The album is called “A Night at The ‘Village Vanguard’ ”; it features Rollins in a trio, with only bass and drums, no piano, the effect of which is to maximize the saxophonist’s solo time and to omit the pianist’s habitual chordal signposting during his solos. He had done this in a studio session, earlier that year, but this album was in fact a live date, or, rather, two: a cut from an afternoon set at the celebrated (and still-running) New York club, added to five tracks from a nighttime session with a trio that was assembled at the last minute, indeed between sets, with the bassist Wilbur Ware and the drummer Elvin Jones. Ware is himself a distinctively melodic bassist, and Rollins called Jones’s unique approach to rhythm “liberating” and “universal.” The coalescence of these artists, along with the stimulation of the concert setting, led to a musical conflagration of a rare intensity. Upon learning of Rollins’s passing, I recalled the opening track, “Old Devil Moon,” as the first Rollins recording I’d ever heard, on a jazz radio station in New York, around 1973; at just about the same moment, a younger friend e-mailed to let me know that the first Rollins he’d ever heard, years later, was “Softly, as in a Morning Sunrise,” from the same album. It can’t be everyone’s first Rollins, but it’s the archway into Rollins-ism, something like a concept album that defines both his ideal—the band as sustenance for solos of wide-ranging exploration—and a crux of his style, at once extending the complexity of bebop and untangling it in the lyrical declamation of a monologue-like solo voice. (“Old Devil Moon” is part of a playlist of Rollins favorites, linked below.)
Some musicians evolve, others effect personal revolutions. Rollins is in the latter category, and his work bears the shuddering force of his drastic, self-imposed transitions. To hear Rollins in the late fifties is to hear the lion roar. He sat in with the Modern Jazz Quartet in 1958 and tore through a couple of modern classics with an understated, seemingly effortless ferocity. He went on a European tour as part of a trio in 1959, and the resulting bootlegs reveal that he played with similar fervor—yet, after he returned to his Lower East Side home that summer, he went on a hiatus and didn’t play in public again until late 1961, didn’t record until 1962. The story is amply unfolded in Aidan Levy’s meticulously detailed biography of Rollins, “Saxophone Colossus”: Rollins wanted both to study music and to stop drinking. The New York jazz world was rocked by the arrival of Ornette Coleman and his quartet, whose efforts to detach improvisation from songs’ harmonic patterns opened vistas of instant modernism akin to the bebop transformations of the early forties, and Rollins was jolted. The times would not pass him by, even if it took him a few years of rigorously disciplined self-transformation to catch up with them.
He did his practicing on an underused walkway on the Williamsburg Bridge, near the apartment where he lived with his wife, Lucille. Eventually, some fellow-musicians joined him; the saxophonist Jackie McLean recalled, “Sonny could blow these low blasts that had tugboats answering him from down below in the water.” His time there was already a prime jazz myth as it was happening. (Amanda Petrusich wrote, for this magazine, about an effort to rename the bridge for Rollins.) When he emerged, his sound was starker, its textures even rougher, with far more weight on the isolated, monumental power of individual notes. Yet his method was also more freely associative, his phrases both rhythmically looser and more abrupt. It was music of profound searching, its bold assertions tempered by self-questioning, and, as a result, it was thrillingly risky, impetuous, uncertain. Inspiration arose in wildly different contexts. A 1965 European tour, again in a trio, turned gigs into largely uninterrupted monologues à trois, with Rollins launching into tunes as abruptly as he departed from them, shifting tempi on the fly, guiding his accompanists as if conducting an orchestra. On the other hand, he composed and played the score for the 1966 British movie “Alfie,” then recorded an album of those tunes with a near-big band—and, within that restrained context, unleashed solos of resonant, full-voiced, loftily declamatory ardor.
