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Sonny Rollins, Giant of the Jazz Saxophone, Is Dead at 95
Sonny Rollins, Giant of the Jazz Saxophone, Is Dead at 95
“Sonny Rollins, a dominant jazz saxophonist known for his forceful and imaginative approach, passed away at 95. He developed a unique sound, flirted with various styles, and was known for his commitment to freshness and improvisational cunning. Rollins’s career was marked by periods of hiatus, during which he focused on perfecting his craft, and he remained a prominent figure in jazz until his passing.
Even by the standards of a music that prizes individuality, he stood out, as both a musician and a personality.
Sonny Rollins, whose forceful and imaginative approach to the tenor saxophone made him one of the dominant jazz musicians of the post-World War II era, died at his home in Woodstock, N.Y., on Monday. He was 95.
His death was announced in a statement from his publicist, Terri Hinte.
Even by the standards of a music that prizes individuality, Mr. Rollins stood out, as both a musician and a personality.
In the late 1940s, when most young jazz saxophonists favored a light tone with minimal vibrato, he developed a fat, full-bodied sound that was a throwback to the older style of Coleman Hawkins, the first great tenor saxophonist in jazz. In the late 1950s, when his career as a bandleader was just getting off the ground, Mr. Rollins abruptly began a hiatus that lasted more than two years — mostly, he explained later, because he was not satisfied with the quality of his playing.
Mr. Rollins came of age when a new kind of jazz known as bebop was in ascendance, and from the start his playing was suffused with bebop’s harmonic sophistication and rhythmic daring. To classify him as a bebopper, however, would be an oversimplification.
Over the years he flirted with the avant-garde, jazz-rock fusion and other styles. But with his ferocious energy, his penchant for playing the unexpected note at the unexpected moment, and his unusual sound — sometimes harsh and mocking, sometimes lush and romantic — he was ultimately unclassifiable.
“The music I play is too big to be put into any one style,” he told an interviewer in 2002. “Every time I pick up the horn, I want to hear something fresh.”
That commitment to freshness was the key to Mr. Rollins’s approach, and to his appeal. The jazz critic Francis Davis wrote in 2000 that Mr. Rollins “is the greatest living jazz improviser, and if we redefine virtuosity to include improvisational cunning as well as instrumental finesse (as we probably should when discussing this music), he may be the greatest virtuoso ever produced by jazz.”
Mr. Rollins was rarely satisfied with his own playing; he often came away from a performance or a recording session proclaiming that he was sure he could have done better. He unquestionably did have his off nights, perhaps more than any other jazz musician of his stature, but some fans saw this as a positive sign: The occasional bad night, they argued, was a small price to pay for his willingness to take chances and his refusal to constantly play the same things the same way.
“The real playing happens on a subconscious level, and at that point the clichés don’t happen,” Mr. Rollins told The New York Times in 1989. “When I’m really playing, my mind is completely blank.”
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An Early Start
Sonny Rollins was born in Harlem on Sept. 7, 1930, the youngest of three children of Valborg (Solomon) and Walter Theodore Rollins, immigrants from the Virgin Islands. His full name was for many years given by most sources as Theodore Walter Rollins, but he later said that he was actually named after his father, a naval steward, and had reversed his first and middle names shortly after becoming a professional musician because problems with the law had made it hard for him to get working papers under his real name.
He began studying music at an early age, and although he also studied art and showed some interest in becoming a painter, he was playing saxophone professionally before he was out of his teens. He made his first recordings in 1949, with the singer Babs Gonzales, and he was soon in demand on the New York jazz scene, working with major figures like Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk and Bud Powell.
Mr. Rollins’s career was briefly derailed in the early 1950s when, like many other jazz musicians of his generation, he became addicted to heroin. But by 1955 he had overcome his addiction and achieved national prominence as a member of the popular quintet led by the drummer Max Roach and the trumpeter Clifford Brown.
Through his work with that group, and on a series of albums he recorded as a leader between 1956 and 1958, Mr. Rollins established himself as one of the most inventive jazz musicians of his generation.
