When I visited Sonny Rollins at his home in Germantown, New York, a semi-hardscrabble hamlet 100 miles up the Hudson River, the 82-year-old jazzman they call the Saxophone Colossus was doing his laundry. "Oh, man, come on in, man," Sonny said in his reedy, slightly high-pitched voice as he stuck his head out the back door of the modest house, blood-orange skullcap on his kingly, lantern-jawed head. Jumble of shirts fresh from the dryer in his arms, he led me through the cluttered kitchen to a sitting room. "Be with you in a minute," he said with a sigh.
For Sonny, certainly one of the greatest tenor-saxophone players in the history of the instrument invented by Adolphe Sax in 1841, and a key figure in jazz for more than half a century, it is a drag any time "the celestial Big Picture" is infringed upon by "the Little Picture," which the musician defines as "that day-to-day crap you have to put up with on this misbegotten planet."
Doing the laundry, while necessary, was definitely in the latter category. But the entire past few weeks had been a hassle, Sonny said. He was booked to leave on a European tour with gigs in Austria, Germany, Switzerland, Luxembourg, and "some other burgs." There would be arrangements, flights, hotels to stay in. Not that all that hadn't happened before, hundreds of times. The new thing was "the move," Rollins' then in-progress relocation across the Hudson River to a larger house near Woodstock. After living in Germantown for four decades, the last nine years by himself since the death of his wife and manager, Lucille Rollins, the shift was proving more problematic than the jazzman had expected. There was always one more box to pack, one more real estate agent to talk to. Plus, telemarketers kept ringing on the phone, the very sound of which caused Sonny to summon his innermost Buddha Nature, lest he fly off the handle. The whole thing was giving him "psychological claustrophobia," Sonny said.
Once upon a very storied time, growing up on Harlem's Sugar Hill during the 1930s and '40s, a relatively well-off son of a West Indian-born Navy chief petty officer, Sonny felt like he had all the time in the world. Already a self-taught neighborhood prodigy at 17, well-versed in the ample brawniness of his great idol Coleman Hawkins and the ethereal stylings of Lester Young, he'd go over to Minton's Playhouse or the Club Baron on Lenox Avenue, where people like Fats Waller or Thelonious Monk might be playing. Then he'd take the train downtown to 52nd Street, the famous jazz thoroughfare, and sit at the bar at Birdland, where he'd often be invited to share the bandstand with bebop immortals like Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Miles Davis.
"That was my life back then – I thought it would always go on like that, never change," Sonny said. Now, on "the wrong side of 81," he could feel the metronome inside his head ticking away, each instant too precious to be squandered on the puny minutiae of the day-to-day.
For instance, only that week he'd spent nearly the entire morning down in the Big Apple, making an episode of The Simpsons. Sonny played a holographic image of himself that hovers, godlike, outside the bedroom window of perhaps his best-known mainstream musical disciple, Lisa Simpson. Sonny had three lines, which he dutifully repeated over and over again, coached by a voice on a speakerphone originating 3,000 miles away in Los Angeles. Later, Sonny said that taking all morning to produce a hologram visible only to a TV cartoon character was "kind of strange," especially for someone who'd managed to cut albums like Tenor Madness and Saxophone Colossus in a few short hours on a two-track machine located in Rudy Van Gelder's Hackensack, New Jersey, studio.
"Technology, man," Sonny said with a shrug. "All this little stuff interrupts my chain of thought. Consequently, I haven't been able to properly practice my horn the way I have to," he said, emerging from the laundry room in a loose-fitting khaki shirt, a pair of baggy gray sweatpants, and thick white socks stuffed into open-toe leather slippers. "If I don't get to practice, work on my embouchure and scales, then I can't play correctly, and if I can't play correctly, I can't work out my ideas, and if I can't work out my ideas, then I go crazy."
Sonny reached over and tapped the hard-shell case of the instrument resting on the table at his right. In there was the gold Selmer Mark VI with the Otto Link mouthpiece that he's played almost exclusively since the mid-1970s. "My second wife," he said, regarding the ax. "I don't sleep with it in bed. But I don't let it out of my sight." (...)
Up in Germantown that day, this was the basis for the urgency he felt, why the intrusion of "the Little Picture" was such an imposition. He was 82 – even if he kept doing yoga every day and kept his mind straight, no one lived forever. The physical body was a fleeting thing. It was impossible to ignore the decay. At a recent show in Detroit, Sonny couldn't play the way he wanted because his teeth were bothering him. A few days later in San Francisco, he had a cold, again keeping him from achieving what he set out to do.
"I don't know if the audience noticed. But I did," Sonny reported. "Others might say, 'Poor old guy; he's doing his best.' But I can't cut myself that slack."
Soon there would be more unsettling news. A few weeks after my visit, Sonny was diagnosed as experiencing what he called "some pulmonary distress." It was suggested he stop playing for a while, which caused him to cancel some gigs, which he absolutely hates to do. In a way it made sense. After all, there weren't many human beings who have ever blown for as long and as hard as Sonny Rollins. In jazz there was Wayne Shorter, 80 this year, and the 86-year-old Jimmy Heath. Both of those guys were great musicians, Sonny allowed, but neither of them blew with "my velocity." He joked about perhaps donating his lungs to medical science: "Sonny Rollins' lungs, the most blown lungs in jazz." Still, retaining his customary long view, Sonny chose to remain upbeat. Certainly it was hard to leave his horn in the case, but things happened, and then you lived through them. Soon he'd be back. This was just a bump in the road.
The drive he felt, the desperate need to get better, was no less at 82 than when he went up on the Williamsburg Bridge, Sonny said. "You see, I'm going toward this breakthrough, this piece of music that is going to explain it all to me," he declared. It could be a single note or new composition, but it was there, Sonny knew, inside of him. When he played the music, "it will matter," he said.
"You mean, like you're going to play this music and the rivers are suddenly going to run backward?" I asked, trying to be funny. After all, he was already perhaps the greatest single improviser in the history of jazz. No one had his emotional range, the ability to one moment be riffing like a musical stand-up comedian and then, abruptly, be tearing your heart out with the abject blues of the human condition. What about that fabulous opening to Monk's "Misterioso"? How about that spectacular ending to "God Bless the Child"?
This made Sonny laugh. When Sonny laughs, you know it. He bends his neck back nearly 45 degrees, casts his eyes skyward, and his mouth becomes a widening circle. Ha-ha-ha, he goes, loudly, like howling at the moon, albeit with perfect breath control.
"Don't you see, that's exactly the point," Sonny chortled as he clamped his skullcap onto to his head. "Those notes you mention, those notes have already been blown."
by Marc Jacobson, Men's Journal | Read more:
Image: Martin Scholler
