Jashua Redman interviews Sonny Rollins.

[Hardbopjazz]

Although this is from 2005, still a good read 10 years later.

 

Joshua Redman: What an incredible honor this is for me to have a chance to speak with you today. You're my biggest influence ever as a saxophonist.

Sonny Rollins: I'm very honored to hear you say that. Especially after I heard you last year. I really liked the show, I really liked your playing in [Kurt Rosenwinkel's group].

JR: Thank you so, so much.... We have a tendency to view history, and especially jazz history, with this air of inevitability. Like, "I cannot imagine jazz history without Sonny Rollins. I can't imagine the tenor saxophone or improvisation without Sonny Rollins." Yet there was a point in time when you weren't a jazz musician and you made a conscious choice to play jazz and to play the saxophone, and I'm interested in that time and that choice. What attracted you to the music, what made you want to play it? Do you feel like you could have gone in a different direction?

SR: I was born in Harlem at the time when Harlem was jumping with music, and I heard a lot of music when I was a kid. I always remember Fats Waller singing "I'm Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter"-that was one of his big hits; I used to hear that on the radio all the time. I used to pass by the original Cotton Club when I was walking up and down as a schoolboy, but there were other places that I heard music. I had music in the house; there was a lot of jazz music. Always used to listen to the amateur night in Harlem from the Apollo Theater. Later on when I was old enough I sort of got my musical education at the Apollo Theater, going there every week and catching all these bands that came through. My older brother played violin; he used to be practicing, and I really got a kick out of that. He was playing more classical, but I really got a kick out of listening to him practice.

I remember when I was really small, around three years old, we used to have a player piano. Because times were hard, we had to move from that apartment to another apartment, and the piano was left out on the street. In those days in Harlem you used to see a lot of pianos on the street with the people's furniture that were being evicted, moving from one apartment to another. These were the days of the Depression, but not that I as a boy felt any of that. You know how it is when you come from a loving family: You don't know nothing about wars and the Depression. My people took care of me just like any good parents would take care of their kids.

But anyway, I listened to a lot of music. I was fortunate, as I said, to be right in the middle of a lot of music, hearing a lot of these cats. I remember my man, the great piano player and bandleader Buddy Johnson. When I was a little kid I tried to sing in front of one of these places on 133rd Street, which years ago used to be a real haven for clubs when people used to come uptown. And Buddy Johnson said he really dug my playing-I was about 12 years old; that was a great feeling. As I grew older, all the great people were living uptown: Coleman Hawkins, Don Redman, Erskine Hawkins, Duke Ellington.

JR: One thing that's completely astounding to me is I've heard recordings that you did when you weren't even 20, and some of your first recordings you did in your early 20s, and you had been playing the saxophone for less than 10 years. You were an absolute prodigy, you were playing on the highest level imaginable. It's kind of intimidating and almost depressing for a musician like me to hear that. Did it feel like it came naturally?

SR: You're very, very kind. I just practiced a lot; I practiced a lot because I loved playing. I'd be practicing all day long. My mother used to have to call me to come and eat dinner because I was in there practicing all the time. I guess some of that came through. I was also lucky to be around some of these great people. I was able to record with a genius like Bud Powell when I was very young, and so I always try to get myself up as close as I can to that level.

JR: When you were practicing at that time, what kind of stuff were you practicing? Were you practicing technique, were you practicing sound, were you practicing tunes?

SR: I remember my saxophone book: I had a Ben Vereecken book; it was very famous around that time. But as far as what I was practicing, I was always a stream-of-consciousness player, playing for hours, by myself. I think that's why I relate to a lot of the so-called free players and they relate to me because I'm sort of like a free player, really. I think that's where my thing is really at.

JR: One of the things that I really learned from you was this sense of flow and narrative as an improviser. You were able to be completely spontaneous-you say stream of consciousness-but at the same time your improvisations have this incredible sense of structure and emotional logic and organization to them. I know you've heard people talk about you as a thematic improviser. Is this something that you've thought about?

