Sonny Rollins: 12 Essential Albums

 

The towering saxophonist, who died at 95, was a master of living in the moment. Listen to some of his most compelling work, onstage and in the studio. 

 By Hank Shteamer

Sonny Rollins’s contribution to jazz can be hard to sum up easily. The saxophone great, who died Monday at 95, didn’t spearhead new movements, like Charlie Parker or Miles Davis; establish a unique compositional universe, like Thelonious Monk or Wayne Shorter; or lead an iconic working band, like John Coltrane or Duke Ellington. But what Rollins unquestionably did do, across his roughly 65-year career, is commit himself to the genre’s core imperative: inventing in real time, brilliantly and indefatigably.

As the critic Stanley Crouch once put it, “Sonny actually embodies what jazz really is, because jazz is really about making the present work.”

Early on, he produced classic recordings under ad hoc circumstances — recording in the middle of the night with a one-off trio on “Way Out West,” assembling another one hours before showtime on “A Night at the ‘Village Vanguard.’” In the ’60s, returning from a self-imposed two-and-a-half-year sabbatical, he brought a startlingly radical approach to a session with his saxophone idol, Coleman Hawkins, and gamely engaged the new jazz vanguard on albums such as “East Broadway Run Down.”

Rollins wrote prolifically, building a repertoire that included future jazz standards such as “Oleo” and “Airegin.” But in his later years, he remained committed to the popular songs that defined his youth, calypsos absorbed through his St. Thomas-born mother and other treasured fare. Taking the stage in 2001, he was happy to regale the audience with what he announced as “a number that I heard a long time ago when I was growing up,” finding renewed inspiration in “Without a Song,” a childhood favorite he had first recorded nearly 40 years earlier.

These 12 albums trace Rollins’s arc from rising star to elder statesman, showing how he never flagged in his restless pursuit of his next spontaneous feat.

58 Jazz Luminaries Assembled for This Photo. Only One Remains.

‘Saxophone Colossus’ (1957)

Rollins’s mother, Valborg, would often sing calypso songs to her son. One of his favorites — a traditional tune known in many variants, including “Fire Down Below” — became “St. Thomas,” the jaunty opener to his definitive early album. A singsong melody and a shimmying Max Roach beat helped make it Rollins’s signature tune and the blueprint for the saxophonist’s many future calypso forays. The LP features the hard-driving original “Strode Rode” (which honored the trumpeter Freddie Webster, who had died at the Strode Hotel in Chicago in 1947) and an amiable take on Kurt Weill’’s “Moritat” (a.k.a. “Mack the Knife”), culminating with “Blue 7,” a lengthy blues the jazz historian Gunter Schuller would later proclaim a triumph of thematic improvisation. “The thing about the thematic approach, I guess it’s true, but I had never thought about it,” Rollins later said. “I was just playing it.”

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‘Way Out West’ (1957)

An avid moviegoer since childhood, Rollins particularly loved Westerns. When the producer Lester Koenig invited him out to Los Angeles in early 1957, he picked up on that theme, choosing tunes like Johnny Mercer’s “I’m an Old Cowhand (From the Rio Grande),” originally sung by Bing Crosby, Martha Raye and others in “Rhythm on the Range” from 1936. The bassist Ray Brown and the drummer Shelly Manne (who used a woodblock, adding a charming clip-clop texture) loped and cooked in turn, fueling the slyly daring style of a leader who, as he later put it, “was really living out my ‘Lone Ranger’ thing.”

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‘A Night at the ‘Village Vanguard’’ (1958)

During an extended Village Vanguard engagement in the fall of 1957, Rollins couldn’t seem to find a band that suited him. Starting off the run with a quintet, he eventually sacked each of its members. (“I know that I was a pretty hard taskmaster at that time,” he later admitted.) On the day of a planned live recording for Blue Note, he made yet another swap between the afternoon and evening sets, replacing the bassist Donald Bailey and the drummer Pete La Roca with Wilbur Ware and Elvin Jones. The impromptu grouping turned out to be an inspired one, with Ware and Jones providing a foundation of finger-snapping swagger, inspiring relaxed yet marvelously fluent Rollins solos on lengthy performances of standards and originals like “Sonnymoon for Two.”

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‘Freedom Suite’ (1958)

Rollins wrote “The Freedom Suite,” this LP’s sidelong centerpiece, in 1957 after he faced racial discrimination when trying to rent a New York apartment. “It was an attempt to introduce some kind of Black pride into the conversation of the time,” he later said of the roomy four-movement work, which again found him at the helm of a trio and left plenty of space for the vital contributions of the bassist Oscar Pettiford and Roach, two years before his own “Freedom Now Suite.”

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‘The Bridge’ (1962)

By 1959, Rollins was one of the most celebrated saxophonists in jazz, but he wasn’t meeting his own high standards. So he decided to take more than two years off from performing and recording, famously spending much of that time practicing on the Williamsburg Bridge, near the Lower East Side apartment he shared with his wife, Lucille. The album that commemorated his return made no radical break with the past, instead showcasing a warm, intimate sound built on the plush chording of the guitarist Jim Hall. Offsetting the relaxed mood was the title track, a Rollins original where he sailed over the brisk up-tempo swing of the bassist Bob Cranshaw and the drummer Ben Riley with marvelous agility.

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‘Sonny Meets Hawk!’ (1963)

Rollins vocally admired Coleman Hawkins, the master soloist who popularized the tenor in jazz. So when the chance came to record with his hero, after a live appearance at the 1963 Newport Jazz Festival, Rollins fretted over the challenge of, as he later put it, how to “still be natural and normal and myself while I still had this feeling of awe for him.” The answer, it turned out, was to cede traditionalism to Hawkins and turn in some of his most bracingly odd performances to date, such as on “Yesterdays,” where he answers his elder’s fluid musings with tense, choppy murmurs, or “Lover Man,” where he fixates on eerie upper-register squeaks.

