Countdown of 10 amazing moments from the year 2011: No. 6 Sonny Rollins

Welcome to number 6 in Aberjhani’s Countdown of 10 Amazing Moments from the Year 2011:

Preeminent saxophonist and all-around jazzmaster Sonny Rollins joined actress Meryl Streep, singer Neil Diamond, celebrated cellist Yo-Yo Ma, and Broadway actress and cabaret performer Barbara Cook as a Kennedy Center honoree at the White House and at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. on December 4, 2011. The honor served as tribute to the career of a musician whose work has won over critics and fans alike for all of six decades.

A Musical Journey

Rollins was born Walter Theodore Rollins (changed later to Theodore Walter Rollins) in New York City on September 7, 1930, both literally and figuratively in the middle of the Harlem Renaissance. As President Barack Obama put it in his introductory remarks at the Kennedy Center:

“Harlem in the 1930s was a hotbed of jazz, and for a young musician with a big horn and bigger dreams, it was heaven. Duke Ellington and Coleman Hawkins lived around the corner. Sonny learned melody and harmony from Thelonious Monk, and Miles Davis was a regular playing partner.”

That early introduction to jazz allowed Rollins to grow up and more than hold his own while playing with such greats as trumpeter Miles Davis, brother saxophonists Charlie Parker and Coleman Hawkins, the aforementioned Monk, the great John Coltrane, drummer Max Roach, pianist Tommy Flanagan, and many others.

His recording career launched as a back-up player in 1949 with: Babs Gonzales and His Orchestra’s album Weird Lullaby; J.J. Johnson’s Origins, The Savoy Sessions; and Bud Powell’s The Amazing Bud Powell, Vol. 1. However, by the mid-1950s, Rollins emerged as a singular solo talent with his signature albums Saxophone Colossus and Tenor Madness. With each passing decade since that time, Rollins has periodically retreated from public life only to later surface with new music as dynamically appealing as that which is now considered classic recordings of the jazz canon.

Retreating and Advancing

Since 2000, as he approached his much-celebrated eightieth birthday, he has continued to perform worldwide and record landmark albums. One such album was Without a Song: the 9/11 Concert. Rather than give himself over to despair in the face of 9/11, just after his seventy-first birthday, Rollins made it his mission to confront the tragedy with an inspired live set recorded at Boston’s Berklee Performing Arts Center on September 15, 2001. He has further continued to illustrate the universal attraction of his music with such major contributions to the genre as: Road Shows Volume 1 (2008), featuring live performances recorded in the U.S., Japan, France, and Sweden, and Road Shows Volume 2 (2011) from live shows in Japan and New York City, both revealing an undisputed master of the craft joyfully and yet studiously at work.

Where his musicianship is concerned, Rollins has been lauded for an uncanny ability to improvise nonstop for performances lasting ninety minutes or more. As an individual, he has been applauded for the conscious choice not to allow the drug abuse that destroyed any number of his contemporaries to do the same to him. In 1962, he wrote a letter to his hero and inspiration, Coleman Hawkins, in which he expressed the kind of appreciation that many aspiring musicians now express toward him. The following is a short excerpt:

“My Dear Mr. Hawkins… Certain it is that character, knowledge, and virtue are superior to ‘music’ as such. And that ‘success’ is relative to the evolution of those qualities within us all. That it has been positive and lasting for you Coleman is to the honor and credit of us, your colleagues, as well as to your own credit. For you have lit the flame of aspiration within so many of us and you have epitomized the superiority of ‘excellence and endeavor’ and you stand today as a clear living picture and example for us to learn from… Yours Truly, Sonny Rollins”

Viewers can watch Rollins' induction as a Kennedy Center honoree during the center's annual television broadcast this year on CBS, December 27, at 9 p.m. EST.

NEXT: Countdown of 10 Amazing Moments from the Year 2011: No. 5 Those Now Departed

by Aberjhani, National African American Art Examiner
author of Christmas When Music Almost Killed the World
and co-author of Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance

Pages from an Author’s 2011 Journal