Sonny ROLLINS

By Josef Woodard

Jazz politics and stylistic waves ebb and flow, but Sonny Rollins, thankfully, prevails and stands above it all. At 72, Rollins may have slowed down his concertizing schedule recently. But still, once the tall, stoic figure starts into one of his trademark epic solos, swaying to the unique spirit that has filled him for decades, we get a scent of sublime musicality in the present. Few living musicians embody the affirmative sense of being alive in the moment. Yes, plenty of important history is embodied in Rollins, through his associations with late greats - Miles Davis, Bud Powell, Thelonious Monk, and John Coltrane among them - and his path through bebop, hard bop and beyond, but his greatest skill is to seize that moment.
And he’s humble in his prowess, no doubt a key to his wisdom. In 2000, Rollins released his most recent album, in his long-standing contract with Milestone Records, This is What I Do, on which he proceeds to live up to the title’s concept of profound simplicity. On the album, Rollins stretches out in a limited way, covering a variety of tunes, including his hearty choruses on the tender, rarely-played ballad “The Moon of Monakoora.”
Live, of course, it’s a different story, especially when Rollins embarks on one of his signature explorations. Last spring, Rollins showed up for a concert at the University in Santa Barbara, California, after having not played in that town for decades. As expected, a standing-room-only crowd hung on his every note, but it wasn’t until late in the show that he broke loose from slightly restrained, shorter form solos. In one long adventurous solo, he seemed to tell the story of jazz, through chiseled bop phrases, sheets of sound, in terms melodic, volcanic and vulnerable, sometimes all at once. It was a Rollins moment, neither mainstream or avant garde, but in a lofty place where words and categories fail.
Rollins spoke from his rustic home in the Hudson Valley, north of Manhattan. With his wife and manager Lucille, Rollins has long lived both here, dropping down into New York City when necessary, but escaping back to the more peaceful environs he calls home. So it goes, too, with his playing, where urban intensity meets earthy, spiritual poise.


Jazz Hot : By now, you know about the rigors of traveling. Once you hit the stage, are you transported to another mind state?
Sonny Rollins : That’s generally what happens when I play. I go into a different world, and that happens when I’m practicing. Anytime I’m really into my music, I’m in a different area. That’s what goes on when I’m performing. Playing is still an exhilarating and a rewarding experience for me.

People talk about your career being unique in that you have actually pulled back and taken breathers, as opposed to just being locked into the career path. There was the famous sabbatical you took in the late ‘50s, when you stopped to practice under the Williamsburg Bridge and re-emerged with the innovative album with Jim Hall, The Bridge. Was that part of a process of refreshing your creative energy?
I did withdraw on several occasions during my career. I guess that was really because I’m really interested in the music and my own relationship to the music, and my relationship to myself as a citizen of the world, and my relationship to myself as a human being, personally trying to be a better human being. All of that was really why I felt it was more important to make sure that those criteria were met, rather than the somewhat superficiality of the “career.”
That’s always been the way I’ve viewed life, so of course, when I did some of those things, they were very unusual for people - although privately, a lot of people told me they admired the fact that I was able to walk away from the business whenever I felt I had something more important.
So I did take several hiatuses, some for practicing and studying, others for other reasons, to get away from the scene for awhile.

The title This is What I Do has a kind of simple, declarative quality to it. What was the story behind it? Just a statement of “this is it, this is what I do…?”
Well, it came out of the engineer, a fellow named Richard Corsello. During the mixing of the album, we were joking around and kibitz, to get a little relief. Richard came up with that. We were talking about something else. We started thinking about that title, and everybody thought this would be a great title - this is what I do. But it actually started out as sort of joke, about something unrelated to music.
Then as we kept making jokes about it, we said `that would be a great title for the album.’ This came up that way.

You could look at it as a more profound, even a more zen idea.
Yeah, I think it fits all of those things. That’s why it turned out to be apt, because it can be applied a lot of different ways. It fits a lot of different approaches. It’s perfectly true: this is what I do, take it or leave it.

