The Notebooks of Sonny Rollins

In The Spectator, Philip Clark tells the story of Sonny Rollins, who changed the face of jazz tenor saxophone, and introduces a new book on Rollins titled The Notebooks of Sonny Rollins. Clark writes:

Now aged ninety-three and retired from performance since 2012 due to a lung condition, Rollins keeps a kindly, but definitely steely, eye on a musical scene he once dominated. When he donated his archive to the New York Public Library in 2017, his personal journals occupied what the editor of this new volume, Sam V.H. Reese, describes as “a hefty six boxes,” and The Notebooks of Sonny Rollins turns out to be a distillation of that material, presented as a bricolage of thoughts and ideas designed to coalesce into a mind-map of Rollins’s thinking from the late 1950s, when famously he vanished from the jazz scene for three years, to today.

Rollins kept returning to the possibility of documenting his thoughts about music and other spin-off ideas inside a book, which he variously considered titling Fantastic Saxophone, The Fraternity of Saxophone or The Saxophone Brotherhood, but it was a project that proved beyond him. Here are the workings-out for that never-completed book, scattered over 150 pages, sometimes with text arranged in dense clumps, others with aphoristic thoughts marooned in white space as though in a poem by e. e. cummings. Implicit in its publication is the admission that Rollins will now never complete his book as intended — but perhaps he was never temperamentally suited to taking a settled view on something as mercurial as improvised music, to fixing ideas between two covers.

The book opens in 1959, a year often celebrated as a milestone in the development of modern jazz — when Coltrane (Giant Steps), Miles Davis (Kind of Blue), Charles Mingus (Mingus Ah Um), Dave Brubeck (Time Out) and Ornette Coleman (The Shape of Jazz To Come) all delivered game-changing albums — artistic highs tempered by the miserably premature deaths of the tenor saxophonist Lester Young, a formative influence on the young Rollins, and of Billie Holiday. Rollins, though, was feeling burned out, and disappeared into the night following a highly successful European tour, during which he had been feted as the pre-eminent modern jazz hero. The three-year sabbatical that followed was, initially, about finding a way of reinventing his approach to the saxophone and toward improvisation; and it was during this period that his obsessive notetaking began, with topics including music, politics and spirituality. His performing career on hold, Rollins clearly needed another outlet for the thoughts that were crowding his brain.

The mythology is even more dramatic because he quite literally disappeared into the night. Finding his apartment acoustically unsuitable to rituals of saxophone practice (and just think of the poor neighbors), he took to practicing underneath the main structure of the Williamsburg Bridge in New York City, hunkering down inside an alcove where he could be overheard but not easily seen and therefore disturbed. These practice sessions extended over many hours, and occasionally he put in all-nighters. Once he returned to active performance in 1961, the next year’s comeback album was inevitably called The Bridge. The mythomania surrounding him, those restless nocturnal wanderings, the lone genius finding his art again by improvising to the sound of the city, set concrete-hard. Unlike Coltrane, whose every album from Africa Brass to A Love Supreme and beyond marked the realization of yet another striking new way of conceptualizing improvisation, The Bridge proved disappointing to many. After three years of self-improvement, was this selection of largely standard tunes, climaxing with Cole Porter’s “You Do Something To Me,” really state-of-the-art material? Reese speculates that Rollins’s sabbatical has long been misunderstood. In fact, it was never about reaching into the cosmos to find fresh concepts destined to change eve- rything. On the contrary, as jazz was becoming increasingly conceptual, Rollins was concerned that too many musicians were neglecting the basics. His goal was not revolution — he was motivated to achieve complete technical “mastership.”

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