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‘East Broadway Run Down’ (1967)

In the mid-60s, Rollins often dropped by a musicians’ loft at 89 East Broadway for hangouts punctuated by marathon jams. He commemorated the period on this admirably raw LP, where he teamed up with the bassist Jimmy Garrison and Elvin Jones, best known as the rhythm section in John Coltrane’s era-defining, then recently splintered quartet. The 20-minute-plus title track captures him in a mode of deep spontaneity, trading solos with the trumpeter Freddie Hubbard, basking in the unadorned throb of bass and drums, and eventually exploring pure free-time abstraction.

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‘Don’t Stop the Carnival’ (1978)

Rollins stayed busy in the studio during the ’70s, but his most memorable releases from the period were captured live. Recorded during a multiple-night stand at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco, “Don’t Stop the Carnival” shows how Rollins adapted his sound to the fusion era, employing electric guitar, keyboard and bass. It’s a treat to hear him unleash a volcanic flow on the title track, a rousing calypso; riff on funky backbeat tunes such as “Camel”; and take flight alongside two high-profile sidemen, the trumpeter Donald Byrd and the drummer Tony Williams, on the up-tempo Byrd swinger “President Hayes.”

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‘The Solo Album’ (1985)

While committed avant-gardists such as Anthony Braxton and Steve Lacy made a habit of unaccompanied saxophone performances, for Rollins, they were a rarity. That makes the only full solo record Rollins ever made into a fascinating outlier in his catalog. Excerpted from an hour-plus outdoor concert at the Museum of Modern Art’s Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden, the fully improvised album feels almost like a Sonny Rollins brain scan, in which, for example, an unrelenting run achieved through circular breathing gives way to a cheeky quote from “Pop! Goes the Weasel.” Some reviewers cried foul, calling the album essentially a backstage warm-up disguised as a concert, but as a document of Rollins’s process — a “jukebox of the unconscious,” as his biographer Aidan Levy put it — it’s essential.

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‘G-Man’ (1987)

In the ’80s, Rollins dug back into a swinging small group sound that, aside from the trusty presence of Bob Cranshaw on electric bass, made little concession to contemporary tastes. As heard on this live album, recorded at the upstate environmental sculpture Opus 40, he was every bit the powerhouse soloist he had been 30 years earlier. (He famously broke his heel mid-show.) Propelled by the snappy rhythm team of Cranshaw, the pianist Mark Soskin and the drummer Marvin Smith, known as Smitty, Rollins draws on a seemingly limitless well of energy as he ascends peak after improvisational peak on riffy tunes such as the title track and a rollicking “Don’t Stop the Carnival.”

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‘Without a Song: The 9/11 Concert’ (2005)

On Sept. 11, 2001, at the time of the World Trade Center attack, Rollins was in his high-rise apartment just six blocks away from Ground Zero, where he remained stuck for more than 24 hours before being evacuated by the National Guard. He considered canceling his next planned engagement, in Boston on Sept. 15, but Lucille, who had begun managing him in 1971, urged him to honor it. Captured by the Rollins superfan and bootlegger turned collaborator Carl Smith and released four years later, the show became a late-career highlight, featuring Rollins, alongside his regular working band, blowing in heartfelt, magisterial form on old favorites such as the title tune, which had led off “The Bridge” 39 years earlier.

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‘Road Shows, Vol. 2’ (2011)

In 2008, Rollins began “Road Shows,” a multivolume live series that answered the prayers of many enthusiasts who felt that his best work was done onstage. The second volume was particularly noteworthy, thanks to the inclusion of material from Rollins’s momentous 80th birthday concert at New York’s Beacon Theater in 2010, which featured several distinguished guests: his “Bridge” collaborator Hall and, on a marathon version of “Sonnymoon for Two,” the drummer Roy Haynes, who had reunited with Rollins for a 2007 Carnegie Hall concert after a nearly 50-year break; the eminent bassist Christian McBride, also returning from the Carnegie show; and Ornette Coleman, who met and practiced with Rollins in Los Angeles in 1957 but had never previously performed with him. Despite its leisurely, jam-session feel, the historic meeting lived up to its promise, Coleman’s reedy, warbling alto contrasting beautifully with Rollins’s full-bodied tenor.

THE NEW YORK TIMES 

Paul McCartney não precisa mais fazer música, ele faz apenas porque gosta: 'Se a liberdade levar a um sucesso, ótimo

Jon Pareles

Para Paul McCartney, compor não é apenas um trabalho, uma arte e uma válvula de escape emocional. É uma compulsão, um desejo incontrolável. “As pessoas perguntam: ‘Mas por que você ainda escreve canções?’ Simplesmente porque eu amo fazer isso. Sou viciado”, disse ele em uma entrevista no Boulevard Carroll, um labirinto de estúdios no extremo oeste de Manhattan, onde o cantor e compositor de 83 anos acabara de encerrar uma tarde de ensaio para o episódio final da temporada do “Saturday Night Live”. “De um buraco negro surge leite e mel. É uma sensação maravilhosa.”

Por mais prolífico que tenha sido — nos Beatles, Wings e em seus álbuns solo — McCartney, de 83 anos, não segue nenhuma disciplina ou rotina para compor. “Pode ser em qualquer lugar, com algum tempo livre e meu violão ao lado, ou um piano por perto. Então a vontade me domina”, disse ele. “Sempre que acerto alguma coisa, é tipo, uau, que sensação incrível. Sabe, todo esse processo criativo é fantástico. Digo que é melhor do que trabalhar.”

