Unused Sonny Rollins op-ed

Wednesday 5/27/26

Same deal.

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Sonny Rollins and loving jazz.

It’s always a good time to fall in love with jazz, and no artist better embodied that idea than tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins.

His death at the age of ninety-five means there’s one less physically connective strand to a period in this country’s popular culture—Rollins’ artistic heyday of the mid-1950s—when a cerebral art form like jazz made inroads with the masses. If you went to a bar, chances were a baseball game was playing on the radio or else a jukebox featuring sides by the man known as Newk.

Rollins didn’t blaze trails in the manner of a Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, or John Coltrane, but in the period prior to his self-enforced three-year sabbatical at the end of the ‘50s, he adventured as a soul in love with this improvisational music in which he acquitted himself so proficiently.

Rollins made what we might think of as a “light” concept album in 1957’s Way Out West, as recommendable a place as any for someone to begin their jazz journey. He had a gift for “clicking” with listeners. You listen to him the first time and it feels like you’ve been listening to him for a long time. His music is the jazz version of that friend with whom you always fall back into synch.

Our culture is starved for this kind of real connection. Whether that’s between people or between people and the things they could love. We’ll often make a show of what we think we’re supposed to love. One sees, for instance, the Instagram photo of stacked compendious tomes—War and Peace, Moby-Dick, The Brothers Karamazov—and the not-so-innocent question of “What should I read next?” which we know is for attention “points.”

In jazz, a “heavy” like Coltrane’s A Love Supreme takes myriad turns at the “look at me, aren’t I a smart person” wheel, but for the listening pleasure of what Ellington called sweet thunder, try Rollins’ A Night at the Village Vanguard, also from ’57.

The best anything in life—including music—stands outside of time. We press play on the twelve-minute jazz track and are ferried away to a place beyond ourselves which is also within ourselves and it’s as though no time has passed.

That’s what it’s like to listen to Rollins, a gateway master. Do so, and you’ll in turn listen to more jazz, for the right reasons. Which is to say, not for show, and because you feel like you must. Listen to more jazz, and you become a different version of yourself.

Jazz listening requires presence. Active listening. Few of us excel at this pursuit, but we can get better. When we’re talking with others, we’re often waiting for our chance to speak. That isn’t the same as hearing them. So it goes with jazz and Rollins will help you out.

He blended soul, blues, rhythm and blues, the rhythms of swing, with hep cat courtliness, albeit inflected with urban grittiness. His solos can suggest both a Piet Mondrian painting and a field holler recorded by Alan Lomax.

Rollins’ 1956 magnum opus, Saxophone Colossus, sums him up with its title. This is the player as force of nature and musical skyline of the big, life-filled city. A rare work of art that we may correctly term perfect because it is perfectly itself.

We encounter bad sitcom type jokes about why would anyone voluntarily listen to jazz if they don’t have to, made by people who’ve likely never heard any jazz, and certainly nothing by Rollins.

Don’t let your life slip away without listening to Newk. Instead, cue up a Rollins tune and pretend you’ve wandered into a bar on a late spring day and dropped a dime in the jukebox to hear some of the silkiest, most euphonic music there is. Music with melodies to ease your burdens, rhythms to liven up your heart. That Sonny Rollins groove.

Except you’re here and it’s right now, and the world no longer sounds quite the same, and won’t ever again.