Legendary jazz musician Sonny Rollins has passed away, age 95. Impermanence is swift.
Rollins was the last surviving member of the infamous A Great Day in Harlem photograph, except possibly some of the children who photobombed the picture, and Sonny may well have outlived many of them.
Rollins was a tenor saxophone master with a great, full-bodied tone and an incredible ability to improvise beautiful melodic tunes, and his only problem was to have lived during the same timeframe as John Coltrane. Miles Davis famously picked Coltrane over Rollins for his first quartet, and Coltrane ushered in an era of new jazz where timbre and technique were more important than melody. A joke going around in the 1960s went, "Anyone know what happened to Sonny? I heard he got hit by a Trane."
It was just Sonny's luck to have died the day before what would have been Miles' 100th birthday, and all the tributes and retrospectives on Miles' career and discography had already been written and recorded, ready to be published, released, and played today.
Here's one of my favorite Rollins' performance, his cover of We Kiss In a Shadow, a Rogers and Hammerstein composition from The King and I, performed with Jimmy Garrison and Elvin Jones, Coltrane's rhythm section, recorded at Van Gelder Studio, home of Coltrane's most iconic albums, and released on Impulse! records, "the house that Trane built." In other words, here he is filling in for Coltrane showing another direction that jazz could have gone, but instead he followed this 1966 recording with a six-year hiatus, visiting Jamaica and spending several months studying yoga, meditation, and Eastern philosophy at an ashram in India.
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