The Notebooks of Sonny Rollins
Image by Dim Hou.
The Notebooks of Sonny Rollins
Edited by Sam V.H. Reese
Published in 2024 by New York Review Book
Sonny Rollins did something highly unusual in modern entertainment: he ascended to the top of his field and then dropped off the radar. Vanished. Disappeared.
The legend is Rollins was dissatisfied with his sound and looking for a new way to play the saxophone. He began woodshedding at the Williamsburg Bridge. He wouldn’t come down until he nailed it. The reality is somewhat different.
Rollins dropped out so he could clean up. He’d been to jail twice already for a drug conviction and he didn’t want to go back. He dropped out to save himself, just as Miles Davis and John Coltrane had done. The fact that he is still alive today can be traced to this decision.
Sonny Was a Star Before The Notebooks Begin
The Notebooks of Sonny Rollins begin on the Williamsburg Bridge in 1961. That means they contain nothing about Rollins’ amazing ten year struggle against drugs and law enforcement, booking agents and club owners, defective instruments and difficult compositions, to become the leading tenor saxophone player in jazz, hailed as a genius of improvisation and lyricism.
The Notebooks do not cover the creative canon that began with Sonny Rollins Quartet in 1951 until A Night at the Village Vanguard in 1959, including the iconic albums, Saxophone Colossus (1956) and Way Out West (1957). For the early life of Sonny Rollins, turn to Aaron Levy’s mammoth biography, Saxophone Colossus (Hachette Books, 2022). Levy spends three hundred pages on Rollins’ life before he drops out and heads to the bridge. You can read my extensive review of that book elsewhere, but there are a couple things you should know before you encounter The Notebooks:
* Sonny Rollins’ family was from the Virgin Islands. He didn’t consider himself Black. Racial lines were subtle in the melting pot of New York and Islanders were typically wealthier and better educated than African Americans.
* Sonny Rollins’ father achieved a high rank in the U.S. Navy, only to be court-martialed in 1946 for hosting an interracial party. The trial was sensationalized in the press and his father received a six-year prison sentence. Sonny was 16 years old at the time.
* Sonny himself went to jail at Rikers Island in 1951 for drug offenses and was returned to prison in 1954 when he violated his parole. He met many other musicians in jail, including pianists Randy Weston and Elmo Hope.
The Tristano Method
When you get to The Notebooks, all this is water under the bridge. The Notebooks start with a refined statement of Rollins’ goal at this intersection in his life: “The instantaneous creation of music — an unbroken link from thought to thing — immediately — at once — intelligently — but with emotion.” It’s not a sentence; more like strung together fragments, which is typical of the largely spontaneous prose of the journal-like entries in The Notebooks.
Throughout Rollins’ six-decade run as the leading tenor in jazz, he expresses the desire to play unaccompanied. The bridge gave him all the opportunity he needed to blow for hours without disturbing the neighbors or yielding to band mates. The best way to see what this looked like is to watch the video of Rollins’ acapella appearance on The Tonight Show in 1979. He blows the whole history of jazz in five ferocious minutes.
There is a great deal of discussion of saxophone technique in the book that will be much appreciated by anyone playing a wind instrument. But there’s also a lot of philosophy between the lessons on fingering and breathing. “If at first you don’t succeed,” Rollins’ advises, “try to suck again.”
Like his friend, colleague, and competitor, John Coltrane, Rollins’ practice regimen was legendary. They both subscribed to “the Tristano method” taught by blind piano virtuoso, Lenny Tristano. Charlie Parker employed the Tristano method and Coltrane and Rollins both admired and patterned themselves after Parker.
The Tristano method is learning to sing a song first, including the solo, before playing it on the instrument. Then play it in all twelve keys, until you can move the melody from one key to another at will. Then run it at a variety of tempos. Once you’ve learned a tune this way, you can improvise on it endlessly.
The end goal is, as Rollins states euphorically, “To create — on the spot — intelligently — intuitively — and with feeling and emotion: this, then, is man in his finest hour.” The opposite, as Rollins writes 30 years later after a lackluster performance, is “an awful feeling, not being able to formulate your ideas on stage.”
Religion and Racism
One very interesting thread running through the notebooks is Rosicrucianism. Rollins is extremely well read in religion, history, economics, and the science of sound. Rosicrucianism is a religion grounded in color theory and sound theory and practiced by many musicians.
On page 77 of The Notebooks, in the early 1960s, trumpeter Don Cherry introduces Rollins to the color scale, assigning hues to keys. On page 102-103, a decade later, Rollins provides an expanded grid that includes fragrances, moods, and colors associated with major keys. One of the half dozen pencil sketches in The Notebooks is a self portrait of Rollins over a Rosicrucian text.
The trickiest topic in the book is racism. Rollins is a victim of it, even though he does not at first see himself as Black. “I am of the gold race,” he writes, trying to get a handle on the issue. “[G]reat care should be taken to not synonimize Negro and Jazz and not to depict Jazz as a Negro product,” he writes on the bridge.
It is wonderful, therefore, to watch Rollins’ evolution from seeing the problem as a racial issue to seeing it as an economic issue: “Whiteness is an illusion,” he writes. “Whiteness is however a social fact, an identity created and continued with all too real consequences for the distribution of wealth, prestige and opportunity.”
Rollins comes to see capitalism as the problem that keeps people of color from achieving equal opportunity. The transformation is similar to that of Helen Keller, who at first blamed blindness on disease before concluding the cause was capitalism keeping people ignorant and poor.
In the end, The Notebooks veer off into a series of tributes and eulogies as Rollins outlives all his contemporaries. The great saxophonist, composer and entertainer turns 94 on September 7. He has become increasingly interested and vocal about global issues and uses the many award ceremonies he attends to press for climate action. In The Notebooks, he comes to peace, at last, with his own gifts and contributions, realizing he is, indeed, “one of the most innovative improvisers in history.”
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