Mesmo para um ensaio, McCartney estava impecavelmente vestido. Usava um paletó azul, uma camisa preta com bolinhas cor de rosa, calças pretas, sapatos de sola branca e meias com um desenho psicodélico de bolhas azuis sob uma listra amarela brilhante.

Alguns dias depois, McCartney se apresentou no “SNL”, tocando músicas antigas e novas, incluindo “Days we left behind”, de seu novo álbum, “The Boys of Dungeon Lane”. Cinco dias depois, foi o convidado surpresa do “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert”, no palco do Ed Sullivan Theater, onde os Beatles fizeram sua estreia na América do Norte em 1964. No último episódio do programa de Colbert, cantou “Hello Goodbye”, dos Beatles.

'Você não tem qualificações'

Pessoalmente, McCartney lida com suas seis décadas de fama com uma simplicidade extraordinária. Ele é afável e despretensioso. Orgulhoso, mas não arrogante, e ainda se encanta com sua vida como músico. "Hoje em dia me pergunto como acabei me tornando compositor", refletiu. "Porque, sabe, quando era um garoto na escola, conversei com o orientador vocacional e ele me disse: 'Você não tem qualificações e... não vejo um grande futuro para você.' Então eu tive que aceitar isso e pensar: 'Que se dane — eu vou fazer alguma coisa.' E isso me fez trabalhar ainda mais para alcançar o sucesso, porque eu não deveria ter sucesso. Então, compor músicas foi uma das melhores coisas da minha adolescência."

A primeira música que ele escreveu foi uma canção com influências de rockabilly, "I lost my little girl". McCartney recordou: “Alguém me disse depois: ‘Essa música é sobre você ter perdido sua mãe.’ Eu escrevi por volta dos 14 ou 15 anos, e ela tinha falecido pouco antes.” Embora os Beatles não tenham gravado a canção, McCartney a apresentaria mais tarde, na década de 1970, com o Wings. “Isso é interessante sobre as músicas”, disse ele. “Sem saber, você acaba se aprofundando em assuntos sobre os quais talvez fosse difícil falar.”

Em “The Boys of Dungeon Lane”, muitas das novas canções revisitam sua infância em Liverpool, Inglaterra, e os primeiros dias dos Beatles. Em “Down South”, ele relembra o encontro com John Lennon enquanto viajavam de carona para o sul, rumo a Londres. Ringo Starr se junta a McCartney para cantar e tocar bateria em “Home to Us”, sobre sua cidade natal sem glamour.

McCartney gravou o álbum com Andrew Watt, produtor vencedor do Grammy que já trabalhou com os Rolling Stones, Miley Cyrus, Lady Gaga, Iggy Pop e Pearl Jam. "É incrível ver o Paul trabalhando", disse Watt em uma entrevista por telefone. "As pessoas falam em 10 mil horas de experiência — ele tem milhões de horas dedicadas à produção e gravação de discos. Então, a capacidade dele de entender microfones, como arranjar, como compor, como tocar cada instrumento é incrível. E ele se diverte muito quando toca. Ele fica pulando pela sala, alternando entre os instrumentos, dançando, rindo. É uma experiência realmente prazerosa trabalhar com ele."

Chad Smith, baterista do Red Hot Chili Peppers que substituiu um músico de última hora na apresentação do "SNL", também foi muito entusiasmado. "Não tenho adjetivos para descrever o quão incrível foi", disse Smith em uma entrevista por telefone. “Ele ficava dizendo: ‘Só façam com que seja divertido.’ Sabe, ele não precisa mais tocar se não quiser, e não precisa gravar discos. É muito inspirador ver essa energia. Ele realmente ama isso.”

Para McCartney, colaborar com Watt despertou memórias. “Trabalhar com um produtor mais jovem me incentiva a revisitar todas as minhas histórias”, disse McCartney. “Principalmente as dos Beatles, porque foi a primeira coisa quando éramos crianças. E esse tipo de memória, eu acho, para a maioria das pessoas, é o mais precioso.”

“The Boys of Dungeon Lane” também exalta a irreverência musical que acompanhou McCartney por toda a vida. A faixa de abertura, “As you lie there”, vai de uma lembrança aconchegante para um grito de McCartney imitando Little Richard. “Never know” assume um tom psicodélico, com vocais em contraponto compostos por sílabas sem sentido e uma majestosa construção final. “Salesman Saint”, uma canção sobre os pais de McCartney que sobreviveram à Segunda Guerra Mundial em Liverpool com “risos e uma canção”, transita por compassos variáveis ​​e, de repente, explode com metais vibrantes de big band.

Ultimamente, as memórias de McCartney têm ressurgido. O Rock & Roll Hall of Fame em Cleveland acaba de inaugurar uma exposição dedicada ao Wings, a banda de sucesso de McCartney na década de 1970. Ele forneceu alguns figurinos e objetos — mas não seu baixo Höfner em formato de violino. “Não posso dar meu baixo para eles, porque ainda uso ele”, disse.

Em Londres, o antigo prédio da sede da Apple, no número 3 da Savile Row, será reaberto como museu. Os fãs poderão visitar o estúdio reconstruído no porão, onde os Beatles gravaram “Let It Be”, e o terraço onde a banda fez sua última e breve apresentação. “Museu implica em poeira”, disse McCartney. “Não acho que será assim. Acho que será bem animado.”

Dungeon Lane, mencionada em “Days we feft behind”, é uma rua em Liverpool que leva à margem do rio Mersey, onde McCartney gostava de observar pássaros. Era também onde valentões locais rondavam, e um dia roubaram seu relógio.

