Since he came into his own in the mid-1950s, Rollins has exerted an inexorable pull on his fellow improvisers, influencing several generations of players. Berkeley-raised tenor sax star Joshua Redman, whose latest album, Back East, was consciously designed as a response to Rollins's 1957 classic, Way Out West, speaks for countless musicians (and not only saxophonists) when he describes the impact of hearing Rollins’s albums.

"It wasn't until I heard his records that I think I really became aware of the true power and potential of jazz improvisation," Redman says. "[Rollins] was the first improviser who made me aware of the potential balance that can be struck between complete spontaneity and always telling a story, always having a logic and an organic unity to an improvisation. Sonny Rollins could be completely in the moment and completely structured at the same time, and that really changed the way I thought about improvisation."

Stuart Brinin

Born Theodore Walter Rollins, he was raised in Harlem in the 1930s, a time and place where kids dreamed of becoming musicians. His neighborhood brimmed with musical talent—childhood friends included future jazz luminaries such as alto saxophonist Jackie McLean, drummer Art Taylor, and pianist Kenny Drew—but Rollins quickly developed a reputation as the most formidable young musician on the scene. After starting piano lessons at age 9, he moved to alto sax two years later. In his midteens, Rollins made the switch to the larger horn, inspired by the man who virtually invented the tenor as a jazz instrument.

"Coleman Hawkins was my idol, and I wanted to play like him," Rollins recalls. "I wanted to incorporate his sound, so I began using a tenor reed on my alto. That's why I really wanted to switch. When my mother was able to afford one, she got me a tenor."

During the first half of the '50s, he recorded as a side man with the leading figures in modern jazz, including trumpeters Miles Davis and Fats Navarro and pianists Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk. Rollins's career really took off when he joined the Max Roach/Clifford Brown Quintet in 1955, a band rivaled only by the Miles Davis Quintet as the top modern-jazz combo of the day. But it was his own recordings from 1956 to 1959, such as Saxophone Colossus, Way Out West, and A Night at the Village Vanguard, that made him the most revered and influential tenor saxophonist of the decade.

Indeed, the adulation became so overwhelming that at the end of the decade Rollins took the first of what he calls his "sabbaticals," withdrawing from the music business. But his legend only increased, as reports circulated that he was spending endless hours practicing on the Williamsburg Bridge.

"The people were getting very enthusiastic, and I had a pretty big jazz name after making all those records," Rollins says. "Being basically self-taught, I always felt not quite finished as a musician. I had something to live up to and felt I needed some more ammunition, so I went back in the woodshed, only in this case it was on the Bridge."

When he returned to the scene in 1962 with the aptly named The Bridge, Rollins had incorporated the rhythmic and harmonic freedom introduced in his absence by Ornette Coleman, while also drawing increasingly on the calypso beats to which he was first exposed by his Caribbean-born mother. It's an approach that he's still refining.

"Instead of getting more technical I wanted to go in the other direction and get more aboriginal, if you will," Rollins says. "There are possibilities in there. I'm hearing in the distance something that I haven't done yet."

Born and raised in Los Angeles, Andrew Gilbert is a Berkeley-based freelance writer who covers jazz and world music for the San Francisco Chronicle, Boston Globe, San Jose Mercury News, and San Diego Union-Tribune. His CD reviews air on KQED's California Report.

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