The great Sonny Rollins passed away at the age of 95. He won the Downbeat critics poll for best tenor saxophone player seven times.
As a rocker, he played magnificently on the Rollings Stones record, “Tattoo You.”
Check out the NY Times obit:
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.
“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.”
Sonny has many iconic recordings including Saxophone Colossus (1956) and Tenor Madness (1956), but my favorite Sonny recordings was when he joined my favorite trumpet player Clifford Brown and Max Roach.
Open thread.
