Jazz man just gets better with time

BY BRETT O’BOURKE

Miami Herald

MIAMI - Sonny Rollins is the last living jazz giant.

The 75-year-old sax player has outlived the likes of his contemporaries such as Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, Clifford Brown, Art Blakey and John Coltrane.

But Rollins is not ready to be retired to the jazz pantheon quite yet.

"I’m trying to improve, trying to practice, trying to keep my game up to do what I have to do to make a successful presentation," says Rollins. "It’s a constant struggle. I don’t have time to listen to accolades from people, though I appreciate them."

That sentiment is the essence of Sonny Rollins: a man constantly struggling to improve, to explore deeper both personally and musically, a man forever in search of just the right notes.

Rollins was born in 1930s Harlem, the epicenter of jazz.

"Harlem was the place. All the bands came through Harlem and everybody played up at the Apollo Theater. We used to hear guys like James P. Johnson and Fats Waller was on the radio. I was right in the middle of it and I lived music," Rollins says.

He began playing the piano at age 7 and picked up the sax in elementary school.

"When I heard some records by Louis Jordan I said, `I don’t know about you people but I’m getting me one of them shiny saxophones."’

By the time he was in his late teens he was leading a band that included future jazz greats Jackie McLean, Kenny Drew and Art Taylor and had gained a reputation as a hard-charging improviser.

"Miles Davis heard me at that time and offered me a position in his band with Coltrane. I was beginning to get into big company."

In the early ’50s, Rollins’ career took off. He played and recorded regularly with Davis, Monk, Coltrane and his idol Charlie Parker. But, like so many jazz musicians of the day, Rollins became addicted to heroin.

"Everybody was doing drugs at one time. Charlie Parker, the great saxophone player, he played a big part in getting me off drugs. He was hooked on drugs himself. Everybody knows that, but what everybody doesn’t know is that Charlie Parker began to see all his young followers using drugs, and that was tearing him up," says Rollins.

Rollins checked himself into a rehabilitation clinic in Lexington, Ky., in the mid-’50s. Parker passed before Rollins got out.

"I was really anxious to show him that I had gotten his message but it wasn’t to be. But I got the message myself and straightened myself out. I never looked back."

In 1955, Rollins played with the Clifford Brown-Max Roach Quintet ("the highlight of my life," he says) and with the Miles Davis Quintet.

Leading his own bands he released some of the greatest jazz recordings of all time: "Saxophone Colossus" (1956), "Way Out West" (1957) and "Freedom Suite" (1958).

Then in August 1959, he walked away.

"I had some discouraging nights, one in particular where things just didn’t work out and I was very despondent and I said wait a minute now, I’m not really playing the stuff I want to play."

From the fall of ‘59 to November ‘61, Rollins quit recording and playing at clubs.

"I said I’m going to what we call go in the woodshed. My woodshed turned out to be the Williamsburg Bridge on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. I could play my horn all hours of the day or night. So that’s what I did and I went up there and got my stuff together."

Over the following decade, Rollins would put all manner of styles into the tumbler of his tenor saxophone to see what kind of shine he could put on them: calypso, Latin, avant-garde, free jazz. He wrote the film score for "Alfie," for which he was nominated for a Grammy (he has won several, including a lifetime achievement award).

In 1968, he traveled to India to study Eastern religions and yoga.

He returned in 1971 and has continued to record and now plays about 30 gigs per year.

"You have to follow your own inner convictions," Rollins explains. "That’s what the bridge really represents. It represents somebody realizing what they wanted to do in life and doing it."