<\/p>\n
US musician Sonny Rollins thought of music as the path to find universal truths – Copyright FERRARI PRESS OFFICE\/AFP Handout<\/small><\/em><\/p>\n Shaun TANDON<\/em><\/p>\n Sonny Rollins, the \u201cSaxophone Colossus\u201d whose hard-charging yet flowingly meditative works made him the last in a golden era of jazz greats, died Monday. He was 95.<\/p>\n \u201cIt is with deep sorrow and profound love that we announce the passing of Sonny Rollins,\u201d a post to his social media page said, adding that he \u201cdied this afternoon at his home in Woodstock, NY.\u201d<\/p>\n A constantly evolving creative force, Rollins found in jazz a means of social and spiritual commentary, with his tenor sax expressing the hopes of African Americans in the civil rights movement, the grief of the United States after the September 11 attacks, and the mystical path he found on extended retreats in India and Japan.<\/p>\n The Harlem-born Rollins \u2014 recognizable in his later years for a shock of white hair \u2014 was one of a handful of saxophone players who defined the instrument, a pantheon that includes Charlie Parker, Coleman Hawkins and John Coltrane, with whom he had an affectionate but complicated relationship.<\/p>\n But unlike so many artists from jazz\u2019s defining post-World War II period, Rollins lived a long life, remastering his work well into his 80s even as respiratory issues limited his performances.<\/p>\n In an interview with AFP, Rollins credited his longevity to yoga \u2014 which helped him to concentrate and stay off drugs and alcohol \u2014 but mostly to his creative thirst.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m still alive because I\u2019m still learning,\u201d Rollins said in the 2016 interview.<\/p>\n Among major saxophonists, Rollins\u2019 style was among the most biting \u2014 a heavy delivery that often struck rather than soothed the listener \u2014 yet he paradoxically was intricate and holistic about composing, describing music as a path to find universal truths.<\/p>\n He was dubbed the \u201cSaxophone Colossus\u201d after the title of his seminal 1956 album, in which he brought a new power to the instrument as he came to define hard bop \u2014 a jazz that was intense and stripped back the genre\u2019s structural confines.<\/p>\n The most enduring image of Rollins comes from the early 1960s when, needing a break from his rising fame, he would practice on the Williamsburg Bridge that connects Brooklyn and Manhattan\u2019s bustling Lower East Side, playing for nearly every waking hour over three years, even in the cold.<\/p>\n The very public sabbatical produced one of his best-known albums, 1962\u2019s \u201cThe Bridge,\u201d and has led to proposals to rename the Williamsburg Bridge in Rollins\u2019 honor.<\/p>\n Rollins also crossed over to a non-jazz audience with occasional forays into rock, most notably his appearances on The Rolling Stones\u2019 1981 album \u201cTattoo You.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2013 Childhood of discovery \u2013<\/p>\n Born to parents who moved to New York from the US Virgin Islands, Rollins incorporated some of the inflections of his heritage into his jazz.<\/p>\n \u201cSt. Thomas,\u201d which appeared on \u201cSaxophone Colossus\u201d and became his best-known song, incorporated Caribbean calypso that he had heard as a child.<\/p>\n Raised in Harlem, the epicenter of African American culture, Rollins recalled that his early musical education came from the Apollo Theater where he would watch its celebrated amateur nights.<\/p>\n By his 20s, Rollins had already managed to play with jazz legends including Parker, Miles Davis and especially Thelonious Monk.<\/p>\n The young Rollins would hang out at Monk\u2019s apartment and played on the pianist\u2019s classic 1957 album \u201cBrilliant Corners.\u201d<\/p>\n Coltrane\u2019s relationship with Rollins has often been described as one of rivalry. Both explored new directions in jazz and became fascinated with Indian spirituality.<\/p>\n Whereas Coltrane brought grace and a gentle texture, Rollins arguably delivered a firmer sense of music\u2019s ebbs and flows, crafting jazz in the manner of a classical composer.<\/p>\n Coltrane, who died of cancer in 1967, is only known to have recorded once with his contemporary, on the title track of Rollins\u2019 1956 album \u201cTenor Madness.\u201d<\/p>\n Rollins, reflecting on his nearly seven-decade career in the 2016 interview with AFP, said he had perhaps been too brash with the legends around him.<\/p>\n \u201cI look back on my relationship with Coltrane, and my relationship with Monk \u2014 a lot of stupid things I did with those people that I would not have done if I was more mature,\u201d said Rollins, who called Coltrane \u201ca beautiful, beautiful human being.\u201d<\/p>\n Rollins\u2019 manager and wife of nearly 40 years, Lucille, died in 2004.<\/p>\n \u2013 Sax \u2018from subconscious\u2019 \u2013<\/p>\n Rollins followed \u201cSaxophone Colossus\u201d with 1957\u2019s \u201cWay Out West,\u201d in which he introduced his technique of \u201cstrolling\u201d \u2014 saxophone solos that would flow over drum and bass, without the piano chords that traditionally kept jazz ensembles in key.