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There are certain musicians whose names become so large they stop sounding like people and start sounding like weather systems. Sonny Rollins was one of those. You didn’t just listen to Sonny Rollins. You stood in the path of him the way a man stands on the North Shore during a thunderstorm, feeling the air pressure change.
When Rollins died this week at 95, the jazz world reacted the way cathedrals might react if somebody misplaced the roof. Rollins was not simply a great saxophonist. He was one of the last living giants from the age when jazz still strode through American culture like a heavyweight champion in a trench coat.
I first encountered Sonny Rollins the way many people discover jazz in adolescence: accidentally, obsessively, and slightly beyond their intellectual clearance level. I was about 15 when I bought East Broadway Run Down and Freedom Suite, two albums that sounded less like records than coded transmissions from another civilization. Rollins and John Coltrane were the musicians who hooked me on jazz for life.
At 15, of course, you don’t really “understand” Sonny Rollins. You survive him.
Most teenagers are listening to whatever is rattling the windows in the mall parking lot. Meanwhile, there I was trying to process ten-minute improvisations that sounded as though a man were simultaneously wrestling with God, rhythm, memory, and several unresolved parking tickets from Harlem.
Then, years later — in 1995, when I was in my early forties — I met him in Pittsburgh at the North Side home of the late Butch Perkins after Sonny headlined the Mellon Jazz Festival and played two back-to-back sets at the Regent Square Theater.
Now, most celebrities react to admiration the way a cat reacts to a bath. They become uncomfortable, distracted, vaguely endangered. But Sonny Rollins was one of the kindest and most humble musicians I’ve ever met. No jazz-snob hauteur. No sense that he needed to remind anyone he was Sonny Rollins. He spoke to people the way secure men do when they’ve long since stopped needing applause to prove they exist.
I told him that he and Coltrane were the two musicians who first opened the door for me into jazz. He accepted the compliment graciously, though with the faintly embarrassed expression of a man being praised for remembering to take out the trash.
That humility was remarkable because, good Lord, the man had earned the right to swagger.
Born Walter Theodore Rollins in Harlem in 1930, he emerged from the astonishing postwar New York jazz scene alongside names that now sound carved into marble: Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Max Roach, Clifford Brown. His improvisations possessed that rare quality jazz musicians spend entire careers chasing — the sensation that somebody is simultaneously inventing and discovering music at the exact same moment.
Critics eventually called him the “Saxophone Colossus,” which sounds slightly excessive until you actually hear him play. Then it sounds restrained.
Rollins had tone, yes, and technique beyond ordinary explanation, but what separated him from lesser virtuosos was humor. Sonny could make a tenor saxophone wink. He quoted nursery rhymes in solos, drifted into calypso rhythms, turned melodies upside down, then somehow landed upright again as though he’d merely taken a leisurely stroll around the block. Jazz, in Sonny’s hands, never became homework. It remained gloriously alive.
Which makes it fitting that Pittsburgh became one of the institutional homes of his legacy.
The University of Pittsburgh jazz program — founded in 1969 by saxophonist and educator Nathan Davis — became one of the nation’s pioneering formal jazz studies programs. Davis understood something universities were slow to grasp: jazz was not nightclub wallpaper. It was one of America’s great intellectual and artistic achievements.
Under Davis, Pitt established the University of Pittsburgh-Sonny Rollins International Jazz Archives, now one of the premier jazz collections in the world. Among its treasures are manuscripts, recordings, photographs, posters, and one of Rollins’ own tenor saxophones — sitting there in Pittsburgh like a Stradivarius parked in Oakland.
Rollins repeatedly returned to Pittsburgh through Pitt’s Annual Jazz Seminar and Concert, appearing during the 1970s, 1980s, and into the 1990s. Those events brought world-class musicians into direct contact with students and ordinary Pittsburghers, which is no small thing in a country increasingly convinced culture consists mainly of people screaming at one another on cable television.
And there was something deeply appropriate about Sonny Rollins and Pittsburgh finding one another.
Both possessed toughness without self-pity. Both understood reinvention. Pittsburgh spent decades rebuilding itself after the collapse of steel. Rollins famously stepped away from performing at the height of his fame because he believed he could become better — practicing for hours alone on the Williamsburg Bridge so he wouldn’t disturb the neighbors. Imagine such a thing today. Most people now upload the first draft of their thoughts before breakfast.
Rollins spent his entire life trying to improve, which may be the most moving thing about him.
Near the end of his life, after pulmonary fibrosis finally silenced the horn, he said all he had ever really wanted was to “blow into the horn” the way his heroes had before him.
That sentence tells you nearly everything about the man.
No branding strategy. No self-mythologizing. Just the work.
And somewhere inside Pitt’s jazz archives, one of Sonny Rollins’ saxophones still waits quietly in its display case while students wander past, perhaps not yet fully understanding they are standing in the presence of one of the great American voices.
But someday they will.
