Golden Rule: A Conversation with Sonny Rollins (Part One)

Fans have long recognized Sonny Rollins as among the upper echelon of figures in improvised music. Some have even ventured to call him “the greatest living improviser.” Critics and those in the music industry seemingly concur. Not only has Rollins been awarded several honorary doctorates, but he is the recipient of the Grammy Award for Lifetime Achievement, the National Medal of Arts, the Edward MacDowell Medal, and the Kennedy Center Honors. He was named an NEA Jazz Master in 1983, before even Ornette Coleman and Miles Davis. In June of 2012, JazzTimes Magazine selected the top 50 tenor sax albums of all time; Newk’s albums made up a third of the top ten, a feat matched only by John Coltrane. Saxophone Colossus (Prestige, 1956) and The Bridge (Bluebird, 1962) are both in the Grammy Hall of Fame, a designation awarded to recordings of immense lasting qualitative or historical significance. Rollins is even in Art Kane’s classic photograph, “A Great Day in Harlem.” Actually, Rollins and fellow saxophonist Benny Golson are the only musicians from that photo who are still with us.

While many throw the appellation “legendary” around a lot these days, it is hard to find an artist more deserving of that label than Rollins. The shape of modern improvised music would likely look vastly different without his presence. And yet, there is a problem with many interviews with him. Far too often, the interviewer focuses primarily on his work as a sideman or emphasizes a small segment of his recorded output. The impulse to zero in on these areas is understandable given the astonishing list of other musicians he has collaborated with and the power of albums like Saxophone Colossus. But this limited scope also shortchanges the artist’s accomplishments.

This writer’s objective, not an easy task, was to ask Rollins questions he had not previously encountered thousands of times. Whether we reached that goal is ultimately up to the reader to decide. At times, our conversation organically led to some heavily trodden subjects – his time on the Williamsburg Bridge chief among them. But the overall aspiration was to try to bring out new insights and connect different moments in Rollins’ life. Those hoping to explore his experiences with John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, or Miles Davis best look elsewhere. Same with anyone seeking an in-depth discussion of Saxophone Colossus. While these are all areas worthy of exploration, others have already done them well.

If one can take anything from Rollins, it is that he has never stayed in stasis. Even at age 91, he’s continually trying to improve himself. Part of this comes from his spiritual beliefs, an area he has long maintained an interest in but has delved even deeper into over the last decade as respiratory problems have kept him from performing music. His spiritual views unapologetically emerge in our conversation. And while not everyone personally ascribes to his beliefs, certain principles – particularly his underscoring of treating others with respect – can and should be shared by all. 

PostGenre: As a child, you first started on the piano then moved on to alto saxophone. On Easy Living (Milestone, 1977), you play soprano on a few tracks. You also recorded on the Lyricon with some songs on Don’t Ask (Milestone, 1979) and Love at First Sight (Milestone, 1980). But most know you as a Titan of the Tenor. What is it about the tenor sax that most spoke to you compared to other instruments?

Sonny Rollins: It’s because of my love of Coleman Hawkins. Even though my first saxophone was an alto because I was very influenced by Louis Jordan, hearing Coleman Hawkins put me on another level musically, and it just always stuck with me. 

PG: In 1963, you ended up performing with Hawkins at the Newport Jazz Festival and you recorded an album together, Sonny Meets Hawk! (RCA Victor, 1963). What was it like playing with your hero?

SR: Well, it was a little difficult for me. He was my hero, he was very kind to me, and it went well. He was a very upstanding human being. But I was a little anxious to play with him because he was my hero. 

PG: Continuing with the theme of your early influences, Way Out West (Contemporary, 1957) was partly based on your love of Western and Cowboy movies as a child. 

SR: That’s right. 

PG: Many have discussed the album over the years, in part because it was your first recording with a pianoless trio. The music itself has a country and western influence, a type of music that has a long and complicated relationship with race. There were Black country and western musicians, even early on. But the industry often pushed them aside in favor of white musicians.  Way Out West presents a prominent figure in jazz – the quintessentially Black American musical form- approaching an area of music that many in the industry tried to close off. Was there a civil rights angle to the album that some may have overlooked?

SR: Well, everything in America is related to race. There’s nothing you can separate from race in America. When I was growing up, my uncle would take me to all of the cowboy movies. They were white cowboys – Buck Jones, Ken Maynard, Charles Starrett, and all those guys – but I still related to them. When I was six years old, it didn’t matter to me that they were white. 

