Saxophone Colossus Sonny Rollins returns to perform at the Kennedy Center on October 10

 

Saxophone Colossus Sonny Rollins

Washington, D.C.­–

Variously called a “saxophone god,” “colossus” and “the greatest living improviser in jazz” by the New York Times, Sonny Rollins is still going strong as he enters his eighties. Rollins, who was named both Musician of the Year and Best Tenor Saxophonist at the 2011 Jazz Journalist’s Associations Awards, returns to Washington on October 10 to perform live on stage at the Kennedy Center Concert Hall. President Obama honored Rollins with a 2010 National Medal of Arts and the National Humanities Medal.

            Said New York Times critic Ben Ratcliff, “Concerts by the tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins are to be experienced the way surfers experience the beach: they wait around for the tide to gather force, and at a certain moment the watery muscle hurtles them along,” adding “Mr. Rollins is a powerful, grand-scale improviser. Almost every modern jazz musician is fascinated by Sonny Rollins.” As though in confirmation, Rollins has said,” “I am sort of a primitive, I never play the same thing the same way twice. This is the essence of jazz. Improvisation is the top level of jazz expression.” Rollins has the rare ability to be “aggressive and tender at the same time. In Sonny’s improvisations, we hear his enormous ambitions and risk-taking, but we also hear heart and storytelling,” said Marc Myers on JazzWax.com.

            A prolific peripatetic performer, Rollins will release Road Shows, Vol. 2 in early September 2011. In addition to material recorded in Japan during an October 2010 tour, the new CD will contain several tracks from Sonny’s September 2010 80th birthday concert in New York, including the historic and electrifying encounter with Ornette Coleman. Rollins released Road Shows, Vol. 1 in late 2008; the inaugural release in a planned series of live Sonny Rollins recordings from the last 30-plus years. In August 2009, the album was named Jazz Album of the Year in DownBeat’s Critics Poll, and Rollins was named Jazz Artist of the Year.

Born in Harlem in 1930, Rollins grew up near the famous Savoy Ballroom and Apollo Theater and idolized Coleman Hawkins. Rollins worked and recorded with his musical mentor and guru Miles Davis, as well as Babs Gonzalez and Bud Powell, before he was 20. Even at that time, according to Miles Davis, Rollins was “a legend…almost a god to a lot of younger musicians. He was an aggressive, innovative player who always had fresh musical ideas.”

In 1955, after a hiatus in Chicago, Rollins came back as a member of the Clifford Brown-Max Roach Quintet, where he became known for improvising on simple tunes such as ballads and calypsos, as well as his often humorous style of melodic invention. In 1956, Rollins began to make a series of landmark recordings under his own name, including Valse Hot, St. Thomas, and Blue 7. His 1957 album Way Out West was the first to use a trio of saxophone, bass and drums, a format known as “stroll.” Rollins is credited with having popularized this style, where a piano-less trio puts the saxophone in the driver’s seat.

Highly self-critical, Rollins withdrew from the stage again in order to perfect his art between 1959 and 1961 and spent hours practicing on the Williamsburg Bridge on the lower East Side of Manhattan. Upon his return to the musical scene in 1962, his first recording was aptly called The Bridge. By then, his sets had adopted their current form of long, complex expressions based on Rollins’ encyclopedic knowledge of popular songs and other melodies. Rollins’ improvisations, says Ben Ratcliff are “brilliant” and full of “slangy humor and quotations…genuine American rhetoric, delirious and ecstatic.” “Jazz is probably the most demanding and the greatest art form in the world,” says Rollins. “It’s as if we were painting before the public, and the following morning we cannot go back and correct that blue color or change that red. We have to have the blues and reds very well placed before going out to play.”

Rollins withdrew again from the stage in 1966, returning in 1972, when he released Next Album, which was followed by another two dozen albums with a variety of ensembles. Rollins won his first Grammy for This Is What I Do in the year 2000, and his second for the 2004 Without a Song (the 9/11 Concert). He won a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences in 2004 and was inducted into the Academy of Achievement in 2006. He was awarded a Polar Music Prize in 2007.

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