“Quando você compõe, o que escreve se torna uma metáfora para algo maior do que você está expressando”, disse, citando a letra da música. “‘Alguns sentirão a dor, mas alguns foram feitos para mais.’ ‘Alguns foram feitos para mais’ somos nós — os caras que escaparam.”

McCartney revisitou seus antigos métodos de estúdio durante a produção do novo álbum. Durante uma reorganização corporativa da EMI, a gravadora dos Beatles por muitos anos, seus contadores decidiram vender os equipamentos do estúdio Abbey Road. McCartney comprou muitos dos instrumentos, entre eles o Mellotron que usou em "Strawberry Fields", o piano vertical que tocou em "Because" e um gravador de fita Studer de quatro canais, que pode ter sido usado para gravar "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band", embora McCartney não tenha conseguido comprovar se é exatamente o mesmo aparelho.

Ele ainda usa os equipamentos antigos. Uma nova faixa, "We two" — uma canção carinhosa sobre amor, parceria, apoio e respeito mútuos — foi inteiramente gravada em fita no Studer. A tecnologia atual oferece um número infinito de faixas que podem ser ajustadas a qualquer momento. Mas, ao produzir "Sgt. Pepper", os Beatles tiveram que mixar vários instrumentos em uma única faixa imutável, repetidas vezes. “Usamos exatamente o mesmo processo que ele usava nos Beatles, tipo, 100%”, disse Watt — até mesmo na edição final, cortando a fita com uma lâmina de barbear.

“We two” termina com o som de uma fita rebobinando — um som que desapareceu na era digital. “A gente só colocou isso porque ninguém ouve mais”, disse McCartney. “Antes dava para ouvir, em todos os discos que a gente gravava.”

McCartney não se preocupa mais em fazer sucessos. "Ao tentar ser criativo, é bom se muita gente gostar", disse ele. "Mas não é tudo. Não é nem de longe tão importante para mim quanto é para algumas pessoas. Eu gosto de liberdade. E se a liberdade levar a um sucesso, ótimo. Se a liberdade me levar apenas a curtir o processo, provavelmente melhor ainda."

O que importa para ele agora é simplesmente fazer música. "É um mundo mágico, a música", disse McCartney. "Cientificamente falando, é apenas um conjunto de frequências. Então, como essas frequências podem afetar o seu coração? Eu entendo, se tem letra, às vezes você pensa, 'ah, sim'. Mas se for só uma melodia — como isso pode te fazer chorar? Isso é mágico. Eu adoro."

Ao final da entrevista, McCartney ficou parado na porta, observando dois funcionários do estúdio se movimentarem em direções opostas. Ele sorriu. "Hello, goodbye", disse.

THE NEW YORK TIMES

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Sonny Rollins, Giant of the Jazz Saxophone, Is Dead at 95

Even by the standards of a music that prizes individuality, he stood out, as both a musician and a personality

 By Peter Keepnews

Sonny Rollins, whose forceful and imaginative approach to the tenor saxophone made him one of the dominant jazz musicians of the post-World War II era, died at his home in Woodstock, N.Y., on Monday. He was 95.

His death was announced in a statement from his publicist, Terri Hinte.

Even by the standards of a music that prizes individuality, Mr. Rollins stood out, as both a musician and a personality.

In the late 1940s, when most young jazz saxophonists favored a light tone with minimal vibrato, he developed a fat, full-bodied sound that was a throwback to the older style of Coleman Hawkins, the first great tenor saxophonist in jazz. In the late 1950s, when his career as a bandleader was just getting off the ground, Mr. Rollins abruptly began a hiatus that lasted more than two years — mostly, he explained later, because he was not satisfied with the quality of his playing.

Mr. Rollins came of age when a new kind of jazz known as bebop was in ascendance, and from the start his playing was suffused with bebop’s harmonic sophistication and rhythmic daring. To classify him as a bebopper, however, would be an oversimplification.

Over the years he flirted with the avant-garde, jazz-rock fusion and other styles. But with his ferocious energy, his penchant for playing the unexpected note at the unexpected moment, and his unusual sound — sometimes harsh and mocking, sometimes lush and romantic — he was ultimately unclassifiable.

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Mr. Rollins performing at the Detroit Jazz Festival in 2012. He played his last concert that year; two years later, he stopped playing altogether.Credit...Jack Vartoogian/Getty Images

“The music I play is too big to be put into any one style,” he told an interviewer in 2002. “Every time I pick up the horn, I want to hear something fresh.”

That commitment to freshness was the key to Mr. Rollins’s approach, and to his appeal. The jazz critic Francis Davis wrote in 2000 that Mr. Rollins “is the greatest living jazz improviser, and if we redefine virtuosity to include improvisational cunning as well as instrumental finesse (as we probably should when discussing this music), he may be the greatest virtuoso ever produced by jazz.”

Mr. Rollins was rarely satisfied with his own playing; he often came away from a performance or a recording session proclaiming that he was sure he could have done better. He unquestionably did have his off nights, perhaps more than any other jazz musician of his stature, but some fans saw this as a positive sign: The occasional bad night, they argued, was a small price to pay for his willingness to take chances and his refusal to constantly play the same things the same way.

“The real playing happens on a subconscious level, and at that point the clichés don’t happen,” Mr. Rollins told The New York Times in 1989. “When I’m really playing, my mind is completely blank.”

An Early Start

Walter Theodore Rollins was born in Harlem on Sept. 7, 1930, the youngest of three children of Valborg (Solomon) and Walter William Rollins, who were from the Virgin Islands. His father was a naval steward.

Sonny Rollins reversed his first and middle names shortly after becoming a professional musician because problems with the law had made it hard for him to get working papers under his real name.