In 1956 alone, he recorded two albums that came to be regarded as classics: “Tenor Madness,” which included his only recorded meeting with his fellow saxophonist John Coltrane, and “Saxophone Colossus” (the title referred both to his physical stature and to his rapidly growing artistic one). Two tracks on “Saxophone Colossus” drew particular praise from critics: “Blue 7,” an ingenious blues improvisation, which was the subject of a much-quoted essay by the composer and historian Gunther Schuller, “Sonny Rollins and the Challenge of Thematic Improvisation”; and “St. Thomas,” an adaptation of a traditional West Indian song that was the first and most famous of the many jazz-calypso fusions Mr. Rollins would record over the years.
A year later, frustrated by what he saw as the harmonic limits imposed by having a pianist play chords behind his improvisations, he began performing and recording accompanied only by a bassist and drummer, an unusual (though not unprecedented) approach at the time. (Pianists “got in the way,” he said at the time. “They play too much.”) He recorded several memorable albums without piano, one of which, “The Freedom Suite” (1958), was noteworthy not just for its spare instrumentation but also for its 19-minute title track, a composition in four movements written by Mr. Rollins as a musical commentary on racial inequality — a bold move in the early days of the civil rights movement.
By 1959, Mr. Rollins was receiving consistently glowing reviews and was widely regarded as one of jazz’s new stars. Nonetheless, that year he suddenly stopped performing and recording and virtually disappeared from the public eye.
Over the next two years, convinced that his playing was not up to his own standards, Mr. Rollins devoted much of his time to practicing, often late at night on the Williamsburg Bridge, not far from his apartment on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where the acoustics appealed to him and there were no neighbors to complain. His absence from the scene, and reports of his bridge sessions, added to his growing mystique, and to his growing reputation as a perfectionist.
“A lot of people couldn’t comprehend why I would stop playing,” he told DownBeat magazine in 2001. “But I learned something. It was necessary for me to do to have the kind of confidence I need to play music like this.”
Mr. Rollins’s return to action in 1961, complete with a contract from RCA Victor Records that was unusually lucrative for a jazz musician, was treated as major news by the jazz press. (In an attempt to cash in on the publicity he had generated during his long absence, the company called his comeback album “The Bridge,” which was also the title of one of the tracks.)
Consistently Surprising
Over the next several years, his profile remained high: He performed in nightclubs, in concert and at festivals all over the world, and he wrote and recorded music for the hit 1966 British film “Alfie.” And his music remained consistently surprising.
He surrounded himself with an ever-shifting cast of talented musicians, ranging from young experimentalists (he alienated many old fans and won some new ones by enthusiastically, if briefly, working with avant-gardists like the trumpeter Don Cherry) to the venerable Coleman Hawkins, the saxophonist he called his idol, with whom he recorded an album in 1963.
The 1960s were a busy and productive time for Mr. Rollins. But before the decade was over, he had vanished again.
He did no recording and almost no performing between 1966 and 1972, spending much of his time in Japan and India on what he later said was a spiritual quest. He returned to the studio in 1972 to record “Sonny Rollins’ Next Album” for the small Milestone label, for which he would continue to record for more than 30 years, and he was soon back at the forefront of the jazz world.
Critics were often unkind to Mr. Rollins in the years following his comeback, especially when, like many of his fellow jazz musicians in the 1970s and ’80s, he embraced electric instruments and rock rhythms. He even collaborated with the Rolling Stones, overdubbing saxophone parts to three tracks on their album “Tattoo You” (1981), although he turned down an offer to tour with them. In performance, he began emphasizing the more obviously crowd-pleasing elements of his music, notably his penchant for calypsos.
“I’m often criticized about the ’70s and ’80s because I used a backbeat and guitars and all, but I don’t understand a lot of it,” he said in 2001. “I was trying to find different ways to make my music relevant. I’ve never thought of myself as being on some pinnacle where I can’t play a calypso or a backbeat.”
The criticism he received — which continued beyond the 1980s — was often marked by an unusual mixture of admiration and regret. Reviewing a concert in 1993, Peter Watrous of The Times praised Mr. Rollins as “one of the greatest improvisers walking this earth,” but also called him “a man bent on misspending the capital of genius” who “plays music that rarely challenges his own historical achievements, and that in its simplicity seems to pander to his audience.” Mr. Rollins, he wrote, “seems unable, or unwilling, to present himself in a context that would give dignity to his great ability, or even just acknowledge it.”
