The Olympian Present: Goodbye and Thank You, Sonny Rollins

His genius could never be contained, only glimpsed in fleeting, incandescent moments

Starting at the timestamp here are nine of the most riveting seconds of musicianship I’ve ever come across:

The sound is flowing out of the horn like magma, right on the edge of control. The breath force is staggering — the notes pelt you with the shock of hailstones. It’s just one of countless bravura moments that follow in this incredible 1980 live performance of “Keep Hold of Yourself,” a Sonny Rollins original from 1972’s Next Album.

For me, these nine seconds sum up how Sonny Rollins was really not apprehensible in anything but such fleeting, incandescent episodes — striving after a kind of Olympian present, pushing and pushing while remaining ever-anchored in song, drawing on the “jukebox of the unconscious” (as his biographer Aidan Levy brilliantly put it) that he kept inside his head. It was a breaking free but it was not “free jazz” nor was it anything else that has a convenient name. It was about riding the wave of the song and, at least in my personal favorite Sonny moments, generating a fearsome momentum that you wished would last forever.

Sonny Rollins made a ton of records, and many great ones. I’m honored to have put together a survey of his classic albums for the Times, which has just posted following the seismic news of his death at age 95.

But the truth is that it’s when I stopped trying to get my head around him only through the traditional medium of the LP and started paying closer attention to the more transitory evidence that I really became a Sonny superfan. I’m talking about the scattered live footage like the above; the Road Shows series; and Robert Mugge’s mindblowing 1986 documentary Saxophone Colossus, which coincidentally is screening next week at Opus 40, in upstate NY, where some of its most unforgettable passages were shot, with live commentary from Mugge and Levy.

It’s these moments that I’ll keep seeking out as I bask in the glow of what he left, the voluminous evidence of his incredible lifelong quest, all that superhuman striving.

I feel beyond fortunate to have spoken with Rollins on two occasions, once for this Times piece on the fabled Great Day in Harlem photo, and the second time for an obituary for the great Al Foster, who can be seen (and heard!) driving the band with style and indefatigable power in the video above.

During the Great Day interview, in 2024, he spoke candidly and poignantly about being the lone survivor of the cohort in the photo:

“When your friends pass away, you have nobody to relate to anymore. You can’t have jokes or things that you both would be talking about, and all this stuff. So when you’re the last guy left, you have a loneliness, because there’s nobody to call up and say, ‘Oh, man, look what Donald Trump is doing today…’”

There are a lot of great Sonny Rollins interviews out there, especially from his final years. This one, conducted in-person by Hilton Als for Pitchfork in 2016, is a good first stop. I love the final bit:

“The world is over in a minute and we’re here just for a second. We need to use this time to find out something. We’re all on our different journeys. And of course it’s difficult. But it’s the way it’s supposed to be. I believe in karma too. Karma is what we’re supposed to be doing—to unravel our karma. See, whatever I did that was bad in this life or another life, I have to get rid of that. And here I am.”