Jazz saxophonist and composer, born in New York City, USA. He learned to play piano, alto saxophone, and tenor saxophone while at school, and early on worked and recorded with major bebop figures such as Charlie Parker and Miles Davis. From the mid-1950s he emerged as an important voice in the hard bop movement. His use of calypso themes reflects his roots in the Virgin Is, and he is considered one of the most powerful improvisers on tenor and soprano saxophones.
Theodore Walter "Sonny" Rollins (born September 7, 1930 in New York City) is an American jazz tenor saxophonist. Sonny Rollins has had a long, productive career in jazz, beginning his career at the age of 11 and playing with piano legend Thelonious Monk before reaching the age of 20. Rollins is still touring and recording today, having outlived several of his jazz contemporaries such as John Coltrane, Miles Davis, and Art Blakey, all performers with whom he has recorded.
Biography
Early Days
Rollins started as a pianist, then changed to alto saxophone, finally switching to tenor in 1946. Rollins had begun to make a name for himself as he recorded with Miles Davis in 1951 and Thelonious Monk in 1953.
Rollins joined the Clifford Brown–Max Roach quintet in 1955, and after Brown's death in 1956 worked mainly as a leader.
Rollins' most widely acclaimed album Saxophone Colossus was recorded on June 22, 1956, featuring Tommy Flanagan on piano, former Jazz Messengers bassist Doug Watkins and his favorite drummer Max Roach. This was only Rollins' third outing as a leader in the recording studio, but it was a date on which he recorded perhaps his best-known composition "St. Thomas", a Caribbean calypso-based on a tune sung to him by his mother in his childhood: "St. Thomas is a song my mother used to sing, it is a traditional tune."
Coltrane had not yet become a major figure and Rollins was the leading modern jazz saxophonist in America. Throughout his career, Rollins used the technique, even backing bass and drum solos with sax licks (and bass for the drummer or drums for the bass player).
By this time, Rollins had become well-known for taking relatively banal or unconventional material (such as "There's No Business Like Show Business" on Work Time, "I'm an Old Cowhand" on Way Out West, and later "Sweet Leilani" on This Is What I Do) and turning it into a vehicle for improvisation.
In 1958 Rollins recorded an extended piece for saxophone, bass and drums: The Freedom Suite.
The LP was only briefly available in its original form, before the record company repackaged it as Shadow Waltz, the title of another piece on the record.
First Sabbatical
By 1959 however, Rollins was frustrated with what he perceived as his own musical limitations and took the first – and most famous – of his musical sabbaticals. To spare a neighboring expectant mother the sound of his practice routine, Rollins ventured to the Williamsburg Bridge to practice.
Throughout the '60s Rollins remained one of the most adventurous musicians around. Rollins explored Latin rhythms on What's New, tackled the avant-garde on Our Man in Jazz, and re-examined standards on Now's the Time.
Second Sabbatical
Frustrated once again, Rollins took his last (so far) sabbatical to study yoga, meditation, and Eastern philosophies. In 1985 he released his Solo Album, though many Rollins fans consider it something of a disappointment compared to his best solo work. Critics such as Gary Giddins and Stanley Crouch have noted the disparity between Sonny Rollins the recording artist, and Sonny Rollins the concert artist. In a May 2005 New Yorker profile, Crouch wrote of Rollins the concert artist:
"Over and over, decade after decade, from the late seventies through the eighties and nineties, there he is, Sonny Rollins, the saxophone colossus, playing somewhere in the world, some afternoon or some eight o'clock somewhere, pursuing the combination of emotion, memory, thought, and aesthetic design with a command that allows him to achieve spontaneous grandiloquence.On September 11, 2001, Rollins, who lived several blocks away, heard the World Trade Center collapse, and was forced to evacuate his apartment, with only his saxophone in hand. That concert was released on CD in 2005,'Without a Song: The 9/11 Concert.
Rollins remains a major figure to this day.
After a highly successful Japanese tour in late 2005, Rollins returned to the recording studio for the first time in five years to record, "Sonny, Please."
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