Sonny Rollins, the Saxaphone Colossus

Sonny Rollins died yesterday at his home in Woodstock, New York.

Sonny Rollins died yesterday at his home in Woodstock, New York. He was 95. Born Walter Theodore Rollins in Harlem in 1930 to parents from the Virgin Islands, he came up playing with Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, and Bud Powell all before he turned twenty, and went on to record more than sixty albums over a seven-decade career that established him as, in the assessment of most people who paid attention, the greatest living improviser in jazz. His 1956 album Saxophone Colossus gave him his nickname and the world "St. Thomas," a calypso-rooted standard that reflected his Caribbean heritage and became one of the most recognizable instrumental compositions of the twentieth century. He took two legendary sabbaticals from public performance, the most famous of which found him practicing alone on the Williamsburg Bridge rather than subject his neighbors to the sound, and returned from each one playing better than before.

Hip-hop's relationship with jazz is deep and well-documented, and Rollins sits somewhere near the center of it. The producers who built the genre's golden era - Pete Rock, DJ Premier, Large Professor, J Dilla, Madlib - were crate-diggers first, and the Blue Note and Prestige catalogs Rollins recorded for in the 1950s were the foundational text. Some of that connection is specific and confirmed; some of it is atmospheric, the sound of a saxophone built into the DNA of beats that were assembled by people who had listened to Saxophone Colossus until the record wore thin.

The most directly documented hip-hop sample of Rollins is J Dilla's "Jack Handy" which samples "Lover Man" as recorded by Rollins and Coleman Hawkins on Sonny Meets Hawk! :

The broader trace is harder to cite on a track-by-track basis but easier to feel. When Pete Rock built the horn-heavy sound of Mecca and the Soul Brother in 1992, he was pulling from the same Prestige Records well that produced Saxophone Colossus. When Large Professor was excavating jazz records for the sessions that became Illmatic, Rollins was part of the vocabulary those producers were working in. When Ghostface Killah and Raekwon started building the Wu-Tang aesthetic around jazz-inflected production from RZA and later Pete Rock and DJ Premier, the lineage ran directly back to the Harlem tenor players of the 1950s and no one cast a longer shadow than Rollins.

Gang Starr's "Jazz Music" from Step in the Arena is a useful document for this era, less because it samples Rollins specifically and more because it names the debt outright. DJ Premier and Guru built an entire aesthetic around the proposition that jazz and hip-hop were the same tradition at different points in time, and Rollins was the figure who more than anyone else kept that tradition alive and rigorous across the decades that separated them:

What Rollins said about death in a 2020 New York Times interview has been circulating since the news broke yesterday: "Everybody is afraid to die because it's the unknown. But my mother died. My father died. My brother died. My sister died. They're all great people. If they can die, then why can't I die? My body is going to turn into dust. But my soul will live forever." A man who spent seventy years making the saxophone sound like a human voice saying something true didn't need to be afraid of being remembered. Put on Saxophone Colossus today. It still sounds like nothing else.