In May 2008 I interviewed Rollins for a feature that ran in The Australian, republished below. He was happy to stay on the phone for nearly an hour and eager to share his thoughts and memories:
WHEN Sonny Rollins, the jazz world's greatest living tenor saxophonist, steps on to an Australian stage for the first time, audience members may be surprised when he launches into Half as Much, a tune by country legend Hank Williams.
To say this is hardly standard jazz repertoire would be an understatement, yet for Rollins it's all of a piece. After all, when he released his trio album Way Out West, in 1957, he raised eyebrows with a track listing that included the Bob Crosby ditty I'm an Old Cowhand.
Still, it's a safe bet that Half as Much will feature little of Williams's twang and sound very much like Rollins. He is almost the archetypal tenor saxophonist. Think of a deep, warm and richly textured sound at the lower, sexier end of the instrument's register, a sound as capable of communicating tenderness as truculence. Then try to imagine a constant line of surprises in the choice of notes and phrasing. As British saxophonist John Surman puts it, "You can wait for 20 minutes or so before you even hear one of his own favourite phrases, let alone a cliche."
"Sometimes we're supposed to go Australia after Japan, but usually we have such a hard tour in Japan that we've said, 'Well, we can't do any more,' so we come back to the States. But I have been anxious to get to Australia for quite a long time."
But next to Coleman and the other great tenor player of his era, John Coltrane, Rollins's music remains comparatively accessible while being harder to define or pin down. He has been associated with two important jazz movements, bebop and (more briefly) free jazz, but has never been contained by them: a deliberate decision, as he makes clear.
"I feel that music is a unifying force and there's nothing I like better than playing for people of different backgrounds and finding they like my work," he says. He loves it when people tell him they don't like jazz but they do like his music, "because the music I'm trying to play, I don't want it to be in a box and 'It's got to be hard bop or straight-ahead jazz.' These are great musics, but my aim is to use music as a positive unifying force."
Born Theodore Walter Rollins in Harlem, New York City, he was mentored by eccentric piano genius Thelonious Monk and played with Miles Davis before the age of 20. After a spell with the Clifford Brown-Max Roach Quintet, Rollins established his name as a band leader and improviser with unusual powers of invention.
Taking an unexpected tune, such as How are Things in Glocca Morra from the musical Finian's Rainbow, he could turn corn into gold. His approach to unlikely material has been called ironic, implying emotional distance, even parody. But, as Rollins says, "when I play these disparate songs from different cultures, I do it with love. I do it because, No.1, I like the melodies and so on, and also because I think that jazz is such a worldwide music that it should be used as a way to bring people together.
"I've played songs associated with the old south, like Rock-a-Bye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody. Now people, critics and so forth, realised I was playing it very seriously but with a real jazz sensibility. I wasn't playing it as if I was somewhere in the deep south. I think they found that ironic, that I could use this material and turn it into something that was very definitely jazz music, and serious jazz music, and at the same time this song would represent something else in its original incarnation."
His take is that he's aiming for a form of jazz improvisation that everyone can appreciate, regardless of individual taste. "I'm interested in getting to a place where the music is getting back to be the music that it should be ... Jazz to me is the greatest music because you have the possibilities of utilising all sorts of music: European classical music, folk music. So this is what my improvisation is trying to get to."
This explains his sanguine views on the state of contemporary jazz. There has been much discussion in the past decade about whether jazz has stopped progressing and become backward-looking. Pondering the issue, Rollins cites Art Kane's celebrated 1958 photograph for Esquire magazine of great jazz players from different generations, in which he can be seen alongside elder statesmen such as Roy Eldridge and Lester Young.
"In that picture you see so many great artists from different periods that were together," he says. "So one could look back and say: 'Jazz had its golden age in the '50s, so now there's no place for jazz to go.' Of course, I wouldn't subscribe to that view. For one thing, I feel that hip-hop and all of these modern musics are under the umbrella of jazz. To say that jazz has reached this apogee and is looking back, no, I don't think so. I think jazz is so much of a vital, contemporary, spontaneous form of music that it still has to be discovered. I'm trying to do that myself."
He says movements such as swing, bebop and free jazz are passe as a way of thinking about jazz. "Now is the time to blossom and be the music that transcends everything and includes everything. Jazz is like nature. Every day a different sky, a different cloud, a different rainbow: this is something that jazz represents. I'm trying to exemplify everything in jazz. It's something that takes in the bigger picture."
"I've been fortunate in my life to appear with some of the great musicians of my time and I know what good music is: you know, my resume is amazing! And in my case, I came into the music as the youngest person of my group. I consider myself a work in progress. Even today I still practise every day, I'm still composing, so I haven't reached my ideal, what I want to do yet as a musician."
That sounds a lot like the perpetually searching Coltrane, who seems to exert a surprising posthumous influence on the intense title track of Sonny Please. "Oh sure, I'm unashamedly influenced by everybody!" Rollins exclaims.
"At the time we were playing together, it was harder (to take on Coltrane's approach) because we were looked on as contemporaries." But since then, he says, he has been able to incorporate into his playing aspects of Coltrane's style as well as that of Coleman Hawkins, Ben Webster and Young. "I'm still getting it together. The idea that 'this is Sonny's style', I don't want that. I always want to be searching."
