This Jazz Legend Is His Own Work in Progress

Sonny Rollins circa 1960, when he took a break from performing and recording to focus on himself. THE NOTEBOOKS OF SONNY ROLLINS, edited by Sam V.H. Reese. It is possible to imagine the jazz musician Sonny Rollins’s life as a novel, pitched between realism and surrealism in the manner of Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man.” The settings would include Harlem, where Rollins grew up poor in the 1930s and ’40s, and the decadence of clubland in New York City and Chicago at the century’s midpoint, when he was a musical prodigy. A chapter might linger on the recording of his landmark 1957 album “Saxophone Colossus.” He began to practice alone, often at night, on the Williamsburg Bridge. A novelist might view this scene from avian heights, swooping down the East River, in and out of his grainy, Dopplered wail. As Rollins aged, accolades began to settle on his head and shoulders the way pigeons do on statues in the Piazza San Marco in Venice. Fame and honor were not enough to assuage his fears when he and his wife bought a house in upstate New York; a Black man and a white woman couldn’t live anywhere too isolated because interracial marriage still drew outrage. The Williamsburg Bridge material might make up this novel’s crucial chapter. (I wish one of the two gifted drummers in my apartment building would practice there, too, instead of across the breezeway. New York musicians and their neighbors: a small book crying out to be written, with sympathy for both sides.) Rollins began practicing there in 1960, not long after he commenced a two-year sabbatical from performing and recording. No one knew where he had gone. During this time, he also began keeping the notebooks that the critic Sam V.H. Reese has now excerpted in a slim and handsome new book, “The Notebooks of Sonny Rollins.” In his introduction, Reese writes that Rollins vanished because he wanted to work on his sound. That is true, up to a point. But Rollins in 1959 was also determined to change his life. He’d been a heroin addict, sometimes […]

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