SR: No, I never really thought about it, Joshua. I didn't think about it beyond what I'm saying now. You're a player; you can't spend too much time thinking about what you're going to play, it comes out so fast. The fact that there's logic to what I'm playing, I've been very blessed about that part because I certainly didn't have anything to do with that-whatever talent that God has given me. Just the thinking, the playing, the going on and on and on-that part is mine. [They both laugh]

JR: Do some of those characterizations of you as a player ever bother you? Do you feel that people don't get it or it kind of reduces what you're doing in a certain way?

SR: Well, my career's been going on so long. There was a time when I felt more intimidated or bothered or upset by-there have been times when I've been much more interested in what people say. Sometimes they're good critiques that you have to accept and other times they're not, they're not helpful. It's hard. There have been times in my career when I was paying too much attention to what people-critics, I should say: Are critics people? [Laughs]

JR: [Laughs] That's a good question. We'll have to have JazzTimes do a whole issue on that.

SR: There have been times when I've been listening, watching what they say, and in all honesty there were times when it was very important, like when we first started out it was very important to get a good review from a critic, it was an economic thing. If I got a good review from Metronome the club owners would pick up on it: "Oh, this guy must be good." Then, critics had much more power. It was much more important for me then; now it's different, but I'm sure for many musicians they still are judged by what's written about them. In my case, at this stage in my life, Joshua, it's like Count Basie used to tell me: "It's 4 o'clock in the afternoon." Now, I'm not worried about that; I'm worried about trying to get a little closer to what I hear that I want to play that I'm not playing. Even if someone was saying something that would be beneficial, I really can't bother taking the time to get into it.

JR: One thing that I've noticed is that over the past decade, probably the past few decades, you've found a way of limiting the amount you record and you perform. Obviously that's something you've been conscious of doing because I'm sure if you want, people are asking you to perform and record every day of the week. How important has that been to you in terms of being able to grow as a musician, or just have peace as a human being, to kind of limit your activities?

SR: The grace of my dearly departed wife [Lucille, who died last year]. When she began to handle my business affairs back in the early '70s, we tried to do things that would be beneficial to me because, for one thing, it's not-this is heresy, I'm sure-it's not about money. I'm not going to play someplace just because of the money. I was interested in doing something that had a certain dignity: the club wasn't too funky, it had a dressing room. Later on, we decided to stop playing clubs and only play concerts. These were career decisions that were deliberate, that tied in with the fact that I didn't want to live a certain kind of life and be a certain kind of person and-I don't want to sound too self-serving here; you're making me sound self-serving.…

JR: What you're talking about is not about ego-"Give me this" or "Give me that-but a certain kind of dignity. As you were saying, you forged your identity and came up in a time when conditions were, on average, a lot rougher for jazz musicians than they may be today. Coming up in that time, you're going to want to reach a point where you don't have to play under certain conditions anymore.

SR: Right, unless you want to. That's the thing: If you want to play, there are great musicians that want to play. Some of the people I'm thinking about now, some of the greats of the greats, that was their life. They wanted to blow their horns every night, every day. You want to do it, fine. It's not that you have to do it. Plus. in those days it was a little easier, they didn't have as much. The social scene was different then, and they were sort of resigned that they were going to be hard-drinking jazz musicians, there was no way to escape that. Some of the people were so great that whatever they were to do was OK.
Of course there's a lot of economic pressures today, so you also have to make a conscious decision that you're not trying to get rich, because if you're trying to get rich, you're trying to get famous and you have these type of goals, then you have to be careful what you turn down because the people that run things, they couldn't exist if too many cats said, "Man, I don't want to take that job, that's a funky club." So if you want to have this kind of attitude, you have to be ready to sacrifice.

JR: So many people have been impressed by the way you handled your career and your willingness to withdraw at certain times from the music business, for whatever the reason, musical or personal. A lot has been written about when you took that time off from 1959 to 1961. Were you doing it because musically you were in search of something else, or was it personal?

SR: Well, both, because music and my personal life are the same thing. There were times I specifically wanted to get away to do music, and there were times when I wanted to get away from the scene to get my personal life together. So each of those took precedent at certain sabbaticals.

JR: Do you ever feel, as somebody who has been so influential and such a colossal figure, burdened by your past accomplishments?

