By Jon Mooallem

"I was filled with question marks," the tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins told the New Yorker in 1961.

He was explaining why, about two years earlier, at age 29 and seemingly at the height of his creative powers, he had vanished from the jazz world, embarking on an almost monastic hiatus of intense introspection and even more intense practicing. Later in life, Rollins would further explain the choice by telling interviewers that he'd no longer felt confident in his playing; that he had wanted "a certain peace inside of myself. And I want that peace at the risk of giving up everything.... I have to be sure that I'm making myself right inside in every way"; and that, starting to feel outshined by newer, buzzier saxophonists like John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman, Rollins -- suddenly a traditionalist, by comparison -- had told himself, "You better get your s -- together, because these cats have something to say."

Rollins described himself to The Wall Street Journal in those days as a " ferocious practicer." He liked to play loudly, for many hours at a time, improvising ceaseless and whipsawing sagas of frenetic melodies and emphatic blaring and screeching -- it was a whole lot of sound. When he took his hiatus, he was living in a loft on Grand Street in New York City with Lucille Pearson, whom he would marry in 1965. (Pearson, who died in 2004, was also Rollins's manager for many years. He was married briefly once before.)

Rollins understood the racket he would be making for his neighbors. And so, virtually every day for about a year and a half, Rollins would walk out onto the Williamsburg Bridge, stand by himself next to the subway tracks and blow for as many as 15 hours at a time. Sometimes, he found himself subtly bending his playing to the sounds of the cityscape. "I used to blow my horn back at the boats when the boats would blow," he told the Washington Post.

Writing later in the New York Times, Rollins remembered: "Playing against the sky really does improve your volume, and your wind capacity. I could have just stayed up there forever. But Lucille was supporting us, and I had to go back to work. You can't be in heaven and on earth at the same time."

He re-emerged in late 1961 and, the following year, released a record titled "The Bridge."

Rollins, who died Monday at the age of 95 at his home in Woodstock, N.Y., according to an announcement on his Facebook page, was frequently praised throughout his half-century-plus career as jazz's greatest living improviser; the phrase came up so often in profiles and reviews that it might as well have been an official title. Though Rollins wrote several tunes now regarded as standards, like "St. Thomas," "Oleo" and "Doxy," his legacy rests in the singular way in which artistry and abandon coalesced in his playing.

The New York Times described Rollins as establishing "a genuine American rhetoric, delirious and ecstatic; audiences reoriented their imagination, and their sense of patience, around them."

"When he's on," the late critic Stanley Crouch wrote, he "seems immense, summoning the entire history of jazz, capable of blowing a hole through a wall."

'A holy grail'

Walter Theodore Rollins was born Sept. 7, 1930, at his grandmother's house in Harlem, the youngest of three children to parents who had immigrated from the Virgin Islands. Most of his childhood was spent in the Sugar Hill neighborhood of Harlem, where he would routinely see some of the era's most prominent Black Americans out and about -- W.E.B. Du Bois, Thurgood Marshall, Duke Ellington -- and once waited in the lobby of Coleman Hawkins's building so he could get the tenor saxophonist's autograph. Hearing Hawkins's recording of "Body and Soul" as a fourth-grader had been a turning point for Rollins musically and eventually lead him to switch from alto to tenor saxophone. He called Hawkins's playing on the song "a holy grail."

After graduating from high school in 1948, Rollins started gigging around New York and, by the early 1950s, was recording with Bud Powell, Miles Davis, Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk, who Rollins called his "guru." In 1951, Rollins was backed by the Modern Jazz Quartet for his first record under his own name. Asked on the podcast "Broken Record" about playing with the biggest names in jazz at such a young age, he said, "I was too stupid to be nervous," adding: "I was never one of these guys that felt intimidated. I just felt, 'Well, look: If they want me to be here, I guess I'm supposed to be here.' "

Rollins was achieving all this while in the grip of a ravaging heroin addiction. He spent much of 1952 at Rikers Island for armed robbery and returned in 1954 on a parole violation. Decades later, an unnamed musician told the New Yorker of Rollins: "That heroin had him so desperate that if he got his hands on your instrument it would end up in the pawnshop."

