The last colossus of bebop died on May 25th, aged 95
On most nights in 1959 and 1960, a very large man could be heard playing the tenor saxophone on the Williamsburg Bridge. He was there because his neighbor was expecting a baby, and a saxophone, played with full conviction, is not a quiet instrument. He was also there because the subway trains, tugboats, and car horns made a noise so comprehensive that no one could reasonably complain about being disturbed by a musician practicing for sixteen hours a day. And he was there, most of all, because he was already one of the finest saxophonists alive—celebrated by critics, in demand from record labels—and he did not believe it.
Walter Theodore Rollins, who died at his home in Woodstock, New York, had grown up in Harlem's Sugar Hill district within walking distance of the Savoy Ballroom, the Apollo Theatre, and the front stoop of his idol, Coleman Hawkins. He came of age inside the music that was reinventing American culture from the inside out. He played with Thelonious Monk, who became his musical mentor and something close to a spiritual guide. He recorded with Miles Davis and with a young rival named John Coltrane, on a session that felt, in retrospect, like the meeting of two rivers before they divide continents. By his late twenties, he had more than twenty albums to his name. Then he walked to the bridge.
"I wasn't going to let people push me out there so I could fall down. I wanted to get myself together, on my own."
It was a peculiar act of self-abnegation, and one that said everything about him. The world had decided he was a genius. He was not satisfied. The Williamsburg Bridge sabbatical, as jazz historians came to call it, became a legend partly because it was true and partly because it captured something essential about the American artistic temperament at its finest: the conviction that technical mastery is merely the beginning of a longer argument with oneself. When he returned to recording in late 1961, the album was titled, inevitably, "The Bridge." He had earned the pun.
His most celebrated record, "Saxophone Colossus," had appeared five years earlier, in 1956. It introduced his signature composition, "St. Thomas," a melody drawn from a calypso his mother had sung to him in childhood—the first hint that for Rollins, the borders between jazz, the Caribbean, the Broadway show tune, and the pop ballad were matters of cartographical convenience rather than artistic principle. He was not a purist. He was, in fact, constitutionally opposed to purism. He would play anything that was worth playing, and play it as if it were the most important thing in the world, because for the duration of a performance, it was.
He took a second sabbatical in 1966, and a third in 1969, traveling to India to study at an ashram—returning not with mystical detachment but with a Guggenheim Fellowship in composition and an even greater appetite for work. In 1981, the Rolling Stones called. They needed something for "Waiting on a Friend," a ballad on "Tattoo You," and what they needed, it turned out, was him. The recording introduced Rollins to millions of listeners who had never set foot in a jazz club, and he accepted the assignment with the same seriousness he would have brought to any other. He was not condescending to his material. He never was.
Four days after September 11th, 2001, at the urging of his wife and manager Lucille—who had evacuated their apartment just blocks from the World Trade Center and who would die three years later—he performed a concert in Boston. The show went on because Lucille said it should. It was the kind of decision that reveals the character of a marriage. He would speak of her for the rest of his long life as though she had never entirely left.
"I think when the creative person ends, he continues in the next existence. A spiritual person doesn't feel like that."
He retired from performing in 2014, when various physical problems—including the pulmonary fibrosis that would gradually confine him to his home upstate—made the stage impossible. He was 83. The jazz world had been losing its foundational generation for decades; now, with his death, it loses the last direct connection to the founding generation of bebop. John Coltrane is gone. Charlie Parker is gone. Miles Davis is gone. They were his rivals and his companions, the people against whom he measured himself in those interminable nights on the bridge.
He is survived by his nephew Clifton Anderson, who played trombone in his band for many years, and by two nieces. He received the Kennedy Center Honor, the National Medal of Arts, the NEA Jazz Master designation, and two Grammy Awards. Sweden gave him the Polar Music Prize. Austria gave him its Cross of Honor for Science and Art. None of these things, one suspects, mattered as much to him as the quality of the next phrase.
What he leaves behind is more than sixty albums and an influence so pervasive it has become the water in which younger saxophonists swim without noticing. He leaves behind the image of a man on a bridge in the middle of the night, playing into the noise of the city, not because anyone was listening, but because there was still, always, something better to reach for. He believed the creative person continues in the next existence. One hopes, for the music's sake, that he is already at work.
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