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen I play and I improvise, I don\u2019t think, because music comes from the subconscious, someplace else,\u201d Rollins told news site The Root.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m just a human, so when I play my horn, I get into a state where the\u00a0music plays me. I\u2019m just standing up there and fingering my horn and blowing,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Rollins embraced yoga, finding that the breathing techniques and especially the concentration gave him a new fluency with his instrument.<\/p>\n In a sequel to his Williamsburg Bridge years, Rollins took a second sabbatical starting in 1966, learning Zen meditation in Japan before spending several years in an ashram in India, where he arrived with just a bag and his saxophone.<\/p>\n Under the guidance of Swami Chinmayananda on the outskirts of Mumbai, Rollins devoted his days to reading and discussing sacred Vedic texts. He rarely performed, although he later brought his spiritual quest into his music in compositions such as \u201cPatanjali,\u201d named for the great yoga master.<\/p>\n Jazz artists \u201cwere trying to find a way to express life through our improvisations. The music has got to mean something,\u201d Rollins later told National Public Radio.<\/p>\n \u2013 Bold civil rights statement \u2013<\/p>\n Rollins found a new purpose to music with \u201cFreedom Suite,\u201d his 1958 work that spoke to the rising struggle of African Americans for equal rights.<\/p>\n If musically the 20-minute instrumental piece reflected Rollins\u2019 artistic freedom in the abstract, he made no secret of its political bent, penning a message in the liner notes that was strikingly bold for an artist of the era.<\/p>\n \u201cAmerica is deeply rooted in Negro culture: its colloquialisms; its humor; its music. How ironic that the Negro, who more than any other people can claim America\u2019s culture as his own, is being persecuted and repressed; that the Negro, who has exemplified the humanities in his very existence, is being rewarded with inhumanity,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n \u201cFreedom Suite,\u201d led by Rollins\u2019 confident sax and also notable for Max Roach\u2019s drumming, proved controversial enough that a reissue chose another title for the album. Rollins recalled that he was confronted about the piece when he performed in the US South.<\/p>\n Rollins similarly championed Black pride on \u201cAiregin,\u201d another of his best-known pieces which is rigorously quick-paced \u2014 and whose title is an anagram for Nigeria.<\/p>\n Rollins found another purpose to his art after the September 11, 2001 attacks, when he was living just six blocks from the doomed World Trade Center. He had to walk down 40 flights of stairs to evacuate his building and felt ill from the fumes.<\/p>\n Nonetheless, Rollins played four days later in Boston \u2014 driving there as flights were grounded \u2014 for a concert that became a live album of remembrance to victims of the attack.<\/p>\n Rollins recalled feeling a sort of serenity as he returned to New York, finding a new empathy in the metropolis.\u00a0<\/p>\n But Rollins, who later moved to a farm in upstate New York where he had space to meditate, would grow pessimistic at humanity\u2019s prospects.<\/p>\n Rollins said that, in the 1960s, he and other artists felt that music could bring peace to the world.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cBut then I learned, and I lived a little longer,\u201d he told AFP.<\/p>\n \u201cI realized that this world will never change. This world is meant to be a place of war, killing, everything \u2014 sickness, illness, death. That\u2019s this world.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.digitaljournal.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" US musician Sonny Rollins thought of music as the path to find universal truths – Copyright FERRARI PRESS OFFICE\/AFP Handout Shaun TANDON Sonny Rollins, the \u201cSaxophone Colossus\u201d whose hard-charging yet flowingly meditative works made him the last in a golden era of jazz greats, died Monday. He was 95. \u201cIt is with deep sorrow and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2432723,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25179],"tags":[21741,362738,21800,477296,25423],"class_list":["post-2432722","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-music","tag-entertainment","tag-hide","tag-music","tag-rollins","tag-us"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Sonny-Rollins-last-jazz-colossus-dead-at-95.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2432722","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2432722"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2432722\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2432724,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2432722\/revisions\/2432724"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2432723"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2432722"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2432722"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2432722"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}