Sunday, June 4, 1995
The Pressure Principle
Sonny Rollins ups the stress (and the pleasure) by going
for perfection
Story By Peter B. King, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Arts & Entertainment
Music Preview
For those of us who catch ourselves thinking that the life
of a jazz musician is as sweet and effortless as a soaring
solo, talk to tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins.
Like a doctor, a lawyer or an air traffic controller, he’ll
tell you, a jazz musician experiences pulse-pounding
stress. When the musician is regarded as one of the best,
and when he sets particularly rigorous standards for
himself, the heat feels that much hotter.
Rollins, who tends to repeat things for emphasis, says,
“There’s a lot of pressure involved. There’s a lot of
pressure involved. As a matter of fact, I was at the doctor
yesterday, and he said, ‘You’re under a lot of pressure,’
because he saw this and that.
“Once you get to a certain station in life, people expect a
lot out of you. I feel I’m obligated, and there’s nothing
wrong with that. I’m obligated to give a good performance.
I’m obligated to make the people leave feeling better than
they came in, feeling lifted up or whatever my playing
might do for them. It’s a constant pressure.”
And a frequent pleasure, of course, as anyone can tell who
has heard Rollins in concert blowing chorus after chorus of
assured, muscular, melodic, humorous and surprising
improvisations. Here’s how Rollins describes his recent
performance at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival:
“It was a very feel-good atmosphere, and the people felt
good so that I felt good and they felt good and I felt good
and we made each other feel good. I like to do that. I like
to play to people like that. You know?”
Hopefully, that good vibe will get passed around when
Rollins and his band perform at the Mellon Jazz Festival
June 16 and 17 at 8 p.m. in the newly refurbished, 425-seat
Regent Theatre in East Liberty. But back to the pressure,
which once built up to the point where Rollins collapsed
onstage during a high-profile 1983 concert at New York’s
Town Hall. How does Rollins deal with it?
“Well, I don’t deal with it. I just do it,” he says in a
voice that is deep, measured and thoughtful. “When I was
younger, I used to be able to do a lot of drinking and all
kinds of stuff, but that doesn’t really work. I just try
not to get stressed, but of course it’s impossible not to.
“I went to India to study yoga, and when I came back from
India, I was walking on air. I was so spiritually at peace
and so into that type of a life that nothing affected me.
In about two or three weeks I began gradually being drawn
back down to this stressful world.”
The trip to India occurred during one of Rollins’
now-legendary retreats from performing and recording. Like
pauses for breath between serpentine sax lines those
retreats have punctuated a long and extraordinary career.
Rollins was born in 1930 in Harlem, “at the perfect place
at the perfect time” for jazz, he says. His West Indian
parents lived in a house across the street from a movie
theater where Fats Waller had once accompanied silent
films. Rollins thinks he soaked up some of Waller’s spirit.
Later, Rollins’ family moved up to Sugar Hill, Harlem’s
fanciest neighborhood, where they lived on the same block
as Duke Ellington and Thurgood Marshall and not far from
the writer W.E.B. DuBois. Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins and
Erskine Hawkins lived nearby.
“All the names, they usually lived on Sugar Hill. So as a
kid growing up, we saw them and we observed them, because
we hoped to play with these guys one day. And eventually we
got to the point where we actually began playing with
them.”
Rollins came of age in the era when swing was yielding to
bop, when the jam sessions that raged till 4 a.m. were a
jazz musician’s most important education.
As a teen-ager, Rollins would jam downtown at Small’s near
Central Park and uptown at Minton’s Playhouse, the
legendary bop incubator. He recalls Charlie Parker, Hot
Lips Page, Blue Mitchell and many others on the bandstand.
Talk about pressure! It must have been tough for a
teen-ager to get up and trade solos with the greats.
“Well you’ve got to have a certain amount of coglioni, you
know? There were a lot of guys there that got up, and they
really couldn’t cut it. And musicians wouldn’t allow them
to get back up there. So it was really a testing ground, a
proving ground. Because these were the best musicians in
the world.”
In his teens and early ‘20s, Rollins gigged and recorded
with Parker, Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, Bud Powell and
other modern jazz pioneers.
In 1954, Rollins took his first sabbatical, in order to
kick a heroin habit. When he returned in 1955, he made a
splash in the great Clifford Brown- Max Roach Quintet.
Albums under Rollins’ own name, like “Worktime” and ‘‘Sonny
Rollins Plus 4,” were also reaping acclaim — not only for
the logic, invention and big-toned Coleman Hawkins swagger
in his solos, but for compositions such as the jazz waltz,
“Valse Hot.”
After Brown’s untimely 1956 death in a car accident on the
Pennsylvania Turnpike, Rollins albums continued to pour
forth, including “Saxophone Colossus” (which includes his
signature calypso tune, “St. Thomas”) and a series with
only bass and drums as backup: “Way Out West,” “Freedom
Suite” and “A Night at the Village Vanguard.”
Rollins also revealed a fascination for quirky pop tunes —
many remembered _from his childhood — that he reworked into
great jazz, like “I’m An Old Cowhand” and “There’s No
Business Like Show Business.”
From 1959 to 1961, Rollins dropped out of music again —
this time to practice. To avoid angering his neighbors, he
did much of his woodshedding at night on the Williamsburg
Bridge between Brooklyn and Manhattan.
When he began performing again, he delved briefly into
Ornette Coleman- style free music. Then came his India
sojourn in the late ‘60s, followed by a return to
performing in the early ‘70s when, for a time, Rollins
dismayed the critics with fusion-oriented albums even as he
wowed anyone who saw him live.
Rollins has long since returned to a more straight-ahead
bag, although he’s one of the few mainstream players who
works with an electric bassist — his longtime colleague Bob
Cranshaw.
When he’s not on the road, Rollins lives quietly on a farm
in upstate New York with his long-time wife and business
manager, Lucille. (He keeps an apartment in New York City,
which is where he took this telephone call).
Many of Rollins’ old recordings are reappearing on CD, but
he won’t listen to them, “because I’m a perfectionist and I
cringe when I hear something that I should have done a
different way.”
Rollins’ latest disc is “Old Flames,” a collection of
standards that includes Tommy Flanagan’s piano and two
gorgeous brass choir arrangements by Jimmy Heath.
Rollins calls “Old Flames” “a good studio album.” But he
adds: “I prefer playing live, where you don’t have to worry
about the studio red light going on and off.”
People sometimes tell him he’s too hard on himself, but
Rollins doesn’t buy it.
“Because only I know what I’m capable of doing. I have to
create the music myself, and I know what my boundaries are
and how much I should be expanding them. Because I know
what I have done, I know what I can do. Therefore, I am the
sole arbiter of the extent of my abilities.
“I’m still searching and trying to perfect what I’ve
learned,” he continues. “And I’m also searching and trying
to keep my ears open for some breakthrough which will get
me closer to that ultimate.” _How close is he?
“Well, there is no end to music. Music is like an open sky.
I mean it’s like trying to know the universe, it’s like
trying to know all the stars, it’s like trying to know all
the secrets of nature. It hasn’t been done yet. That to me
is the vastness of music.”
Sonny Rollins
Where: Regent Theatre, East Liberty.
When: 8 p.m. June 16-17.
Tickets: $25; 323-1919.
Copyright © 1995, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