Regardless of the reviews, Mr. Rollins in those years achieved the greatest success of his career. Although the audience for jazz ebbed and flowed, he was consistently one of the music’s most popular concert attractions. He gave much of the credit for his success to his wife, Lucille (Pearson) Rollins, who was also his manager and his co-producer on many albums.
Ms. Rollins died in 2004. An earlier marriage, to the actress and model Dawn Finney, ended in divorce. No immediate family members survive.
Mr. Rollins for many years had homes both in Lower Manhattan and in upstate Germantown, N.Y. He abandoned his Manhattan apartment in the wake of the 2001 terrorist attacks. He moved from Germantown to Woodstock, N.Y., in 2013.
Experiments and Honors
Although he worked primarily with small groups, Mr. Rollins sometimes experimented with other configurations. In 1985 he gave a solo concert at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, improvising for two hours without accompaniment. That same year he performed his “Concerto for Tenor Saxophone and Orchestra” in Tokyo with the Yomiuri Nippon Symphony Orchestra. (“I was trying to synthesize two elements by remaining true to the symphonic form and also to the way I play,” he explained.)
Mr. Rollins continued to tour and record well into the 21st century. He also did his best to weather the changes in the music business.
In 2005 he started his own record company, Doxy, named after one of his best-known compositions, which released a well-received series of live albums. In 2006, Mr. Rollins — who told The Times in an interview that year, “I hate technology myself” — began offering free audio and video clips on a newly created website, sonnyrollins.com.
In Mr. Rollins’s later years, the honors piled up. A two-time Grammy Award winner, he received a lifetime achievement Grammy in 2004. In 2010 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and became the first jazz musician to receive the prestigious Edward MacDowell Medal for achievement in the arts. In 2011 he received both a National Medal of Arts and a Kennedy Center Honor. (The encomiums had begun much earlier: He was named a Jazz Master by the National Endowment for the Arts in 1983.)
Despite the honors, he continued to explore — to search for, as he put it in an interview with The Times in 1984, “the ultimate sound.”
“That’s why I keep practicing,” he said. “I’ll know when I find the ultimate sound, because I’ll be completely fulfilled just by the sound of it and by what I’m able to do with it instrumentally.”
Mr. Rollins’s archives, including hundreds of recordings from rehearsals and practice sessions, were acquired in 2017 by the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem. That same year, a bill was introduced in the New York City Council to rename the Williamsburg Bridge in his honor. (The bill did not pass, but the campaign to have the bridge renamed has continued.)
In 2022, he was the subject of an acclaimed biography, “Saxophone Colossus,” by Aidan Levy.
With the death of his fellow saxophonist Benny Golson in 2024, Mr. Rollins became the last survivor of the 58 musicians captured by the photographer Art Kane in his famous Esquire magazine group portrait “Harlem 1958.”
“I was a fan,” Mr. Rollins told The Times in recalling the photo shoot in 2024. “I was in the picture, but it wasn’t so much as a musician — although I happened to be there as a musician — but I had been following jazz all my short life up to that time, so I knew a great deal about the guys.” He added that he was particularly proud to have been photographed alongside “my particular idols, Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young.”
In his later years Mr. Rollins experienced respiratory problems. He never formally announced his retirement, but in 2012, after being diagnosed with pulmonary fibrosis, he gave his last public performance. Two years later, he also stopped playing at home.
“The reason my retirement happened quietly was because my health problems were gradual,” he told The New York Times Magazine in 2020. “It took me a while to realize, hey, that’s gone now.”
“When I had to stop playing,” he said, “it was quite traumatic. But I realized that instead of lamenting and crying, I should be grateful for the fact that I was able to do music all of my life.”
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5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Ron Carter - The New York Times
5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Ron Carter
Christian McBride, Endea Owens, Large Professor and more writers and musicians share favorite tracks from the bass maestro, who turned 89 this week.
Many years ago, for a period of months, the bassist Ron Carter would go over to Rudy Van Gelder’s recording studio in New Jersey every Saturday. Together they spent hours working out microphone placements and recording techniques, ensuring that the sound of the upright bass could be well represented on tape.