As far as music goes, I love all kinds of music. Growing up, I used to listen to The Grand Ole Opry when it came on every week. Ultimately, music is music. There was no impediment, in any way, to my liking or writing in a way influenced by country or western music. There’s no big dichotomy to me among different types of music. Of course, I like Black music. I love jazz. Jazz is the greatest kind of music as far as I am concerned. But I love all kinds of music. 

PG: But staying with race for a moment, Freedom Suite (Riverside, 1958) was another pianoless trio album. Some have called it the first instrumental extended protest piece, being connected with the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. A lot has changed over the last six to seven decades. But, as you suggested a little earlier, we are still struggling with race. How do you feel music today can guide us in moving towards racial justice?

SR: I don’t know if music can do much more than it has already done. 

Here we are in 2022, with a long history of Black people living in the United States contributing music, and we still have problems. But Black people like white music. White people like Black music. It is just that Black people don’t get compensated for their music while white people are more likely to be compensated for anything they do. That has always been a problem in the United States. It hasn’t changed and, probably, will never change. 

But, at the same time, music can cut through hatred, jealousy, and all those terrible things. When I would go to the movies as a boy, I would also see Louis Armstrong performing in musicals with  Bing Crosby. The music was always great – it was Louis Armstrong – and most people seeing it just enjoyed the music. It was the music that mattered, not that Louis was Black and Bing was white.

PG: You previously mentioned in some interviews that while performing, you felt like the music was flowing through you, that you were a conduit to some higher power. Do you think that may be connected to music’s power to break down the problems of this world?

SR: Well, I’m a very spiritually linked person. I believe there is a higher power and everything comes from it. We are not just in a sea of nothingness. I also believe that everything we do means something. Also, we are here for one life but will be back again for another life. Reincarnation. I am into that. And ultimately, it is all good and has meaning. You will find that out sooner or later. In this life, you may wish you had done one thing or another.  You may think that if you had lived better, you would have done something else. But so much of what we go through in life is learning. If we don’t get to where we are supposed to in this life, we will in the next one. A lot of that comes from Eastern philosophy, which I follow.

PG: You even studied in an ashram in India for a while. How do you feel that experience shaped your music?

SR: I’m not sure it did. I wasn’t there for music, really. I went there because I was studying yoga and Eastern philosophy. My time in India was not directly related to music. But everything in my life has had music in the background. So, the experience might have given me a noise that I can’t determine. 

PG: Your health has kept you from performing for almost a decade. Since you believe everything has a purpose, do you feel your inability to perform has changed your purpose? Or do you have the same purpose, but it is just expressed in a different form than it was before?

SR: I think I still have the same purpose. Music was not my purpose in life. My purpose in life was to be who I am. If that meant some prominence as a musician, fine. But I am here to be a human being beyond just my profession as a musician. 

I look at myself as a work in progress as a human being. That also goes through all my previous lives that I went through. I am very happy that I was able to play music because I love music. And I was very upset when I had to stop playing. But I was able to put that into context and realize that rather than dwelling on being unable to perform, I should be happy that I spent my life making music. I made a lot of musical friends and made some music that I can be proud of. 

PG: Is there a specific recording you’ve done that you are particularly proud of?

SR: Generally, I’m not a big fan of my recordings, and I don’t listen to them. Listening to my old recordings was not something that was necessarily to my advantage when music was still my career. And so that made me somewhat reluctant to listen to my recordings. I know that when I worked with Miles Davis years ago, he would record the performance, take it home, and listen to it. He found it very beneficial. Maybe I would have too, but I just wasn’t emotionally equipped to go back and listen to my work. 

PG: One of the admirable things about your career was the times you stepped away from public performance because you felt like your music was not living up to the standards you set for yourself. The most well-known of these was from the Summer of 1959 to the Fall of 1961. But you often continued to practice, just not perform for an audience. With the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic hopefully behind us, many musicians are going out and performing publicly for the first time after an extended period of exploring things on their own. As someone who has voluntarily done that, do you feel like the circumstances will create more opportunities for creativity to come out in the music?

SR: Well, I know a few musicians who have lamented the fact that the pandemic has sort of cramped their style, so to speak. But, for one thing, I enjoy – enjoyed past tense – practicing as much as I did performing. The fact I couldn’t be out on the stage performing didn’t mean I was separated from my life’s work. 

Today, I would bet musicians spent a lot of that time just practicing. You can get a lot of stuff done by just practicing. You’re missing out on opportunities you would get from playing with others. But now that we are in a pandemic and can’t meet with everyone, dig into whatever faults you may have in your music and fix them. 