He began studying music at an early age, and although he also studied art and showed some interest in becoming a painter, he was playing saxophone professionally before he was out of his teens. He made his first recordings in 1949, with the singer Babs Gonzales, and he was soon in demand on the New York jazz scene, working with major figures like Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk and Bud Powell.

Mr. Rollins’s career was briefly derailed in the early 1950s when, like many other jazz musicians of his generation, he became addicted to heroin. But by 1955 he had overcome his addiction and achieved national prominence as a member of the popular quintet led by the drummer Max Roach and the trumpeter Clifford Brown.

Through his work with that group, and on a series of albums he recorded as a leader between 1956 and 1958, Mr. Rollins established himself as one of the most inventive jazz musicians of his generation.

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Mr. Rollins in 1956, the year he released the critically acclaimed albums “Saxophone Colossus” and “Tenor Madness.”Credit...Bob Parent/Getty Images

In 1956 alone, he recorded two albums that came to be regarded as classics: “Tenor Madness,” which included his only recorded meeting with his fellow saxophonist John Coltrane, and “Saxophone Colossus” (the title referred both to his physical stature and to his rapidly growing artistic one). Two tracks on “Saxophone Colossus” drew particular praise from critics: “Blue 7,” an ingenious blues improvisation, which was the subject of a much-quoted essay by the composer and historian Gunther Schuller, “Sonny Rollins and the Challenge of Thematic Improvisation”; and “St. Thomas,” an adaptation of a traditional West Indian song that was the first and most famous of the many jazz-calypso fusions Mr. Rollins would record over the years.

A year later, frustrated by what he saw as the harmonic limits imposed by having a pianist play chords behind his improvisations, he began performing and recording accompanied only by a bassist and drummer, an unusual (though not unprecedented) approach at the time. (Pianists “got in the way,” he said at the time. “They play too much.”) He recorded several memorable albums without piano, one of which, “The Freedom Suite” (1958), was noteworthy not just for its spare instrumentation but also for its 19-minute title track, a composition in four movements written by Mr. Rollins as a musical commentary on racial inequality — a bold move in the early days of the civil rights movement.

By 1959, Mr. Rollins was receiving consistently glowing reviews and was widely regarded as one of jazz’s new stars. Nonetheless, that year he suddenly stopped performing and recording and virtually disappeared from the public eye.

Over the next two years, convinced that his playing was not up to his own standards, Mr. Rollins devoted much of his time to practicing, often late at night on the Williamsburg Bridge, not far from his apartment on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where the acoustics appealed to him and there were no neighbors to complain. His absence from the scene, and reports of his bridge sessions, added to his growing mystique, and to his growing reputation as a perfectionist.

“A lot of people couldn’t comprehend why I would stop playing,” he told DownBeat magazine in 2001. “But I learned something. It was necessary for me to do to have the kind of confidence I need to play music like this.”

Mr. Rollins’s return to action in 1961, complete with a contract from RCA Victor Records that was unusually lucrative for a jazz musician, was treated as major news by the jazz press. (In an attempt to cash in on the publicity he had generated during his long absence, the company called his comeback album “The Bridge,” which was also the title of one of the tracks.)

Consistently Surprising

Over the next several years, his profile remained high: He performed in nightclubs, in concert and at festivals all over the world, and he wrote and recorded music for the hit 1966 British film “Alfie.” And his music remained consistently surprising.

He surrounded himself with an ever-shifting cast of talented musicians, ranging from young experimentalists (he alienated many old fans and won some new ones by enthusiastically, if briefly, working with avant-gardists like the trumpeter Don Cherry) to the venerable Coleman Hawkins, the saxophonist he called his idol, with whom he recorded an album in 1963.

The 1960s were a busy and productive time for Mr. Rollins. But before the decade was over, he had vanished again.

He did no recording and almost no performing between 1966 and 1972, spending much of his time in Japan and India on what he later said was a spiritual quest. He returned to the studio in 1972 to record “Sonny Rollins’ Next Album” for the small Milestone label, for which he would continue to record for more than 30 years, and he was soon back at the forefront of the jazz world.

Critics were often unkind to Mr. Rollins in the years following his comeback, especially when, like many of his fellow jazz musicians in the 1970s and ’80s, he embraced electric instruments and rock rhythms. He even collaborated with the Rolling Stones, overdubbing saxophone parts to three tracks on their album “Tattoo You” (1981), although he turned down an offer to tour with them. In performance, he began emphasizing the more obviously crowd-pleasing elements of his music, notably his penchant for calypsos.

“I’m often criticized about the ’70s and ’80s because I used a backbeat and guitars and all, but I don’t understand a lot of it,” he said in 2001. “I was trying to find different ways to make my music relevant. I’ve never thought of myself as being on some pinnacle where I can’t play a calypso or a backbeat.”

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Mr. Rollins onstage in the Netherlands in 1987. He was rarely satisfied with his work and he often came away from a performance or recording session proclaiming that he was sure he could have done better.Credit...Frans Schellekens/Redferns, via Getty Images

The criticism he received — which continued beyond the 1980s — was often marked by an unusual mixture of admiration and regret. Reviewing a concert in 1993, Peter Watrous of The Times praised Mr. Rollins as “one of the greatest improvisers walking this earth,” but also called him “a man bent on misspending the capital of genius” who “plays music that rarely challenges his own historical achievements, and that in its simplicity seems to pander to his audience.” Mr. Rollins, he wrote, “seems unable, or unwilling, to present himself in a context that would give dignity to his great ability, or even just acknowledge it.”

Regardless of the reviews, Mr. Rollins in those years achieved the greatest success of his career. Although the audience for jazz ebbed and flowed, he was consistently one of the music’s most popular concert attractions. He gave much of the credit for his success to his wife, Lucille (Pearson) Rollins, who was also his manager and his co-producer on many albums.