That anecdote is just one among the thousands of studio tales and road stories stuck in the memory banks of history’s most recorded bassist, who turned 89 on Monday and is currently celebrating the milestone with a five-night run at the Blue Note in Manhattan. But it’s a good reminder that Carter’s main request has always been a modest one: to be heard clearly.
His new book, “Chartography,” is another earnest attempt to make sure we are picking up what he’s putting down on the low end. In the book, Carter transcribes and painstakingly unpacks his bass solos on five renditions of the standard “Autumn Leaves,” all recorded live with the Miles Davis Quintet, and each bearing its own insight into the quiet inventiveness of his playing. That group, from 1963 to 1968, destabilized small-group jazz’s relationship to rhythm and harmony on albums like “Miles Smiles,”“Nefertiti” and “E.S.P.” Since then Carter has amassed a catalog of both side-musician and bandleader work — ranging from jazz to funk to Western classical to gospel, on upright and electric bass — that far exceeds the 2,221 official recording credits recognized by the Guinness Book of World Records.
Read on for a list of highlights from the maestro’s vast career, brought to you by writers, musicians and devotees. Scroll down to find playlists of their selections, and if you have a favorite that wasn’t mentioned, feel free to drop it in the comments.
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Herbie Hancock, ‘One Finger Snap’
Kenny Barron, pianist
One of my favorite records of Ron Carter’s is “Empyrean Isles,” which he recorded with Herbie Hancock in 1964. My favorite track is “One Finger Snap.” I actually heard that record being played when I was doing a run at the Lighthouse in Los Angeles with Yusef Lateef. They played music during the intermissions, and I heard that record and said: Who’s that — playing bass and piano? I found out it was a new record by Herbie Hancock, with Ron Carter on bass. We had first met earlier in the ’60s, when he did a record with my brother that I was on. He wasn’t the Ron Carter that he is today, obviously, but he was a great bassist and very supportive of the music. Then when I heard him on “One Finger Snap” that night, I was fascinated with his beat and his time and his sound — just his flow. He had all of that.
▶ Listen on YouTube, Spotify and Apple Music
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V.S.O.P., ‘Third Plane’
Christian McBride, bassist
I was 11 years old when my great-uncle gave me a stack of records to listen to that got me started on my journey with jazz. Ron Carter’s name pretty much dominated the bass seat on all of the albums in the stack. Out of the many albums I heard, the first album of Herbie Hancock’s V.S.O.P. quintet from 1977 (along with Freddie Hubbard, Wayne Shorter and Tony Williams) caught my ear. And of the many high-octane songs on that album, Ron’s tune “Third Plane” was lyrical. Gentle. An earworm. It starts out as a straight-eighths, pseudo bossa nova. Then, after they complete the melody, they start swingin’ like only Ron, Herbie and Tony could. I copied note-for-note what Ron plays behind Wayne Shorter’s opening solo. At age 11, I didn’t know what made it something I wanted to learn, I just did it. It felt and sounded good. And it was Ron Carter. Until this very day, when I pull out my bass to warm up, from a deep muscle memory, I still play the first eight bars of what Ron plays behind Wayne. It’s my official warm-up exercise.
▶ Listen on YouTube, Spotify and Apple Music
Nancy Wilson, ‘I Thought About You’
Liany Mateo, bassist
The role of the bassist can sound deceivingly simple: Make the band sound like a band. We are the bridge between the melody, harmony and rhythm. We want everyone to feel taken care of and at the same time make clear decisions based on our own artistry. It can be a complicated process, but the best of us can negotiate and make it sound simple. Ron Carter effortlessly takes charge of the band from behind the bass on this track by Nancy Wilson. His beat mirrors Wilson’s infectious phrasing. You can visualize everyone in the studio having a ball, because when music swings this hard you can’t help but smile. The track is short, sweet, and he’s walking the mess out of the bass. If you ever have the privilege of seeing Maestro Carter perform, you’ll still see the joy he has from not just being a bass player but the bass player.