On the album, you do a version of “The Moon of Monakoora,” and you do have a tendency of stretching out on sweetly melodic tunes. “Darn That Dreams,” from your album Old Flames, is another example. Do you have a particular fondness for classic ballads?
Yeah. I heard a lot of these songs when I was coming up. Every week, we’d go to the movies and I heard a lot of these songs in the movies and around the house and so on. I really loved that period. There’s a nostalgic pull with a lot of those old Bing Crosby ballads and other things. They’re from that period. I really have committed a lot of those to my repertoire. I always like them.
When this album was released, there was a critic in London who liked the album, but he said that a lot of hardcore jazz fans might quibble with the fact that there’s not enough hardcore…

Blowing?
Blowing, right, that sort of straight ahead type of jazz blowing. Despite that, he liked it. Actually, my response to that would be that I feel that jazz is bigger than formula. Whereas some people might say `this is jazz. You have to play 4/4 rhythms, straight ahead, fast and medium fast, and the tunes have to be this or that. I dispute all of that, because I feel that jazz can be anything. You can make any song jazz. You can turn any song or any melody into jazz, any type of melody. You can make it jazz, rather than having to have jazz as a style in itself which can only be applied to blues and whatever else.
When you say that I play those songs, I do play a lot of those songs because I feel that I’m a jazz player and I feel that I love them and can play them. They’re still jazz, but they’re also those songs. I don’t think jazz has to be so rigid. We have to enlarge our vision of jazz, and what’s valid in jazz.

That question of purity comes up, and whether that should be the measure of what it is.
Sure. Nobody can say that I’m not a jazz player.

No, that’s pretty much a given by now.
It’s a given. So the fact that I can play all of this material and make a valid statement should prove the point.

Was the same operative attitude when you did “I’m an Old Cowhand?”
Exactly. Sure. I enjoy playing material which is not normally confined to the jazz ghetto, if you will. I want to expand the repertoire and the meaning of jazz. Jazz is a free expression and creativity, spontaneous, and it can be applied to any type of music—original music or music which comes from other genres, so to speak.

And you’re coming from a place of diversity. You have a pretty wide range of musical interests, which gives you a certain perspective. Maybe more diehard jazz musicians get locked into a certain mentality, wouldn’t you say?
They do, but they don’t have to. I’m sure every jazz player has heard pop tunes on the radio. If you live in this country, there’s no way you can avoid hearing the pop tunes or even the rap tunes, whatever we’re inundated with every day. We just have to look at them in a more democratic way, and use them as vehicles to play jazz on. Why not?

In your case, there’s the added question of the meaning of style. Your solos veer through do many different modes, from “avant garde” to bebop or whatever idioms one might ascribe to your playing. Is that part of what you’re talking about?
Well, in my particular case, I don’t want to imply that other players should emulate me or anything of that sort. I’m just saying that it seems to be a truism that has been neglected.
In my particular case, I was fortunate enough to have come up in the so-called “bebop era.” But I loved music before, when I was a small boy listening to everyone from Fats Waller to gospel music and calypso music in Harlem. I just happened to hear a lot of music, and I liked music. However, I did come up in the bebop period, and I was able to prove that I was a legitimate bebop player. Therefore, I was able to branch out and play other things.
I was fortunate, because I came up during the bebop period. In fact, my wife gave me something where someone wrote that, more than anyone, I was able to go into these other styles that came along - avant garde, like you mentioned, and so forth. Yeah, I’ve done that, because to me, it’s just about trying to get to the ultimate expression of Sonny Rollins. I want to be able to deal with all of these forms, to get close to my own ultimate expression.
I don’t know if this would apply to other people or not. It applies to me, and I was able to play bebop and deal with some of these other areas in music. I don’t know if other people should follow me or whether they can do it, but I think musicians should have an appreciation of all of these other forms of music and listen to them.
If you’re a jazz player, jazz is going to be predominant, because jazz is the predominant musical form. There’s no doubt about it. Jazz is the top of the heap, because it combines everything. You can do everything in jazz, and still you’ve got a music of spontaneity, creativity, all of this stuff. Jazz is the top of the heap, but within that, you should have an appreciation for all of the other forms of music. A lot of people do. I don’t think I’m unique in that, really.

As the 20th century ended, there was a lot of talk about what had occurred in music during that time. It was obvious to everyone, even to those who may not have liked jazz, that this was the great musical invention of the century.
I don’t think there’s any doubt about it. I don’t think there’s any doubt about it.

Obviously, a lot happened in the classical world, between Stravinsky and Schoenberg and others, but nothing so powerful that bridged different cultural worlds, like jazz.
I agree with you, absolutely. It’s just a fantastic music.