Ms. Rollins died in 2004. An earlier marriage, to the actress and model Dawn Finney, ended in divorce. No immediate family members survive.

Mr. Rollins for many years had homes both in Lower Manhattan and in upstate Germantown, N.Y. He abandoned his Manhattan apartment in the wake of the 2001 terrorist attacks. He moved from Germantown to Woodstock, N.Y., in 2013.

Experiments and Honors

Although he worked primarily with small groups, Mr. Rollins sometimes experimented with other configurations. In 1985 he gave a solo concert at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, improvising for two hours without accompaniment. That same year he performed his “Concerto for Tenor Saxophone and Orchestra” in Tokyo with the Yomiuri Nippon Symphony Orchestra. (“I was trying to synthesize two elements by remaining true to the symphonic form and also to the way I play,” he explained.)

Mr. Rollins continued to tour and record well into the 21st century. He also did his best to weather the changes in the music business.

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Hillary Clinton, then the secretary of state, sat with Mr. Rollins when he received a Kennedy Center Honor from President Barack Obama in 2011.Credit...Pool photo by Ron Sachs

In 2005 he started his own record company, Doxy, named after one of his best-known compositions, which released a well-received series of live albums. In 2006, Mr. Rollins — who told The Times in an interview that year, “I hate technology myself” — began offering free audio and video clips on a newly created website, sonnyrollins.com.

In Mr. Rollins’s later years, the honors piled up. A two-time Grammy Award winner, he received a lifetime achievement Grammy in 2004. In 2010 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and became the first jazz musician to receive the prestigious Edward MacDowell Medal for achievement in the arts. In 2011 he received both a National Medal of Arts and a Kennedy Center Honor. (The encomiums had begun much earlier: He was named a Jazz Master by the National Endowment for the Arts in 1983.)

Despite the honors, he continued to explore — to search for, as he put it in an interview with The Times in 1984, “the ultimate sound.”

“That’s why I keep practicing,” he said. “I’ll know when I find the ultimate sound, because I’ll be completely fulfilled just by the sound of it and by what I’m able to do with it instrumentally.”

Mr. Rollins’s archives, including hundreds of recordings from rehearsals and practice sessions, were acquired in 2017 by the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem. That same year, a bill was introduced in the New York City Council to rename the Williamsburg Bridge in his honor. (The bill did not pass, but the campaign to have the bridge renamed has continued.)

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Mr. Rollins in 2005. Throughout his career, he continued to search for “the ultimate sound.” “I’ll be completely fulfilled,” he once said, “just by the sound of it and by what I’m able to do with it instrumentally.”Credit...Eric Johnson for The New York Times

In 2022, he was the subject of an acclaimed biography, “Saxophone Colossus,” by Aidan Levy.

With the death of his fellow saxophonist Benny Golson in 2024, Mr. Rollins became the last survivor of the nearly 60 musicians captured by the photographer Art Kane in his celebrated Esquire magazine group portrait “Harlem 1958.”

“I was a fan,” Mr. Rollins told The Times in recalling the photo shoot in 2024. “I was in the picture, but it wasn’t so much as a musician — although I happened to be there as a musician — but I had been following jazz all my short life up to that time, so I knew a great deal about the guys.” He added that he was particularly proud to have been photographed alongside “my particular idols, Coleman Hawkins and Lester Young.”

In his later years Mr. Rollins experienced respiratory problems. He never formally announced his retirement, but in 2012, after being diagnosed with pulmonary fibrosis, he gave his last public performance. Two years later, he also stopped playing at home.

“The reason my retirement happened quietly was because my health problems were gradual,” he told The New York Times Magazine in 2020. “It took me a while to realize, hey, that’s gone now.”

“When I had to stop playing,” he said, “it was quite traumatic. But I realized that instead of lamenting and crying, I should be grateful for the fact that I was able to do music all of my life.”

 THE NEW YORK TIMES

 

 

The Guardian elege '100 melhores romances de todos os tempos

 Nem Machado de Assis, nem José Saramago. Na lista dos “100 melhores romances de todos os tempos” publicada pelo jornal britânico The Guardian não há nenhuma obra brasileira ou escrita em língua portuguesa. O primeiro lugar ficou com um romance tipicamente inglês (e pouco conhecido no Brasil): “Middlemarch: um estudo da vida provinciana”, de George Eliot, que veio à lume em 1872. 

 Descrito por Virginia Woolf como “um dos poucos romances ingleses escritos para adultos”, o livro apresenta um painel da vida no interior da Inglaterra na Era Vitoriana e trata de temas como amor, fé, amizade, traição, ciência, política, moralidade e poder. “Tudo bem, ele não é tão obviamente passional quanto ‘O morro dos ventos uivantes’ (e dificilmente ganharia uma trilha sonora de Charli xcx), o número 20 da nossa lista, nem tão divertido quanto ‘Orgulho e preconceito’ (na nona posição). Mas toda a vida humana está aqui”, escreveu Lisa Allardice, jornalista responsável pela cobertura de livros no Guardian.

O segundo lugar ficou com “Amada”, da americana Toni Morrsion, a única escritora negra vencedora do Prêmio Nobel de Literatura. Em terceiro, está “Ulysses”, romance do irlandês James Joyce que radicalizou o modernismo literário. O autor com mais obras na lista é Virginia Woolf, que aparece com “Ao farol”, Mrs. Dalloway”, “Orlando”, “As ondas” e “O quarto de Jacob”.

