Collection: Sonny Rollins

Sonny Rollins grew up in Harlem's Sugar Hill neighbourhood, the same stretch of 155th Street that produced Coleman Hawkins and Thelonious Monk as neighbours, and was playing professionally in his teens. He recorded with Babs Gonzales, Bud Powell and Fats Navarro before he was twenty, and had already written "Oleo," "Airegin" and "Doxy" as jazz standards by the time his own name appeared above the title. He joined the Clifford Brown and Max Roach Quintet in late 1955, appeared on "At Basin Street" alongside Brown, and continued with Roach after Brown's death in June 1956. "Saxophone Colossus" (Prestige, 1956), recorded at Van Gelder's studio with Tommy Flanagan, Doug Watkins and Max Roach ten days after the Brown-Roach quintet's last session, introduced "St. Thomas," a calypso his mother had sung him, and announced a saxophonist whose approach to melodic improvisation was genuinely new. "Way Out West" (Contemporary, 1957), a piano-less trio with Ray Brown and Shelly Manne, proved the point differently. Then in 1959, at the height of his fame, he stopped performing, found a spot on the Williamsburg Bridge above the East River and practised alone up to sixteen hours a day for two years. He said he needed to find himself as a musician rather than as a celebrity. He came back in 1962, named his return album "The Bridge," and spent another decade recording prolifically before leaving again, this time for an ashram in India. He returned to performing in 1972 and continued until pulmonary fibrosis forced his retirement in 2012. He lived another fourteen years after that. Sonny Rollins died at his home in Woodstock, New York on May 25, 2026, aged 95, having been widely considered America's greatest living jazz musician for most of the last twenty years.