During a recording session with Charlie Parker, Rollins told "Broken Record," he insisted to the older sax player that he had kicked heroin -- but Parker soon discovered the truth. Looking at Parker, Rollins said, he could tell "how destroyed he was, how despondent he was," since Parker, well-known to have been a heroin user, felt responsible for the many younger musicians who'd emulated him and gotten hooked themselves. "It was killing him," Rollins said. "I saw that at the session." So Rollins vowed to get clean to remove some of that burden from his hero. In 1955, he spent several months at the U.S. Narcotic Farm, also known as the Lexington Narcotic Farm, a government rehab facility in Lexington, Ky.

Re-emerging, Rollins joined the Clifford Brown-- Max Roach Quintet in Chicago, a group whose chemistry and groundbreaking hard-bop style exhilarated Rollins -- but which dissolved out from under him in 1956, when Brown and pianist Richie Powell were killed in a car accident. Aidan Levy's 2022 biography "Saxophone Colossus" describes Rollins weeping when he got the news. "All I could do was go back to my hotel room and practice all night long," Rollins said. "I was so stunned that at first it did not seem real and the only way to deal with it was to practice."

Returning to New York, Rollins continued what the Guardian would later call "an astonishing creative breakout," recording 10 albums in 1956 alone, most of them under his own name. These included "Saxophone Colossus," which contained his most famous composition, the calypso tune "St. Thomas." "Way Out West," in 1957, was the first album in which Rollins, having felt constrained by piano players in the past, made the unconventional choice to record as a stripped-down trio: just sax, bass and drums. "A Night at the Village Vanguard," another trio record, came out later the same year.

In 1958, he released "Freedom Suite," an album crowned by its nearly 20-minute title track and its manifesto-like liner notes -- one of the earliest, definitive protests against racial injustice to rise out of the jazz world. Rollins wrote: "America is deeply rooted in Negro culture: its colloquialisms; its humor; its music. How ironic that the Negro, who more than any other people can claim America's culture as his own, is being persecuted and repressed...."

Miles Davis, in his autobiography, referred to Rollins around this time as being "a legend, almost a god to a lot of the younger musicians." In the inaugural issue of Jazz Review, in 1958, critic Gunther Schuller described Rollins as a central figure in a new movement to approach improvisation as an act of spontaneous composition, taking flight into cohesive and structurally sophisticated music, rather than just successions of licks.

Rollins, Schuller wrote, was the single best example of how "discipline and thought do not necessarily result in cold or unswinging music." No one, he added, "is more passionate in his musical expression than Sonny Rollins."

Burned out in India

Rollins stepped away from music and fame a second time at the end of the 1960s, feeling burned out. "I went to India, and had no idea whether I would ever play the saxophone professionally again," he explained. This self-imposed exile lasted about two years. Rollins had gotten deep into yoga years earlier, but now a teacher he encountered at an ashram in India insisted that jazz was his true spiritual path -- that "I would be bringing joy to people," Rollins told Yoga Journal, and "That was a proper way to live."

Rollins had always presented as an eccentric -- and never a shallow one. In 1959, he'd sported a mohawk to honor Native Americans. He was known for taking decidedly corny-seeming songs that no other serious player would touch -- "I'm an Old Cowhand," "There's No Business Like Show Business" -- and blowing aggressive, braying solos over them, forging them into legitimate jazz.

In 2024, critic Sam V.H. Reese edited a selection of Rollins's notebooks from the first decades of his career -- diaries that revealed him as a rigorous self-improver, experimenting with his diet, embarking on exercise regimens and restricting his lust, facing "the startling and intriguing reality that there is within me a force working hard for my own destruction," he wrote. (The Journal called the book "as valuable in creative insight as Emerson's journals, van Gogh's letters and Baudelaire's 'Late Fragments.' ")

And as Rollins aged, he would remain a voracious seeker, with interests that expanded into Zen Buddhism, martial arts, Kabbalah, the esoteric 17th-century tradition of Rosicrucianism, reincarnation and Egyptology. As a musician, the sounds escaping his horn seemed to rise from some far larger, internal furnace of intellectual and spiritual restlessness. His goal, he wrote in one notebook entry, was "the instantaneous creation of music -- an unbroken link from thought to thing -- immediately -- at once -- intelligently -- but with emotion." Or, as he put it to NPR: "The music is supposed to be playing me."

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