I knew when he was coming home. He signed my autograph. I was 13 or 14.”

“I was a real pest, as a young guy,” he recalled. “It’s sort of embarrassing to think about it now.”

Parker Cuts Loose

Inevitably, Charlie Parker was on Mr. Rollins’s list. But the piece, “Another Hair Do,” from 1947, was an unusual choice. It is a 12-bar blues. At the beginning, Parker and a very young Miles Davis play a repeated line for the first four bars. But after that Parker cuts loose and improvises at double-speed for the next five, before the written part resumes and the theme-section ends.

“Another Hair Do” is nothing canonical in jazz history, but for Mr. Rollins it was. “The thing about this song was that the form of it was revolutionary even for bop,” he said.

He backtracked a little. “First of all, this guy’s rhythmic thing was definitely on another planet. You don’t find people doing that, the way he was doubling up there. There was a lot of free improvisation in the melody there.” (By melody, Mr. Rollins meant the opening 12-bar theme section.)

When Parker comes back to play the theme again, I said, he’s not going to play that fast bit the same way. “No,” Mr. Rollins said. “It’s an open space. See, Miles is trying to do a little bit of it, too” – improvising in double-time over the steady pulse – “but he can’t quite do it yet. But, you know, Miles was a genius. He was playing with Charlie Parker and not able to do some of the technical stuff, but yet making it sound like he’s in the same ballpark.” He whistled, and laughed, then went back to Parker’s achievement.

“It’s not just the computer saying four notes against two notes. It’s what Charlie Parker’s doing within that thing. It’s music that can’t be written down. You have to feel that to make it come out. So what Charlie Parker accomplished was, he made an open-ended song which was not open-ended. It wasn’t like playing anything you want. But within that there was so much freedom to play what you wanted to play. And still he made it to sound like a regular blues song.”

Mr. Rollins himself wrote some open-ended pieces, like “The Bridge.”

“Well, I probably got it from my idol there,” he responded. “People playing jazz have to try to understand where he was coming from, what that was, and emulate it and absorb it. This is what jazz is: jazz is freedom. I don’t think you always have to play in time. But there’s two different ways of playing. There’s a way of playing where you can play with no time. Or, you can have a fixed time and play against it. That’s what I feel is heaven – being able to be that free, spiritual, musical. I would say that’s an ideal which is underappreciated.”

Here he seemed to sense that he was getting into rough waters. “I mean playing free without any kind of time strictures – there’s nothing wrong with that either. I’m not saying that’s inferior. But I guess I’m getting older now, so I’m getting to be a person that’s steeping myself in the tradition of Fats Waller and all of these people we’re listening to today, who are playing time music. I’m probably going to be dissing myself to the new guys coming up somewhere, but a lot of our audiences still relate to time. I’m still in the era of time being an important component of jazz. I’m still there, O.K.? So kill me.”

The Storyteller

Finally, we got to Lester Young. “Afternoon of a Basie-ite” was recorded in 1943 – five days after Hawkins’s “Man I Love” session – with a quartet including Johnny Guarnieri on piano, Slam Stewart on bass and Sid Catlett on drums. It is almost lotus-eater music, light and gorgeous, geared toward dancing. “Boy, I’m telling you,” said Mr. Rollins, smiling. “That’s the Savoy ballroom there.”

“It sounds very free and easy,” Mr. Rollins said. “But we know it’s not, because what he’s saying is deep as the ocean. There was a beginning and an end. He was storytelling all the way through. So when I first heard that, I mean, this cat was talking.”

When you talk about improvised storytelling, I asked him, what are you really talking about?

“Well, I guess it’s making sense,” he replied. “It’s like talking gibberish and making sense. That’s on the very basic level. Then beyond that, of course, it’s a beautiful story. It’s uplifting. It’s emotional.”

He wanted to illustrate it further with an observation a writer once made about his own playing, but then he stopped himself. “I don’t want this to sound self-aggrandizing,” he said. “In my later years I’ve become very self-effacing. I have decided that I know what greatness is, and I don’t want to put myself in that category.”

Understood. “Anyway,” he continued, “somebody wrote that what I was doing in a certain song was asking a question and then answering the question. I think he was talking about harmonic resolutions. So that would be sort of what I think telling a story might be: resolving a thought.”

I asked if there were any of his own recorded performances he felt comfortable with, that didn’t pain him with thoughts of how it should have been better. “It’s hard to say, because I haven’t listened to any of my stuff in a long time,” he said. “Unless it’s on the radio, and I can’t leave the room. But I seem to like ‘Sonnymoon for Two,’ with Elvin Jones and Wilbur Ware.” (It can be found on Mr. Rollins’s 1957 album “A Night at the Village Vanguard.”)

I asked if the increasing self-effacement had any musical implications. Does it come out in his work?

Mr. Rollins looked embarrassed and tickled by the idea; he started smiling and looking at the corners of the room, as if wondering whether there was an escape hatch. “Wow. Well, I hope that it’s going to be expressed in my work. But I don’t know how. These things come out, you know.” His hands flew up to his face, and he twisted the white strands of beard around his mouth, grinning.