And once you get it in your head, forget it: It’s a lifelong obsession.
Yeah. It takes some educating, which his great, because it’s not just a faddish music. It’s really a serious music. You can’t just jump into it. You have to learn something about it. On the other hand, it is easy to get hooked on it, too. You don’t have to know a lot of music to appreciate it. It is a serious intellectual music, as well as being accessible. But it is intellectual and some people really have to get with it.
There’s a guy in a town near where I live with a health food store. There are two health food stores here, one north of town and one south of the town. The one north of the town is a little more of a blue collar town. The one in the south is more of a bedroom community type of town.
Anyway, I was in blue collar sort of town and I used to go in there. I’d hear all these great jazz records of all kinds. I heard Coleman Hawkins playing ‘Body and Soul,” I heard some beautiful piano trios. It was all top-notch music. I asked the guy working there about it, and he said it was the owner of the store’s CD collection. I finally met this guy and found out he was a big jazz fan. He learned about jazz when he was in school and how this guy educated him. He said that once he got it, he’s been a big fan.
It was nice to know he had to be educated. It’s not just that you get it or you don’t get it. It’s just that this guy turned him onto it. He said that once he got it, he realized what it was.

Where would you say your own musical education began?
I heard a lot of music around my house when I was growing up. I heard different musics, jazz from Fats Waller and people like that. I would say that was where I began getting attracted to jazz. I heard Louis Jordan’s group when I was small, and I liked him a lot. I got addicted to the saxophone through him. That was when I was 7 or 8 years old.
As for my early jazz education - I just heard it a lot. There was so much music at home at that time. I sort of imbibed.

By osmosis?
Yeah, it really was. I was lucky to grow up in that setting.

When did you actually started studying music formally?
There was a school called the New York School of Music, which, at that time, had various branches all over the city and particularly in Harlem. I think they charged 15 cents a lesson. They taught all different instruments. It was basically for beginning and intermediate students. At any rate, I began going there with my saxophone, taking saxophone lessons there. As I say, I was pretty young.
I come from a musical family. My brother plays violin and my older sister plays piano. They were both very formally trained. It didn’t take for me. I didn’t want to take the piano lessons and so forth. So, being the youngest one and sort of my mother’s favorite, she didn’t insist on it. I sort of got a by on that.
I used to go to my uncle’s house and he used to play these country blues guys, like Arthur Crudup and Lonnie Johnson, and also Louis Jordan’s band - Louis Jordan and the Tympani Five. I was attracted to all of that stuff, and particularly the Louis Jordan stuff, with the saxophone and the trumpet and the small band. Around that time, I was beginning to get a consciousness of the saxophone. I had a couple of cousins and an uncle who played the saxophone.
All of these things seem to coalesce together, and it dawned on me that this was really what I wanted to do - play saxophone. Then, Louis Jordan, by the way, was also appearing across the street from my elementary school. Coming home from school, I used to see 8x10 glossies of him. All of these things came together. I said `yeah, this is it. I want to play saxophone.’
After going to the New York School of Music, I had some personal teachers in New York, a couple of guys I went to. I went to several people in New York, private teachers. I really didn’t do too much music in high school. I was playing in high school, but I wasn’t really in the high school band. It wasn’t much of a band. I just went to a regular, general type of high school. So I didn’t really do much music in school, but of course, while in high school, I was beginning to play in my own little groups and I began rehearsing with Thelonious in the latter end of my high school days.
Considering my education, in many ways, I would say that I’m self-taught, although I’ve had teachers, of course. As I said, I began at this New York School of Music, which taught all instruments for 15 cents a lesson - accordion, trumpet, everything, they were all listed there.

Was there any jazz training involved in that?
No, it was strictly rudiments. As far as jazz went, the lessons I got in jazz was strictly the things that I heard from people that I liked. We used to listen to records at that time, and copy things off them. I did study with this fellow Walter Thomas, who used to play with Cab Caloway, but the time I was with him, he wasn’t really teaching me jazz. He was teaching me saxophone technique. I never really had a jazz lesson from somebody, in that sense. It’s in that sense that I would say that I was self-taught. I had a valuable opportunities to be around the older guys, like Fats Navarro and Bud Powell. I was able to pick up a lot from them.

That’s the general picture I get in talking to musicians from earlier periods in jazz, that the experiential part of education was key to the development of the music, personally and as a collective scene. It wasn’t coming out of classrooms. Now, young musicians can pick and choose which schools to go to, which is a very different scenario.
Right. As I got older, I always lamented a couple of things. I lamented that I didn’t start formally taking music when my parents wanted me to, because I think that would have given me a more formal education, and then I lamented the fact that I never really went to a school, go to college, really. Perhaps, since I was musically-inclined, I would maybe study music in college, but I never had those opportunities, and it looked to me to be nice things to do.
In a way, rather than feeling that these kids coming up today don’t have what I had, I think they have a real opportunity to get away and really study in one place. I look at college, in general, as a good thing. I might have some reservations about how well jazz is being taught, because that’s up to the individual teacher.

