The Notebooks of Sonny Rollins

Sonny Rollins was not yet twenty-six years old when he recorded the album that would be Saxophone Colossus. No one at the time or since has ever thought of that title as any kind of hubris—the album in fact is one of the greatest documents in the entire jazz discography. The playing from Rollins, pianist Tommy Flanagan, bassist Doug Watkins, and drummer Max Roach is at the highest level, but there are hundreds of jazz albums where the playing is just as good. What elevates this disc above the merely fantastic is that Rollins is giving a lesson in how an improviser thinks, in how one constructs logical, coherent, expressive, and just plain hip music extemporaneously.

What makes Rollins (ninety-three years old at this writing and about a decade retired from performing) not just a saxophone colossus but one of the small handful of titans in American music (a peer of Roach, Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Clifford Brown, Charles Mingus, Thelonious Monk, Don Cherry, and Cecil Taylor, he made important appearances with Brown, Parker, Davis, Monk, and Cherry) is what that lessons imply, Rollins as a thinking improviser who can clearly lay out what he’s doing for the attentive listener. It’s an intellectual quality that is a substantial part of a complex musical personality that integrates it with wit, a sense of aural and emotional beauty, an affable independence, and more than a little goofiness.

That’s one of the key things that Aiden Levy’s substantial biography, Saxophone Colossus (2022) reveals; young Rollins as very much a nerd when it came to radio comedies, movies, boxing, and comic books. The sliver of frustration with the book is that after a comprehensive look at Rollins’s life, with plenty of comments from the man himself, there’s little insight into how his life’s events are reformulated through his musical thinking into the joyous, effusive, and intellectually rich improvisations. This new, slender distillation of his personal notebooks (available in April), edited by fiction writer and critic Reese from Rollins’ archives at the New York Public Library, bridges some of that gap.

The book has four chapters broken into chronological units, “1959–1961: The Bridge Years,” “1961–1963: Fantastic Saxophone,” “1963–1973: What I am,” and “1970–2010: Legacy.” Rollins, up until the mid-eighties, was a creatively restless artist, always in the process of becoming something else—or truly getting closer and closer to his essence. The most famous stretch of this in his career was the first part, when he stepped away from performing and recording and spent most of his days strolling out onto the Williamsburg Bridge and practicing. Primarily, he was dissatisfied with his playing and was searching for something new, the bridge was convenient because Rollins didn’t want to disturb his neighbors.

And what was he thinking? The notebooks have many vital details, but it’s an open question whether they will reveal much to the reader. This is because they are details of saxophone playing that will be familiar to anyone intimate with the instrument but will likely be baffling to others. During the bridge years, Rollins was exploring, questioning, and adapting the basics as laid out by Sigurd Raschèr, one of the great saxophonists of the twentieth century and by far the most important teacher of the instrument. The notebooks show Rollins concentrating on Raschèr’s idea of tone, itself a combination of training the muscles of the embouchure, the chamber size of the mouthpiece, and breath support. Rollins takes his own notes on how to form his lips around the mouthpiece, how to stand and breathe, even how to properly place the saxophone strap around his neck.

Likewise he also focuses on details of the key assembly, especially the notes that are played and changed with the pinky finger on the left hand, and also how to think about and approach certain notes in the middle registers. This is specifically a tenor saxophone issue, as notes in this area on the horn can be stuffy and hard to produce with the same tonal richness as in the upper and lower registers. There are other things on his mind, like diet and quitting cigarette smoking, but there’s nothing about whether or not he is rethinking improvisation. This is not a lack of information, rather a separation between Rollins the saxophone player and Rollins the improvising artist, and following the chapters with samples from his discography during these years connects the two.

Or better put, understanding that Rollins often interrogated his own saxophone playing and reworked it explains how both his sound and style changed and developed through the years. The sound comes immediately out of the technique, so the blunt, Coleman Hawkins-esque gruffness of the mid-fifties was replaced by a much more fluid, richer tone after the bridge practice was over. This later changed into the warm, grainy sound of his later decades, heard by millions through his solos on three tracks on The Rolling Stones’ Tattoo You.

What feels intuitive, though maybe wrong, is that changing his sound got Rollins closer to the transparent communication of his ideas. And that’s where the titan reappears. The quizzical logic of his first period was replaced by a wandering curiosity, not just improvisations that seemed to flow above and beyond the context of the moment but explored the expressive possibilities of each note, like the wonderful, woozy, pushing and pulling with the tune of “On Green Dolphin Street” on the On Impulse album. After his second major break, from 1969–1971, his playing became an extraordinary combination of stream-of-consciousness, near-vocalized articulation, and enormous, extroverted energy. He added much more latin and funk to his music, and seemed happy to please the crowds wherever he went.

The man often comes through in the notebooks, ideas for books to write, things to tell to other musicians like Davis and Mingus, a reminder of the right size suspenders to wear, admonishments on how he’s treating himself. His thinking about himself in the notebooks is self-critical, but there’s no direct line from this to the ideas that come out through his horn. But that’s the elusiveness of the great artists, they are great because they think of things others can’t, and it’s so inherent to their beings; there’s no way to explain it. Except for the self-criticism, it’s what sets Rollins apart from just about everyone else, the way he repeatedly tore down his most basic ideas about his musicianship and built them back up, focussing brick by brick and letting the final form take care of itself. That rare frame of mind is on the page during the “Legacy” years when he writes:

Sonny—

Maybe think about retirement when listening to my playing (technically) at this point.