[www.dailypilot.com]

Humility on the sax
Tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins discusses his decades-long career before next week’s performance.

By Paul Anderson
Updated: Wednesday, April 22, 2009 8:53 PM PDT
There are No comments posted. View Comments

Sonny Rollins still tries to practice two hours a day.

He’s 78, one of the great jazz luminaries who has played with titans like Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk and Bud Powell, and they call him the Saxophone Colossus.

But, yes, that Sonny Rollins feels the need to rehearse that often.

“I’m still searching for that lost chord,” Rollins said in a recent telephone interview. “That’s what I hope to find even now, and I feel like I’m getting there. It’s a little more difficult these days. But if I can get two hours in a day then I feel like I accomplished a lot.”

Humility also drives him.

He may be one of the greatest saxophonists, but clearly the talk makes him uncomfortable.

“I do have trouble with that,” he says, referring to characterizations of him as an icon or luminary. “Maybe it’s because I have in my mind what I want to be doing and I know I still have a great gulf to what I want to be doing. But when someone praises me I’ve learned to accept it and be gracious. I’m grateful really that people have any kind of positive view of myself.”

He hears it often, but he’s most pleased when someone tells him how his music has helped them over the years.

“I’m certainly humble and happy to be involved in the arts. It’s a great life, man. I guess I could live another kind of life doing other things, but it’s so great to be an artist,” he said.

Rollins started out on piano then switched to alto sax, but ultimately settled on tenor. His early years featured recording with Bud Powell, and he also performed with Davis, Charlie Parker and Monk.

Along the way, through his decades-long career from the ’40s to today, he has taken two sabbaticals. Humility motivated them.

“I just felt I had so much more I should be doing, which is how I feel right now,” Rollins said. “But now even though I can’t practice as long as I used, to at least I’m able to practice any time I want like in the middle of the night.”

His first sabbatical from recording and performing in 1959 led him to “The Bridge,” one of his signature themes. He worried that his long practices might disturb a pregnant neighbor so he took his sax out to the Williamsburg Bridge in New York to wail.

“I practiced on the bridge because I wanted to improve myself. I’m a prolific practicer, but it just so happened there was a woman living in the next apartment who was pregnant so when I found the bridge it took that off my mind. I didn’t feel guilty about it,” he said.

The impetus for the second sabbatical in the early ’70s came while gigging in Japan when he got involved with a yoga club there.

“Later on I traveled to India to study yoga,” he said. “It’s still part of my life.”

He came out of that time off interested in more popular music like funk, and rhythm and blues, and eventually even agreed to play on the Rolling Stones’ “Tattoo You” album.

“A friend of mine, who was also a good friend of the Stones, told Charlie Watts, who’s a big jazz fan, about me so they came to see me one night in New York,” Rollins said. “A couple of weeks later Mick Jagger calls me up and asks me to play on the record. I didn’t know much about them, but my wife liked them. She was a big influence on doing that. I had heard of them, but I wondered why would I do it? It was a big challenge and I figured, OK, let me see if I can do it and make it come out like a whole so it doesn’t sound like I’m from Mars, but holistic. I went into the studio with Mick Jagger and laid down the tracks for the record. Subsequently when I listened to it I thought I had accomplished that.”

Later, after the record came out and it was a hit, Rollins found himself in a supermarket shopping when he heard something naggingly familiar.

“They had this music playing in the supermarket so I’m thinking, ‘Gee, there’s something funny about [the way this sounds], and then I think, ‘Hey, wait a minute, that’s me.’ I realized it was the Stones record and that was me playing on it.”

Rollins’ most recent work, “Road Shows, Vol. 1,” which came out last year, chronicles years of live performances. The audio quality varies, but it has a bootleg vibe that should please most jazz fans, especially those not too snobby to appreciate how accessible an artist he is. Rollins isn’t one to tend too much toward the abstract, instead aiming more to please his audience with flourishes of melody.

When he jams at the Orange County Performing Arts Center next week, though, don’t have any expectations either way.

“I have no set plans,” he said. “The stuff should be spontaneous to the most degree I can make it. And that’s it.”

IF YOU GO

WHAT: Sonny Rollins

WHERE: Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa.

WHEN: 8 p.m., April 30

COST: $25 to $82; discounted student rush tickets will be available for $15 an hour before the performance.

INFO: (714) 556-2787, ocpac.org.

Nice! I think he's a tad overrated (= nearly not as good as Coltrane for ex.) though.

Interesting. Thanks for posting this, I always wondered how the Stones/'Saxophone Colossus' collaboration came to be (not surprised it was through a Charlie connection). It's funny that Rollins first heard "Waiting on a Friend" in a supermarket!

It might have been "Slave"

i don't think sonny is over-rated at all. nobody ever accused him of being in coltrane's league. that said - his and coltrane's collaboration on tenor madness is perhaps the finest example of boppin' fours i've ever heard....keeps pace with mighty john just fine on that classic.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2009-04-23 20:24 by StonesTod.