Happy Birthday Sonny Rollins
Sonny Rollins’ distinct tenor saxophone tone influenced generations of saxophonists and artists alike. Many of his compositions have become standards in the jazz realm while he continues to perform and write. Among his many recordings, there lies records in which he has served as leader and those in which he has accompanied Miles Davis, Max Roach, Thelonious Monk, Dizzy Gilliespie, and even the Rolling Stones.
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Sonny Rollins: The Saxophone Colossus Turns 80

It's hard to overstate Sonny Rollins' contribution to jazz. As the groundbreaking saxophonist celebrates his 80th birthday on Sept. 7, he can look back on a performing and recording career that spans more than 60 years and has influenced generations of jazz players.
And, of course, the good news is that he's still recording, performing and living up to the name of his magnificent 1956 recording, Saxophone Colossus. As a way of wishing Rollins a happy 80th birthday, here are five classic examples of his extraordinary sax work.
Please feel free to leave your own birthday wishes and Rollins recommendations in the comments section below.
SONNY ROLLINS: THE SAXOPHONE COLOSSUS TURNS 80

Oleo
- Artist: Miles Davis & Modern Jazz Giants
- Album: Bags' Groove
Although Sonny Rollins began recording as a sideman in 1949 and as a bandleader in 1953, he really came into his own in his work with Miles Davis from 1951 to '54. On Davis' 1954 Bags Groove, Rollins contributes three of his own compositions and great bop chops. All three have gone on to become jazz standards: "Airegin," "Doxy" and this song, "Oleo." Along with Sonny and Miles, this band also includes Horace Silver (piano), Percy Heath (bass) and Kenny Clarke (drums).

I'll Remember April
- Artist: Clifford Brown/Max Roach Quintet
- Album: At Basin Street
In 1955, in addition to working on his own musical projects, Rollins teamed up with the band led by Clifford Brown and Max Roach. Everyone plays masterfully on these recordings, and the band might have gone on to create a great body of work. But after Brown's death in 1956, Rollins would continue to record almost exclusively as a bandleader, creating his own unparalleled body of work.

St. Thomas
- Artist: Sonny Rollins
- Album: Saxophone Colossus
Rollins' 1956 album Saxophone Colossus was perhaps his first classic recording as a leader. It was also the album that provided him with the sobriquet he'd own from then on: "The Saxophone Colossus." His recording of "St. Thomas" is taken from a traditional calypso melody from the Virgin Islands, which his mother sang to him as a boy. With the help of drummer Max Roach, pianist Tommy Flanagan and bassist Doug Watkins, the song has since become yet another Rollins-inspired jazz standard.

The Bridge
- Artist: Sonny Rollins
- Album: The Bridge
Between 1956 and '58, Rollins was on fire creatively: He recorded 16 albums, including Saxophone Colossus, Tenor Madness (with John Coltrane), Way Out West and Freedom Suite. That's why the jazz world was stunned when Rollins decided to take what would turn out to be a three-year sabbatical from performing and recording. During that time, he practiced his playing relentlessly, often playing solo on New York's Williamsburg Bridge, trying to break through what he perceived as his musical limitations. When he returned in 1962, he recorded The Bridge with guitarist Jim Hall, bassist Bob Cranshaw and drummer Ben Riley; it remains one of his best-selling albums.

Why Was I Born?
- Artist: Sonny Rollins
- Album: Without a Song: The 9/11 Concert
After 50 years of making excellent recordings, Rollins won his first Grammy in 2001 for This Is What I Do. Later that year, on Sept. 11 -- four days after his 71st birthday -- he had to evacuate his downtown New York apartment, which was just blocks from the World Trade Center. All he took with him was his saxophone. Five days later, he played a concert at the Berklee School of Music in Boston. The recording of that concert was released in 2005, and it earned Rollins his second Grammy for Best Jazz Instrumental Solo, for the song "Why Was I Born?"
HAPPY BIRTHDAY, SONNY ROLLINS
Today, September 7th, is the great tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins’s birthday—or, as President George H. W. Bush called it in 1988, Pearl Harbor Day. (He also got the year wrong.) Rollins turns eighty-one today, and it’s good to report that he’s still playing (his Web site lists three shows coming up in California later this month)—and that there’s a new disk coming out next week, “Road Shows, Vol. 2” (I wrote about Volume 1), featuring performances from recent concert appearances, and, notably, his eightieth-birthday date from the Beacon Theatre, where he was joined, for one number, by another octogenarian in the jazz pantheon, Ornette Coleman. (Patrick Jarenwattananon writes about the release at NPR.org, where the recording can be sampled.)
Jarenwattananon writes that this concert marked the first time that Coleman and Rollins had performed together. But it’s worth adding that Coleman and his music played a dramatic role in Rollins’s career. Though born in the same year, their careers proceeded very differently—at the age of nineteen, Rollins was already recording with such luminaries as Bud Powell and Fats Navarro (and, for that matter, the drummer Roy Haynes, who was on hand for the recent festivities as well), and he would quickly join bands led by Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, and Clifford Brown. Coleman’s career, however, had a long gestation—but his first recordings, in 1958, were astonishingly progressive; the impact of his 1959 recordings was utterly revolutionary. Rollins was already an unusually thematic improviser, a post-bopper who paid a special attention to melody and its variations; but Coleman, dispensing with the harmonic framework of bebop altogether, took that manner to its radical extreme. In 1962, Rollins hired for his band the trumpeter and drummer—Don Cherry and Billy Higgins, respectively—from Coleman’s seminal quartet, and his own playing became increasingly splintered, fragmented, even hallucinatory, as if reflecting his war within, the conflict between the modern postwar tradition of which he was already a longtime master and and the new ways of free jazz, which he admired and perhaps even envied, certainly learned from, but couldn’t entirely adopt.
At top is a clip of this band, from 1962; it opens with a fanfare by Cherry and soon offers Rollins a marvelous, unaccompanied cadenza. There’s a second part, in which Rollins offers a long, sinuous, searching uptempo solo. It took, I think, a couple of years before Rollins—who, by then, had doubtless been exposed to even more extreme varieties of the “new thing” (as from John Coltrane, in his later manner, or Albert Ayler)—seemed at ease with the roots of his musical identity, or came to integrate them more closely—and his brilliant 1965 performance in Copenhagen (which I linked to a year ago today), attests to it. His protean career, with its stops and restarts, its fits of self-questioning and its avid openness to the advances in the art—and with its endless energy and happy longevity—is cause for celebration.
P.S. Ben Greenman posted here today that it’s also Buddy Holly’s birthday; I don’t know of any Holly covers by Rollins, or vice versa.