Sonny Rollins, legendary saxophone colossus, dead at 95

Rollins’ marathon, hard-blowing solos earned him a reputation as the greatest jazz saxophone improviser

Saxophonist Sonny Rollins, who spent more than two years practising in solitude as a young man on a windswept New York bridge to reinvent his playing and ⁠become one of the giants of jazz, died at the ⁠age of 95 on Monday, his publicist said.

Rollins had recorded the confidently titled Jazz Colossus album ⁠in 1956. But the saxophonist remained wracked with self-doubt.

So, in the summer of 1959, he began to play on the windswept pedestrian walkway of New York’s Williamsburg Bridge. Initially a place where he could avoid disturbing his pregnant neighbour, the walkway became the site of endless practice.

“What made me withdraw and go to the bridge was how I felt about my own playing,” Rollins told the Guardian newspaper in 2022. “I knew I was dissatisfied.”

He ended up spending more than two years there, often for 14 or 15 hours a day.

The resulting record, The Bridge, was not a complete break from his previous style but took his soloing and improvisation to a new level. A review in the Jazz Journal at the time said Rollins was able “to extract the last ounce of meaning from a particular phrase taken from the melody of the song”.