▶ Listen on YouTube, Spotify and Apple Music
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Ron Carter, ‘Half a Row’
Marcus J. Moore, writer
I owe Mr. Carter an apology. Given his stately nature, I assumed his solo music could never be avant-garde. But as I relistened to his 1969 album “Uptown Conversation,” I realized it’s a suite with funk and ambient textures, and the song “Half a Row” is a sonic puzzle that nods to serialism without surrendering to formality. What could’ve been a dry exercise becomes tactile and sly. Carter’s playing is precise and elastic, and Herbie Hancock sands the edges with restless piano chords that keep the composition from settling. It feels like a mutual provocation, each phrase nudging the other toward deeper abstraction. On “Half a Row,” Carter meets listeners midway, offering something dense, elegant and accessible. Despite its 10-minute run time, it never feels indulgent; it’s a necessary statement with boundless returns.
▶ Listen on YouTube, Spotify and Apple Music
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Grover Washington Jr., ‘Inner City Blues’
Marvin Goffe, Ron Carter discographer
My introduction to Ron Carter was at a funeral for a family member in 1982. The uncle who was in charge of the music for the repast didn’t want the mood to be too somber, and one of the records he played was by Grover Washington Jr., called “Inner City Blues.” It’s a 1972 LP on Kudu Records, a label affiliated with CTI, where Ron was the house bassist. He’s playing electric bass here. That was my introduction to Ron Carter, and my indoctrination into jazz. Many years later, I met Ron Carter, and I asked him: How many of your albums do you own? He said, zero. I said, you’re kidding. What I do now for Ron is, every two to three months, I run around gathering records — on the internet, at record shows. I’ve given Ron probably 1,200 to 1,500 of his recordings. And I worked with him and his team to get his name in the Guinness Book of World Records. Guinness was very discriminating. They knocked out a lot of what we submitted, including dates that only came out on Laserdisc. If you count those, and all that he has released since the record was established in 2016, he easily has appeared on 3,000 records.
▶ Listen on YouTube, Spotify and Apple Music
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Miles Davis Quintet, ‘All Blues’
Giovanni Russonello, writer
The Miles Davis Quintet’s defining trait in the mid-1960s was its total lack of hierarchy on the playing field. Davis was, by then, one of the most famous people in the world, but he was as much listener as leader; all five members seemed to have an equal say on where the music went moment-to-moment. Actually, if one person played the most determinative role, it was probably the least noticeable one: Ron Carter. His bass attack is so even, his style so supportive and assured, that you’re most likely to encounter his genius secondhand: through the sudden, sideways directions into which he guides Herbie Hancock on piano; the total comfort of Tony Williams’s beat, even at high speeds; or the way Wayne Shorter builds a narrative throughout his solo, and finishes strong at the end. It is Carter — with his leaps and glissandos and harmonic counterintuition — building the architecture supporting these moments. On the high-tempo versions of “All Blues” that the band used to play on world tours, Carter would glide deftly between leading and supporting roles, embracing the rendition’s wriggling energy but keeping things steady all the while, as if running an engine with its own fan system built in.
▶ Listen on YouTube, Spotify and Apple Music
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Ron Carter and Ricky Dillard, ‘Pass Me Not’
Endea Owens, bassist
“Pass Me Not” was the first track I heard from “Sweet, Sweet Spirit,” Ron Carter’s new album with Ricky Dillard (which turned out to be no-skips, by the way), and it struck me how Mr. Carter, who’s now 89 years old, was backing an entire choir of gospel singers, singing in full chest voice; drums, full rhythm section; all the works, guitar, horns — and still being heard profoundly on upright bass. And underneath, how he forms his harmonies, his rhythms; how he changes up his phrasing to completely shake up song structure, it’s all so impressive. What he does rhythmically throughout the piece is subtle, but moves the music forward. At the one-minute mark he changes to quarter notes instead of eighth notes and around three minutes he takes a short solo, which gives the piece a moment to breathe. Carter’s quarter-note feel has the power to change an entire song’s direction because he plays the full length of the note, which naturally allows the musicians to adapt to his beat. To still have that agility and power, let alone at his age, is amazing.
