Sonny Rollins (1930–2026), requiescat in pace

The year is 1983. I’m 18 years old and I’ve got a Saturday job working in Freeman, Hardy and Willis, a shoe shop on Pier Avenue, Clacton-on-Sea. By this time of life I’ve fallen in love with jazz music. I’m learning to play both the electric bass and double bass, and I’m trying to listen to anything and everything I can. Fortunately for me, just a little way further up Pier Avenue there’s a small jazz record outlet situated above a leather goods shop, and at lunchtime — when I’d be given my wages, in cash and in a little brown envelope — I’d immediately walk up the road and climb the narrow stairs with a sense of excited expectancy to see what jazz gem I was to buy that week. The owner — whose name, alas, I forget — was a genuine jazz aficionado and he’d always try his level best to help me find something that would hit the appropriate spot, and which, of course, I could also afford! It was from there that I bought the single most important album of my “jazz life”: Miles Davis’ extraordinary 1970 album, Bitches Brew. More than any other record, this was the one that made me realise — crazy though the idea was — that I had to become a jazz bassist. Astonishingly, that stupid, foolish idea came to pass. But, like all things, there were some vital steps — that is to say, records — along the way to that (for me) monumental realisation: Dave Brubeck’s Time Out and Time Further Out, The Modern Jazz Quartet’s Last Concert, Soft Machine’s Third, to name but a few. But another key record was also bought in that little shop on Pier Avenue, one that the owner put me on to: a Prestige two-fer by Sonny Rollins called Saxophone Colossus and More that contained tracks from three sessions from 1956, all with both Sonny Rollins and Max Roach. Indeed, many people consider the tracks from the Saxophone Colossus album to be some of Rollins’ finest and most influential — an opinion with which I wholly concur.

Two tracks on this Prestige two-fer opened my ears to a couple of key things for which I will remain eternally grateful.

The first was “Blue 7”, where the double bass player (Doug Watkins) plays a B♭ blues bass line that plays upon the ambiguity/dissonance of the flattened 5th. “Wow, that sounds great!” I thought and, at the first opportunity — likely the following Sunday morning — I transcribed the bass line. It blew me away.

The second was the bass line for “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face” (played by George Morrow) which, to my unsophisticated and musically innocent ears, seemed so melodic that for a long while I simply thought of it as a counter-melody rather than as a bass line that was unfolding the harmony of the underlying chord structure of the tune. Although today, as I listen to it again, I can hear there’s nothing particularly striking about it in absolute terms, in subjective terms it really was (and still is) striking, and I know that it was the first time I fully realised that a bass line didn't need to be in any way prosaic as it did its necessary job in a quartet.

But, of course, these bass lines were not standing alone; they were there as the necessary support for the wonderful, life-affirming playing of Sonny Rollins which so captivated me that, over the years, every now and then I’d buy another LP by him. In this way his distinctive jazz voice slowly became an important and enduring part of my life. His move to a more electric sound from 1972 onwards also played a part in my finding a way to play the electric bass in a jazz context that felt good and natural to me.

And this morning, I heard that Sonny had died, aged 95. Perhaps inevitably, it caused me immediately to put on Saxophone Colossus (1956), then The Bridge (1962), then Sonny Rollins’ Next Album (1972), back to Alfie (1966), then back a bit further to his early Prestige sessions, including those with Miles Davis, Miles Davis with Horns (1951).

Like every other fan, it’s a sad day indeed. But, miracle of miracles, wonder of wonders, we are so fortunate that we still have the astonishing music he recorded and which is playing as I write this.

But I want to finish by noting a delightful connection with the attitude to life that Sonny Rollins shared with my great free-religious exemplar, Imaoka Shin'ichirō (1881–1988).

Imaoka-sensei famously said many, many times throughout his long life (eventually dying in 1988, aged 106) that there really was “no graduation from the University of Life”, and when he was 92 and lying seriously ill in hospital he wrote:

I believe that life is a journey with no end-point. Of course, there may be occasional points of arrival, but they are not the end — they are only stages along the way. The meaning of life lies not in the end-point but in the journey itself. It lies not in completion but in incompleteness. Even if it is only a stage, even if it is incomplete, if there is tension, fulfilment, improvement, and development, then every day is a good day. How one dies does not matter.

Well, in the obituary in today's Guardian newspaper, Ben Beaumont-Thomas concludes with the following paragraph: 

[Sonny Rollins] once said that his aim was ‘to reach a level where I will never cease to make progress’ and even in 2013, just before his retirement, he was arguing he still had much to do: ‘People say, “Sonny, take it easy, lean back. Your place is secure. You’re the great Sonny Rollins; you’ve got it made.” I hear that and I think, “Well, screw Sonny Rollins. Where I want to go is beyond Sonny Rollins. Way beyond.”’

Maybe that’s why I so admire both Imaoka Shin’ichirō and Sonny Rollins; both of them never stopped creatively pushing ever deeper into the ever-unfolding “Great Life of free and unobstructed creative evolution” [自由で無碍な創造的進化の大生命]. Both of them may now be dead in a conventional sense, but in truth, I find their words and music still to be living and, as such, they are still with us, encouraging us to live in just such a creative fashion, open to the future. Yes, indeed, there is “no graduation from the University of Life”, and Sonny Rollins’ music will forever be a powerful voice making up the sound of that Great Life blowing where it wills . . . 

Requiescat in pace, Sonny. 

Sonny Rollins (1930–2026)