I Read a Book: Saxophone Colossus: The Life and Music of Sonny Rollins by Aidan Levy

Relentlessly exploratory choruses on the life-long pursuit of greatness

“Sonny Rollins, man!” Wynton Marsalis has rarely been at a loss for words, but backstage June 4, 1983, at the Beacon Theater in New York City where he had just been treated to a demonstration of improvisational skill and ideas by the great tenor saxophonist, this was all he could say. The onstage meeting of the legendary performer, then age 52, and the fresh-faced young lion trumpeter, then age 22, takes place a little past the half-way point of this monumental new biography of Rollins.

Aidan Levy wrote a previous biography of Lou Reed, which I’m now curious to read. This new book is as detailed a chronological story of a musician’s life as you can find. For a long time, I was convinced Levy was going to mention every single place and approximate date Rollins played or recorded. I was kind of looking forward to seeing the shows I saw included – the 1985 Webster College appearance is at least mentioned, but his appearance at Mississippi Nights a few years later, and the one at the Touhill Performing Arts Center in 2009 don’t make the cut.

But Saxophone Colossus is much more than a list of names and dates. Built on meticulous research into virtually every article ever written about the great man, along with interviews with Rollins himself and as many people who played with him or knew him as could be rounded up alive in the last seven years, not to mention access to letters and papers written by Rollins and his wife Lucille, this book explores the musical and spiritual development of a magnificent musician across the first 92 years of his life. Though Rollins has not been able to play his horn for over ten years, thanks to pulmonary fibrosis which could very well have been triggered by the toxic air he breathed in for two days after 9/11/01 when he lived six blocks from the World Trade Center, he has continued to grow as a person. For Rollins, the golden rule found in so many religious sources is a constant goal.

For as long as he was playing tenor saxophone, though, his other goal was to reach the space in music that he felt he never quite accomplished. As I said, I saw him play three times. Two of those performances included half-hour long single tunes in which the man played chorus after chorus after chorus, breaking through to a place where music transcends time and space to become pure ecstasy. Levy quotes enough musicians and critics throughout the course of this book to imply that those times I saw him were more in the middle than near the peak of his concert performances. There were nights when he could lead his band for four hours without coming close to earth. That level of playing was what led Marsalis to run out of word choices.

Of course, while transcendent performances can live in our memories, Rollins is best known to most people through the 45 studio albums he made as a leader, and the 15 live records, and the 24 albums on which he appeared as a sideman, not to mention the three songs he played with the Rolling Stones on Tattoo You. For years, the records he made in the 1950s – Dig and Bags’ Groove by Miles Davis; Clifford Brown & Max Roach at Basin Street, Max Roach + 4 and Jazz in ¾ Time by Max Roach; Brilliant Corners by Thelonious Monk: and his own Tenor Madness, Saxophone Colossus, Way Out West, and Freedom Suite, among many others – were considered the peak of his powers. Levy doesn’t deny their greatness. Nobody possibly could. But while acknowledging circumstances which made later work less consistent, he makes a case that Rollins was always able to achieve remarkable things in the studio, if not as remarkable as he could do on stage. It’s impossible to ccount the number of times Rollins himself is quoted as feeling his records, even his live performances, weren’t nearly as good as he wanted them to be. I’ve listened to an assortment of random Rollins records in the last couple weeks that I had ignored or dismissed in the past, and there is some terrific music still waiting to be discovered or rediscovered.

Rollins had a relatively middle class upbringing in New York City during the 30s and 40s, and was able to see many of the great jazz musicians of that time living near the several homes in which he grew up. He was always a workhorse as a player – if somebody had kept track, I’m reasonably sure he would be in the Guinness Book of World Records with the largest number of hours spent practicing in a single lifetime. After he broke into the jazz world, and after his father was unceremoniously court martialed out of the Navy for the crime of dancing with a white woman, Rollins’ obsessive personality turned for ten years towards heroin. Levy does not turn away from the downsides of this period in Rollins’ career, during which time his playing continued to get better as his life became unstable and disordered. At one time he was sentenced to prison for participating in a robbery. The chapters covering this time are depressing to read, though I knew there would be a breakthrough at some point. He then became obsessive about leading a clean life, and substituted his addiction to drugs with a life-long practice of yoga.

The search to constantly improve, even when it was obvious to everybody else that Sonny Rollins was the greatest improvising musician alive, makes for a fascinating biography. Levy also throws in some sharp analysis of the music, sometimes from himself, sometimes from Rollins, and frequently from other musicians along the way. Rollins didn’t participate heavily in political concerns, though his “Freedom Suite” was an explicit musical commentary on the Civil Rights movement and he eventually wrote a piece called “Global Warming” that was one of his most played in the last dozen or more years of his career. Levy makes sure to put Rollins in the context of political times around him, without moving focus away from Rollins himself. This is a close look at a major musician, which kept me learning more and more until nearly the last page. The last sentence of the penultimate chapter is one which probably makes every other musical biographer jealous.