Charlie Haden was telling me about when he started the jazz program at Cal Arts, and he wanted to emphasize both the technical aspects, which is obviously important, but also the spiritual aspects of improvisation. You might not normally think about that end of music in an academic situation.
No, it’s something very difficult to get. Having a teacher who thinks like that would be great, someone who could be that aware of the real merits of jazz would be a wonderful thing.

Do you feel that learning is a lifelong process?
Because I didn’t really go to a formal school - I didn’t go to Julliard or anything like that - learning has become, for me, a lifelong project. I’m sort of a perennial student. It has worked well for me. It has kept my interests up. I don’t feel `gee, I’ve learned it all,’ to where you get bored or stuck in a particular way of playing. That’s something that I avoid because I’m constantly trying to learn more. And in trying to learn more, you have to change some of your approaches, so you never get stuck, for any long period of time, anyway.

That’s something that jazz seems uniquely adapted to, the idea of growth - maybe moreso than other kinds of music.
I would agree. Because jazz is such an improvisational type of music, you’re able to really continually develop. As long as you have that kind of attitude, the directions you can go in are endless. But you have to have that mind and you don’t feel like `well, this is it’ and that you’ve done it all. There are always things to learn.
Some guys have certain styles which probably lead them to what could be dead ends. I’m thinking about some players who may have had styles which led them to a place - an exalted place, to be sure - but nevertheless, a place where the growth possibilities in terms of stylistic things, are… well, I wouldn’t say impossible, but their development led them to places where there is hardly any room for development.
In a way, this can happen to some great musicians. It’s certainly not for me or anybody else to say that I want to hear them playing something else.

Where it becomes a fixed language?
That certainly is great in itself. It’s like the guy who played guitar, and he used to always play one string and one note. He would always be playing this one note. Guys would come to him and say `gee, man, why do you just play that one note over and over again?’ So he says `well, those other guys are looking for it. I’ve found it.’

With your music, you entertain the troops, so to speak. I can see people going to your concerts who might be big jazz fans, but really getting something out of it. And you’re also pursuing serious interests in the music, as well, but it’s also entertaining. Is that a goal of yours?
Of course, I’m playing serious music. That has to be said. You can’t just jump up on stage and play. You have to know what you’re doing. That being said, I have met people who have actually come up to me and said `you know Sonny, I don’t like jazz, but I like you.’

Is that sort of a mixed compliment?
Right. I didn’t know quite how to take that. But actually, I accepted it, because I’m secure in my own jazz roots, so I don’t have to worry about somebody saying that I’m not jazz. The fact that I’m bringing people to music is great. I have to think about people like Louis Armstrong, to cite maybe the biggest example of an entertainer cum musician.
Now, I don’t sing and all of this stuff, but I’m not ashamed of reaching people. I think it’s important. I’d like people to be somewhat uplifted and entertained, in quotes, as well as getting something intellectual out of the music. It’s one of those things. I’d like to be able to do both. I think, through the third world music that I’ve been playing, that gives me a bridge to be able to get to people who I might not ordinarily get to, and maybe convert some people.
But then again, to me, jazz doesn’t have to be straight ahead playing, with fast changes and this kind of stuff. That is jazz, but jazz doesn’t have to be only that. Jazz is much more than that, in my view.
I’m glad that when people see me, they feel that they’re getting entertained in a way. That can be such a demeaning word, I hate to say it…

The e-word?
I certainly don’t set out to entertain. I don’t want to do that. But in the course of what I’m doing, if they feel entertained or they feel positive vibrations, that is more the way I’d like to see myself, as giving them uplifting, positive vibrations. There’s nothing wrong with that. Well, that’s me. I’m not putting it on. I’m just being myself and going through a performance. I hope it’s ok, but this is what I do (laughs).

You’ve played many calypso-oriented tunes through which the audience is drawn into the seductive quality of the rhythm, but then your solo heads out into the cosmos. It seems as if they’re being delivered a music lesson, maybe even subconsciously, along the way. Does that process describe a balance you hope to achieve?
I hope it is. But again, that’s just my presentation. I’m glad it’s working on some level. It’s not contrived. I’m just getting up there and doing a performance, and doing all the things I enjoy doing, and that I feel that I do best. In the course of that, if it’s something that people can get into, that’s great.