Cerca de três quartos das obras citadas foi escrita originalmente em inglês. Também foram contemplados clássicos da literatura russa — como “Os irmãos Karamázov”, de Fiódor Dostoiévski, e “Anna Kariênina”, de Liev Tolstói —, obras-primas francesas — como “Em busca do tempo perdido”, o monumental romance de Marcel Proust publicado em sete volumes —, e livros escritos em alemão, como “O processo” e “A metamorfose”, de Franz Kafka. Apenas dois livros latino-americanos foram lembrados: “Cem anos de solidão”, do colombiano Gabriel García Márquez, e “Pedro Páramo”, do mexicano Juan Rulfo.

A obra mais antiga da lista é “Dom Quixote”, do espanhol Miguel de Cervantes, publicada no começo do século XVII. A maioria dos romances data dos séculos XIX e XX e apenas dez foram lançados depois do ano 2000, como “A amiga genial”, da italiana Elena Ferrante, e “Meio sol amarelo”, da nigeriana Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

Eram elegíveis para a lista romances que já tenham sido publicados em inglês, independentemente do idioma em que foram escritos. Os votantes foram 172 intelectuais e personalidades literárias, como os escritores Stephen King, Bernardine Evaristo, R.F. Kuang e Salman Rushdie (cujo “Os filhos da meia-noite”) também entrou na lista.

A jornalista Lisa Allardice reconhece que se trata de uma lista “parcial — como toda lista é”. “Tampouco podemos reivindicar um caráter definitivo — trata-se de literatura, não de ciência. O melhor romance é aquele que transforma o gênero, a sociedade ou o indivíduo? Aquele que captura o espírito de uma época ou cuja vida se prolonga muito além de suas páginas? Ou um romance que se grava tão profundamente em sua alma que você consegue se lembrar exatamente de quando e onde o leu pela primeira vez?”, questionou.

Veja a lista completa abaixo:

• “Middlemarch”, George Eliot
• “Amada”, Toni Morrison
• “Ulysses”, James Joyce
• “Rumo ao farol”, Virginia Woolf
• “Em busca do tempo perdido”, Marcel Proust
• “Anna Kariênina”, Liev Tolstói
• “Guerra e paz”, Liev Tolstói
• “Jane Eyre”, Charlotte Brontë
• “Orgulho e preconceito”, Jane Austen
• “Madame Bovary”, Gustave Flaubert
• “O grande Gatsby”, F. Scott Fitzgerald
• “A casa soturna”, Charles Dickens
• “Emma”, Jane Austen
• “Mrs. Dalloway”, Virginia Woolf
• “Moby Dick”, Herman Melville
• “1984”, George Orwell
• “Cem anos de solidão”, Gabriel García Márquez
• “Persuasão”, Jane Austen
• “A vida e as opiniões do cavalheiro Tristram Shandy”, Laurence Sterne
• “O morro dos ventos uivantes”, Emily Brontë
• “Retrato de uma senhora”, Henry James
• “O mundo se despedaça”, Chinua Achebe
• “Os filhos da meia-noite”, Salman Rushdie
• “Os vestígios do dia”, Kazuo Ishiguro
• “Lolita”, Vladimir Nabokov
• “Dom Quixote”, Miguel de Cervantes
• “O processo”, Franz Kafka
• “Os irmãos Karamázov”, Fiódor Dostoiévski
• “Fogo pálido”, Vladimir Nabokov
• “Frankenstein”, Mary Shelley
• “A primavera da srta. Jean Brodie”, Muriel Spark
• “O deus das pequenas coisas”, Arundhati Roy
• “David Copperfield”, Charles Dickens
• “Wolf Hall”, Hilary Mantel
• “Grandes esperanças”, Charles Dickens
• “O conto da aia”, Margaret Atwood
• “Homem invisível”, Ralph Ellison
• “A idade da inocência”, Edith Wharton
• “Seus olhos viam Deus”, Zora Neale Hurston
• “Canção de Solomon”, Toni Morrison
• “Coração das trevas”, Joseph Conrad
• “A montanha mágica”, Thomas Mann
• “Housekeeping”, Marilynne Robinson
• “O quarto de Giovanni”, James Baldwin
• “O caderno dourado”, Doris Lessing
• “O leopardo”, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
• “Feira das vaidades”, William Makepeace Thackeray
• “A metamorfose”, Franz Kafka
• “Um delicado equilíbrio”, Rohinton Mistry
• “Vasto mar de sargaços”, Jean Rhys
• “A amiga genial”, Elena Ferrante
• “A taça de ouro”, Henry James
• “O trânsito de Vênus”, Shirley Hazzard
• “Orlando”, Virginia Woolf
• “As ondas”, Virginia Woolf
• “Mansfield Park”, Jane Austen
• “O som e a fúria”, William Faulkner
• “Desonra”, J. M. Coetzee
• “Não me abandone jamais”, Kazuo Ishiguro
• “Howards End”, E. M. Forster
• “Os anéis de Saturno”, W. G. Sebald
• “Meio sol amarelo”, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
• “Dentes brancos”, Zadie Smith
• “O bom soldado”, Ford Madox Ford
• “A cor púrpura”, Alice Walker
• “O mestre e Margarida”, Mikhail Bulgakov
• “O homem sem qualidades”, Robert Musil
• “Meridiano de sangue”, Cormac McCarthy
• ‘Crime e castigo”, Fiódor Dostoiévski
• “Judas, o obscuro”, Thomas Hardy
• “Kindred: laços de sangue”, Octavia E. Butler
• “Nosso amigo em comum”, Charles Dickens
• “Austerlitz”, W. G. Sebald
• “Condições nervosas”, Tsitsi Dangarembga
• “O olho mais azul”, Toni Morrison
• “Drácula”, Bram Stoker
• “O arco-íris”, D. H. Lawrence
• “Uma casa para o sr. Biswas”, V. S. Naipaul
• “Proclamem nas montanhas”, James Baldwin
• “Rebecca”, Daphne du Maurier
• “Os Buddenbrook”, Thomas Mann
• “Fim de caso”, Graham Greene
• “Adeus às armas”, Ernest Hemingway
• “O talentoso Ripley”, Patricia Highsmith
• “A vegetariana”, Han Kang
• “A outra volta do parafuso”, Henry James
• “A linha da beleza”, Alan Hollinghurst
• “Ragtime”, E. L. Doctorow
• “A mão esquerda da escuridão”, Ursula K. Le Guin
• “O quarto de Jacob”, Virginia Woolf
• “Vida e destino”, Vassili Grossman
• “A educação sentimental”, Gustave Flaubert
• “As cidades invisíveis”, Italo Calvino
• “O mundo conhecido”, Edward P. Jones
• “O retorno do nativo”, Thomas Hardy
• “Pedro Páramo”, Juan Rulfo
• “Ardil-22”, Joseph Heller
• “A estrada”, Cormac McCarthy
• “O mensageiro”, L. P. Hartley
• “My Ántonia”, Willa Cather