SR: I felt the burden, the weight of the '50s at one time more than at other times. I felt that way because there was a period when I really felt that I was the only guy that was out there from that era. So that I felt a responsibility to really not deliver a subpar show because it would sort of maybe reflect on the period or something. It's sort of convoluted thinking. But no, there's nothing now. At this advanced stage of life, everything is mellow [Both laugh]. And even if things aren't mellow, they are mellow, you know what I mean?

JR: Saxophone Colossus is probably the most influential record for me of any record in any genre of music. When you made that record, did you have a sense of the importance of it? Did you feel, "Oh, man, this is a really good date for me," or was it just another moment in music for you?

SR: It was just another record date, you know? It wasn't one of my first dates as a leader, so it didn't have any particular significance. Of course, I had great musicians on that record, and with great musicians the music was always paramount-trying to make it the highest quality. But other than that there was no reflection at that time about that album, or even later.

JR: Was there any album or any performance that you remember feeling, "Oh, this was it, this was special, I got to something here"?

SR: Yeah, there've been a few scattered over my long career, but I remember one that took place in San Francisco. There used to be a club in San Francisco called Wolfgang's. The rock promoter Bill Graham, it was his club, and one night we had just come back from playing at the Los Angeles Olympics in 1984. I felt really good about my playing; everything I wanted to play I felt I could play, you know, and it came out. Too bad that wasn't recorded; I'd like to hear that now.

JR: At many points in your career you have addressed some major social and political concerns through your music. Freedom Suite, East Broadway Rundown, Global Warming-the titles of those albums alone made a strong statement. Do you consider yourself a political musician in any way? If you felt like you had a responsibility to try to make the world more aware through your music?

SR: I think W.E.B. DuBois and some other people said that it was the duty of an artist to express social opinions though his work, right? So in a sense, I think it is. But in the colored world it's so hard to really know where you're doing the most good, or whether you should write an album and say, "I'm a Republican" or "I'm a Democrat"-it might not be the best way to get across your real moralistic values by getting involved in things like politics. There may be better ways these days to express yourself and to make a contribution, so I wouldn't suggest to anybody that they had to be overtly political in their work.

JR: The '50s and '60s were an amazing age in music, where all these incredible innovations were taking place. Among musicians in my generation, with everything we've read and heard, there is a perception that there was more of a life for jazz on the streets of New York, a sense of real community; musicians playing and recording with each other all the time. Is that true?

SR: Well, in those days-and I'm speaking now primarily of when I came on the scene, the latter part of the '40s, into the '50s and so on, there was less money to be made. Therefore, the guys sort of stuck together. It was more about the music than about becoming a household name-especially the type of music that was making the break from swing; the guys that were doing that felt marginalized anyway, so they had a community and it was a very close-knit community. There were the usual problems between human beings, but the jazz community, the guys that were playing, they were naturally brought closer together because there weren't that many places to play. There were just clubs, and clubs were small, and not that much money to be made, not as many records sold.

The musicians were beginning to get a social consciousness, which is one of the reasons I always used to like Charlie Parker, the way he presented himself when he played, his persona. He was really serious as opposed to some of the guys were a little more jovial on stage. That attitude pervaded a lot of us guys who were coming up under him.

In those days, guys had to do what they did because they were often vilified by the larger community, and they just felt they had to stick together, fight together, create music together and never mind tomorrow. I don't want to overpreach, but that was just the way things were more so then. I'm not saying that there are not people that don't feel like that now.

JR: Do you think that sense of community, that sense of urgency, the sense of being the underdog-that music not being as accepted and not offering that many economic options-was perhaps a good thing for the development of the music?

SR: What you're asking me is something that people have framed to me in several ways. They may say, "Billie Holiday was really a great singer, but would she be great if she didn't live such a troubled life?" and everything like that. So therefore maybe her living that troubled life is part of her greatness and what makes her great. My response to that is Billie Holiday and Charlie Parker, who had a lot of the same type of problems in their lives, they would have been great under any circumstances. It's just that they happened to be put under that great handicap and they were so great that they came through it anyway. I don't think that people have to suffer adversely to make it. If you have to have a goal you should think more in terms of maybe having some kind of a spiritual goal. If you're a spiritual person, you're always going to be the underdog in this world, so that's something that you can feel marginalized about. Trying to be a good person, you're always going to be on the margin in this world, so there's something.