▶ Listen on YouTube, Spotify and Apple Music
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Wayne Shorter, ‘Speak No Evil’
Donald Vega, pianist
This was probably the first track where I really noticed Ron Carter’s playing, long before I met him. I also remember hearing records by the Miles Davis Quintet, and thinking: That pianist, Herbie Hancock, has all this wild harmony! But the more I listened, the more I was like, Oh man, it’s actually Ron Carter kind of dictating the harmony and pushing everything from below. And then once I started playing with him, it became clear why. He has such a strong personality, and it comes out in his playing. You can’t help but listen to him. When he changes one note, it changes the whole direction of the band. On this recording, he’s very interactive with Elvin Jones on drums. And on the modal sections of “Speak No Evil,” when the chords are stagnant, his lines remain melodic and fluid, and it kind of balances the need for structure with creative freedom. When you play a bass line, you spell out the chord changes, but he’s not really doing that — he’s so melodic that you can hear the harmony clearly without him having to spell it out.
▶ Listen on YouTube, Spotify and Apple Music
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Ron Carter, ‘Blues Farm’
Large Professor, D.J.
I hear Ron Carter’s “Blues Farm” as a total composition. It has this really cool ’70s jazz sound, which to me is like the sound of Midtown Manhattan. And he has so much range on the bass, from high to low — it’s almost like he’s playing the guitar in certain moments here. Growing up I had a neighbor, an older gentleman, who gave me all his cassettes and albums. One cassette was a taping of a jazz radio show, and this was one of the songs on it. Then, in my early days of digging, I finally found the “Blues Farm” album. Years later, I remember when Q-Tip told me: “Yo, we got Ron Carter to rock for us” on “The Low End Theory.” That was the pinnacle for me. The way Carter knew how to translate what he had been doing for so many years into hip-hop — that was incredible.
▶ Listen on YouTube, Spotify and Apple Music
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Donald Harrison, ‘Receipt Please’
Tyrone Allen, bassist
This track comes from “Heroes,” a record by the saxophonist Donald Harrison, with Ron Carter on bass and Billy Cobham on drums. That’s a special hookup, because Carter and Cobham have been documented playing together since the late 1960s. By the time of this recording, in 2002, their connection was on a plane I aspire to reach with my favorite drummers. “Receipt Please” is a Ron Carter composition, and I love that it gives us the blues without using a traditional form. We also get to appreciate his chordless playing here; Mr. Carter gives us an entire orchestra underneath the soloist. His way of playing lines can make you notice that he’s there, but in such a supportive and distinct way. To me, it feels like he goes from the beginning to the end of the song in one long phrase. Even if he’s changing registers, or playing unexpected notes and rhythms, there’s a linear development. From the first note to the last, I’m always left reminded of the power every note can yield.
▶ Listen on YouTube, Spotify and Apple Music
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Rosa Passos and Ron Carter, ‘Por Causa de Você’
Ashley Kahn, author
If you truly want to hear a musician’s heart and soul, slow down the rhythm and minimalize the accompaniment. Featuring only vocal and bass, this track, from the 2003 album “Entre Amigos,” stands out on an LP that is also a standout acoustic recording. It pairs two masters of sensitivity and emotional restraint, performing in the resonant interior of a Brooklyn church, the intimacy of their encounter caught by a single microphone — no amplification or close mic. The two find their way through a Jobim bossa nova. With bluesy hints, Carter matches his phrasing to Passos’ bittersweet, conversational delivery. One can hear them listening closely to each other. Between them, there’s both an ease and a note of diffidence, suggesting an intimacy that might be one step away from heartbreak. Carter’s solo answers that uncertainty with calm confidence, with his typical drops and double-stops: a languid, minute-long master class in technique, poise and emotional precision.
▶ Listen on YouTube, Spotify and Apple Music
Houston Person and Ron Carter, ‘Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most’
Linda May Han Oh, bassist
This track, from an album of duets with the tenor saxophonist Houston Person, is effortlessly beautiful and understated, and Mr. Carter’s way of approaching the accompaniment is so tasteful. By often playing in chords, more than one note at a time, he really helps to outline the harmony and plays something more than the bass’s usual role. The sound of the tenor and the bass together is so warm and intimate. They really don’t need any frills or anything fancy, they are just playing the song beautifully. And when we get to Mr. Carter’s unaccompanied solo, it is so clear, so solid, so steady and elegant."
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