At the same time, I didn’t step away from music because of the pandemic, so maybe I shouldn’t be too hard on people. But I do know that in my life and all of the time I would have been performing on stage, I’d be practicing at home or wherever I could.

Also, there is a connection between the spirit world and the music world. Because of that connection, I often enjoyed playing outside. Sometimes when I was playing, I would look up at the sky and it would be an impetus for me to play things I wouldn’t ordinarily play. It would give me a big boost. I would concern myself with the heavens more than the music itself. I loved looking up at the sky while I was playing in the open. 

PG: And, of course, that ties directly into the time you famously spent practicing on the Williamsburg bridge during that first sabbatical. For the last few years, the Sonny Rollins Bridge Project has been trying to get the bridge renamed after you. What are your thoughts on those efforts?

SR: I’m flattered. My time at the Williamsburg Bridge was a high point in my life. 

Living in small apartments in New York, you couldn’t really blow a horn because you were right next to someone else. If you did, people would bang on your door telling you to “shut up that noise.” So, you couldn’t really practice at home. I was living in the Lower East Side, and there was a lady in the apartment next to me who was pregnant. I knew that blowing my horn wasn’t something she wanted to hear.

One afternoon, I happened to be walking around the Lower East Side near Delancey Street and saw steps leading up to the bridge. I never went up there but decided to walk up the stairs. Once I did, I saw that there was a big expanse under the crossway. There was no one else up there and I decided to walk across the bridge. There was maybe one person coming from the Brooklyn side. There were cars and trains below, but they weren’t visible up where I was. No one going over the bridge by train or car could see the place I ended up practicing, 

PG: So you could just be alone with the music. 

SR: Alone with the music! I was in my spot. I found my answer to living in small apartments. I was out there away from everything. 

Everything except for the boats that would go along the river beneath me. They wouldn’t see me, but I saw them. I would sometimes play around with the boats, blowing notes at them, and they would blow their horns back. But, still, no one saw me. I was completely alone. Anyone walking over the bridge on the walkway could see me but, strangely enough, at that time, there weren’t that many people walking across the bridge. Those who did walk across wouldn’t stop to see who was the crazy guy over there blowing his horn. Eventually, one guy did stop, he was a music guy, and told others that it was me playing up there. I was only there for a certain amount of time because I needed to go back to work. But the time I was up there, it all worked out well.

PG: Do you feel like going up there and playing by yourself led you down the path of doing solo performances later in your career?

SR: Well, I always wanted to do things like solo performances. That’s something else that my idol, Coleman Hawkins, did. When he did it with his song “Picasso” (Selmer, 1948), it was something that no one had done before. I always wanted to do that.

And, in fact, when I played my music, I didn’t use a piano often because I wanted to get the freedom I felt when I was practicing by myself. I needed rhythm accompaniment but not the chordal element that pianos provide. I don’t mean anything negative about pianos. I played with some great pianists in my life. But I wanted to feel free, and the piano’s emphasis on chords got in the way.

PG: It seems that freedom doesn’t necessarily equate to playing “out.” At various points in your career – East Broadway Run Down (Impulse!, 1966) comes to mind – you moved into the avant-garde but never fully stayed in that area the way someone like John Coltrane did in the latter part of his career. Was there a specific reason you decided to pull back after dipping into the avant-garde or did you just feel like that was not where the music was leading you?

SR: I do remember also dipping into it with Don Cherry and Billy Higgins when I had that band. Ultimately, it wasn’t satisfying enough for me to continue. I felt like I needed to get back to what I established for myself, which was very much playing standard songs and improvising on them. 

But I didn’t really lose favor with the avant-garde. It wasn’t something I left and never wanted to experiment with again. I did make some good strides in that kind of music, I had so many other things I needed to do. I had to incorporate calypso into my music because it was unique in itself. I loved all those avant-garde guys and played with them at different times. But calypso was my thing. No one else in jazz was playing calypso. I was able to, and because my ancestors were from the Caribbean, playing calypso was easy for me. It was something that I relied upon later on when people loved me for lots of other things. The use of calypso accentuated the fact I was different and had my own thing. That was important. It doesn’t mean the avant-garde musicians or I played on a higher level than the other, we just played what spoke to each of us.

Our conversation with Sonny Rollins continues here. More information can be found on his website.

Main photo by John Abbott. A special thanks to Terri Hinte.