Sonny Rollins Revisiting the Bridge at 60

Sonny Rollins Revisiting the Bridge at 60.

Rollins was born in New York City to parents from the United States Virgin Islands The youngest... more

by Diane Hocker

Title

Sonny Rollins Revisiting the Bridge at 60

Artist

Diane Hocker

Medium

Photograph - Photography

Description

Sonny Rollins Revisiting the Bridge at 60.

Rollins was born in New York City to parents from the United States Virgin Islands The youngest of three siblings, he grew up in central Harlem and on Sugar Hill,[ receiving his first alto saxophone at the age of seven or eight. He attended Edward W. Stitt Junior High School and graduated from Benjamin Franklin High School in East Harlem. Rollins started as a pianist, changed to alto saxophone, and finally switched to tenor in 1946. During his high school years, he played in a band with other future jazz legends Jackie McLean, Kenny Drew, and Art Taylor.

While in Los Angeles in 1957, Rollins met alto saxophonist Ornette Coleman and the two of them practiced together.Coleman, a pioneer of free jazz, stopped using a pianist in his own band two years later.

By this time, Rollins had become well known for taking relatively banal or unconventional songs (such as "There's No Business Like Show Business" on Work Time, "Toot, Toot, Tootsie" on The Sound of Sonny, and later "Sweet Leilani" on the Grammy-winning album This Is What I Do) and using them as vehicles for improvisation.

Rollins acquired the nickname "Newk" because of his facial resemblance to Brooklyn Dodgers star pitcher Don Newcombe.

In 1957 he made his Carnegie Hall debuand recorded again for Blue Note with Johnson on trombone, Horace Silver or Monk on piano and drummer Art Blakey (released as Sonny Rollins, Volume Two). That December, he and fellow tenor saxophonist Sonny Stitt were featured together on Dizzy Gillespie's album Sonny Side Up.

In 1958, he appeared in Art Kane's A Great Day in Harlem photograph of jazz musicians in New York;.he is one of only two surviving musicians from the photo (the other being Benny Golson).

The same year, Rollins recorded another landmark piece for saxophone, bass and drums trio: Freedom Suite. His original sleeve notes said, "How ironic that the Negro, who more than any other people can claim America's culture as his own, is being persecuted and repressed; that the Negro, who has exemplified the humanities in his very existence, is being rewarded with inhumanity.". The title track is a nineteen-minute improvised bluesy suite; the other side of the album features hard bop workouts of popular show tunes. Oscar Pettiford and Max Roach provided bass and drums, respectively. The LP was available only briefly in its original form, before the record company repackaged it as Shadow Waltz, the title of another piece on the record.

Following Sonny Rollins and the Big Brass (Sonny Rollins Brass/Sonny Rollins Trio), Rollins made one more studio album in 1958, Sonny Rollins and the Contemporary Leaders, before taking a three-year break from recording. This was a session for Contemporary Records and saw Rollins recording an esoteric mixture of tunes including "Rock-a-Bye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody" with a West Coast group made up of pianist Hampton Hawes, guitarist Barney Kessel, bassist Leroy Vinnegar and drummer Shelly Manne.

In 1959 he toured Europe for the first time, performing in Sweden, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, and France..

By 1959, Rollins had become frustrated with what he perceived as his own musical limitations and took the first – and most famous – of his musical sabbaticals..While living on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, he ventured to the pedestrian walkway of the Williamsburg Bridge to practice, in order to avoid disturbing a neighboring expectant mother. Today, a fifteen-story apartment building named "The Rollins".stands on the Grand Street site where he lived..Almost every day from the summer of 1959 through the end of 1961, Rollins practiced on the bridge, next to the subway tracks. Rollins admitted that he would often practice for 15 or 16 hours a day, no matter what seasonIn the summer of 1961, the journalist Ralph Berton happened to pass by the saxophonist on the bridge one day and published an article in Metronome magazine about the occurrence. During this period, Rollins became a dedicated practitioner of yoga..Rollins ended his sabbatical in November 1961. He later said "I could have probably spent the rest of my life just going up on the bridge. I realized, no, I have to get back into the real world.".In 2016, a campaign was initiated that seeks to have the bridge renamed in Rollins's honor..

Uploaded

February 12th, 2023