Aidan Levy - Saxophone Colossus: The Life and Music of Sonny Rollins

Sonny Rollins told stories through his horn. His telling, no matter how intricate or elaborate, was always pure, honest, and vulnerable, while the storyteller himself remained elusive and intangible. Until now. In Aidan Levy, Mr. Rollins has found his chronicler, an immensely talented writer whose lyricism, mastery, and dedication to truth matches that of his subject. The result is an opera, a calypso, a magnificent symphony that captures All of Him: Sonny, Newk, Theodore, Wally, Brung Biji, and the one and only Saxophone Colossus.

Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original

When I was a boy, I knew nothing of Sonny Rollins, the man, but his music set me free. Now, forty-some-odd years later, this book has gifted me a profound, almost revelatory, appreciation of all it took for our singularly Great American Improviser to exist, to persist, to survive, to thrive, to comprehend, to transcend, to create, to liberate, to beat once the towering, omnipotent, immortal Colossus and the humble, gentle, questioning, questing human. Sonny Rollins has always been the master storyteller of the jazz idiom. What an illuminative joy it is to finally read the story of his own life so exhaustively and engagingly told.

Joshua Redman, Grammy-nominated saxophonist, composer, and educator

Sonny Rollins is the most acclaimed and celebrated jazz musician alive. His fearless creativity and willingness to test his limits are the stuff of legends, as are his modesty, discipline and self-criticism. With deep research and meticulous documentation, Levy, with the aid of Rollins, gives us a revelatory and richer picture of the man and his era. A colossus of a book.

John Szwed, author of Space Is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra and So What: The Life of Miles Davis

In this forensically researched biography of an American hero, the elusive Sonny Rollins stands revealed not only as the great Jazz Maker but a man of profundity and passions. By combining the story of his rise as a Saxophone Colossus with a picture of the Black artist in an age when social progress was not necessarily a given, Levy has produced a memorable book.

Val Wilmer, author of As Serious As Your Life: Black Music and the Free Jazz Revolution, 1957-1977

The life and music of Sonny Rollins as chronicled by acclaimed author Aidan Levy is an insightful view into the daily struggles, achievements and spiritual journey of whom I like to refer to as the Maestro di Maestri, Mr. Sonny Rollins. All I can say is:

II: READ LISTEN LISTEN READ :II

You will be enlightened as I am.

Joe Lovano, saxophonist, composer, producer, educator, and Grammy winner

Aidan Levy has provided the jazz world and beyond an important documentation of one of the greatest musicians of all time. Sonny Rollins spoke his own language through the saxophonejust check out his solo on Alfie! And Saxophone Colossus provides for us in words a portal to deeper understanding of this legendary jazz giant!

Terri Lyne Carrington, Grammy-winning drummer, producer, composer, and educator

[The] authoritative book on Rollins among the best-researched books ever devoted to jazz.

Lewis Porter (Grammy-nominated pianist, composer, educator, and author of John Coltrane: His Life and Music), Playback with Lewis Porter

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Dedicated to Kaitlin, Diana, and Isabel

Sonnys fingers filled the air with life, his life. But that life contained so many others. And Sonny went all the way back, he really began with the spare, flat statement of the opening phrase of the song. Then he began to make it his. It was very beautiful because it wasnt hurried and it was no longer a lament. I seemed to hear with what burning he had made it his, with what burning we had yet to make it ours, how we could cease lamenting. Freedom lurked around us and I understood, at last, that he could help us to be free if we would listen, that he would never be free until we did.

JAMES BALDWIN , SONNYS BLUES

The great work of the painter is not a colossus, but a historia.

LEON BATTISTA ALBERTI

The rhythm and the family name go back to Sonnys grandfather Steadman Rollinsbut Sonny Rollins was almost Walter Berkel. Sonnys musical inheritance is straightforward, but the namethe name is more complicated. I had something about the name, I guess: Sonny Rollins, Sonny later said. Its just a name that it sort of has a melody to it in itself, so that when people begin to hear it I mean, it sounds like somebody already.

Sonny never met Steadman Rollins, but he felt his influence. My father told me that he played clarinet at one time. I never heard him play, Sonny said, but other than that I think its probably further back. I think my grandfather on my fathers side was a singer. Thats what I was told, and they were from St. Croix. And my sister had pictures, and she said I resemble him very much. He was also a lothario, and she gave me these stories about him being chased out ofjumping out of windows when guys would find him. Im not like that, but I may have gotten my musical thing from him.

Sonnys story, and the story of how he got his melodious name, begins not on St. Thomas, but on the tiny island of St. Eustatius, a former Dutch colony in the West Indies of only eight square miles. Sonnys paternal great-grandmother, Martha Bennett, was born on St. Eustatius, or Statia, in 1864, the year after Emancipation in the Dutch West Indies.

Marthas son, Steadman Rollins, or Rawlins, shared a name with a former governor of neighboring St. Kitts, a sugar plantation owner and slave trader who had died in Nova Scotia in 1830. Sonnys grandfather was born