GLOBO  

How Plausible Is ‘Project Hail Mary’? Astrophysicists Have Thoughts

 

 

 

By Alexis Soloski

“The stars weren’t big enough,” Mark Popinchalk said. “Stars are really big.”

Popinchalk, a postdoctoral fellow at the American Museum of Natural History, was voicing a quibble with “Project Hail Mary,” the sci-fi blockbuster. Starring Ryan Gosling as Ryland Grace, a reluctant astronaut, it follows a desperate mission to save the human race, through perilous interstellar travel and some nifty microbiology experiments.

The film has inspired online argument about everything from its cheery vision of international cooperation to Grace’s rumpled, cardigan-friendly style. But much of the debate has centered on the film’s science.

In some ways, this is silly. “Project Hail Mary” is a work of science fiction, emphasis on the fiction. And while it’s possible to get caught up in the wattage of a light saber or the precise speed a warp drive allows, such speculation is extraneous to the stories. But this movie is based on a novel by Andy Weir (“The Martian”), who writes hard science fiction, which blends imagined tales with fact, or at least plausibility. As Weir said recently, scientific accuracy is his “whole shtick.”

So discussions of the science of “Project Hail Mary” aren’t exactly ancillary. Armchair physicists and even some actual physicists have powered countless online threads with questions around interstellar travel, alien life and why Grace, who has a doctorate in microbiology, can’t seem to balance a centrifuge.

The film, like the book, relies on a premise that a microbe called astrophage, a fictional space mold, has entered our solar system, absorbing enough of the sun’s light to send the Earth into an ice age. It has also attacked other suns, imperiling other planets. Jillian Bellovary, a scientist who directs the masters program in astrophysics at the CUNY Graduate Center, dismissed this crisis.

“Nothing can siphon the sun’s light away,” she said. “It’s a cute idea, OK, but that is not a thing.” This was also Popinchalk’s chief complaint, that the sun and similar stars are so massive that it would take a phenomenal amount of microbes to affect its light. Other scientific grumbles: that xenon, a noble gas, could transform into a pliant solid; that microbes cannot only survive but even thrive in the vacuum of space; that these microbes would somehow power interstellar travel.

“It is very squishy,” Charlotte Olsen, an astrophysicist at City Tech who specializes in galaxy formation, said of that idea. But Olsen didn’t mind the squish, in part because the film was accurate in so many other ways, like its depiction of the silence of space or the physics of a spacewalk, the work of rotational gravity or a moment when Rocky, the alien engineer who befriends Grace, calls out the lameness of naming a planet Tau Ceti e.

“Many of the seemingly implausible ideas of “Project Hail Mary” do have some basis in fact. There’s precedent for a dangerous calculation error and for the use of light emission to power spacecraft. Scientists have even been able to crystallize xenon, though they can’t yet manipulate it in the ways Rocky can. And if the idea that astrophage might harm the sun stretches credulity, a lack of light has plunged the Earth into ecological crisis. Just ask a dinosaur. (Some Reddit wags have joked that the book’s great lapse is the insistence that Grace might walk from the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory to the Mission Control Center in the Houston heat.)

“I didn’t get too upset at any of the scenes,” Bellovary said. “I was never like, Oh my God, that’s so wrong. That never actually happens. A pretty good score for science.”

What might delight scientists most is the depiction of scientific thought. While “Project Hail Mary” has its share of explosions and catastrophes, it’s the thinking that’s thrilling. Grace and Rocky must come together, with tools and whiteboards, craft and ingenuity, to solve a seemingly insoluble problem. They make mistakes, but they learn from those mistakes and from each other.

“Getting things wrong is really important in science, and that’s not something that people who aren’t scientists really know,” Bellovary said.

The film also shows the importance of cooperation. Grace bounced out of academia after his thesis was mocked, suggesting that he doesn’t work well with others. But in Rocky, a faceless, adorable life form, Grace finds a colleague. “One of the core things that scientists do is collaborate,” Olsen said. “My take is that he learns to become a scientist because he learns how to collaborate.”

Before the mission, Grace worked as a middle school science teacher. (Could Grace pilot a spacecraft without proper training? That’s another detail the movie fudges.) Bridget Ierace, a high school science teacher and a science communicator, thinks her students could learn a lot from the film.

“It shows the people behind the science,” she said. “It shows that scientists make mistakes and have emotions and that there are different things that drive them.” That’s not necessarily a lesson in physics or microbiology, but it’s still a good one.

THE NEW YORK TIMES