JR: Your forthcoming CD, Without a Song (The 9/11 Concert), was recorded live in Boston only four days after September 11th. You were in New York City when the planes hit the towers, right?

SR: Right, I was about six blocks north of the World Trade Center.

JR: You were there for another whole day, and then the National Guard evacuated your building. Then you drove to Boston to perform a few days later, since the planes were grounded. What was the feeling that night, so recently after September 11?

SR: For one thing, my legs were hurting because I had to walk down 40 flights of steps to be evacuated; my legs were still stiff. Plus, gulping in some of those toxic fumes. So, I felt sort of unsteady physically. But since it was such a catastrophic thing I also got into that feeling everybody had, you know?

JR: Obviously, the audience was overjoyed to hear you and have an opportunity to experience music at a time like that. I've been to a number of your concerts, and that's pretty commonplace for the audience to go ecstatic. You just have that effect through your music and through your presence. Did you feel something special in the reaction of the audience that night?

SR: Well, the enormity of the event, and playing so close to it, sort of overwhelmed everything else. I'm always happy to have a chance to play for my audiences. So that part is always the same anyway, and other than that, it was just the event and everything was so uncertain at that time. In a way it was good times because everybody was nice to everybody. Of course, all of that changed gradually, so we were back into this same old screwed-up world. But at least during that period, that immediate period it was sort of, a lot of feelings of positive feelings that people had for one another. I did observe that.

JR: I know when I came back to New York shortly after September 11, a few days later, it was such a special time in the city. New Yorkers related to each other in a way that I had never experienced before. Out of all that tragedy and the horrible events came this incredible empathy, human empathy and a soulfulness and a kindness.

SR: Exactly. It was really-it was great.

JR: You feel like that has changed, we've lost some of that?

SR: Oh, yeah. I think things have sort of reverted-it's just like back in the '60s. I spent some time studying yoga in India, and when I came back to the States I was really on a high spiritual plane. I was really walking on air, in a way; I wasn't even walking on the pavement on the streets. I was sort of in an elevated state of mind, state of being, but the longer I stayed in the city-after a week, two weeks, three weeks, I began gradually coming back down to the reality of a more materialistic world. It reminded me of that, what happened after 9/11.

JR: On the CD there's a portion where you're giving introductions of the band, and you say something about music being one of the beautiful things of life and we have to try to keep the music alive in some kind of way and that maybe music can help. Can music help foster that kind of understanding, that kind awareness? Does it have that force?

SR: We all know how powerful it is. But in another sense, look at all of the great musicians that we've in our field-we've got all of these great people and it hasn't had a real effect. I know when we were playing back in the '50s and so on we used to think, 'Oh, boy, we're going to change the way the world is going by our music.' A lot of the famous players thought that way, some of the cats that I was close with. But you see, it didn't really happen. The music is there, no doubt, but I'm not sure that it can do anything to the nonbelievers.

I think music is great and it keeps us believers alive and it keeps us realizing that there is a heaven, but for the other people, I don't think music can affect them, and even I used to feel at one time that music was great because it brought people together because that's what I saw. I traveled around the world, and I saw everybody, all races and creeds, and everybody loved jazz. I thought, "Gee, this is a great thing." Now when I reflect on that I realize, well, yes, it's a great thing if you feel that it's great for people to get together, but there are a lot of people in this world that don't think it's great to have all different people being friends and relating together. So, in that sense, it's not a complete positive force. But music is a positive force for those of us who are ready to hear it and embrace it.

JR: Did you plan for the Boston concert to be released as an album?

SR: No, it wasn't planned. I decided to put it out now because it was time-it's getting around the anniversary of 9/11 again. I had another recording that I had started to work on and I didn't finish it, and my dear departed wife-we were working together, and we didn't get it finished. This was the last album that I had under this present contract and company, so I wanted to get something out and this was available for me to put out. But when I did the concert, I wasn't thinking of it as a record, it was just a performance. It happened to be recorded; I recorded it also because I record my concerts now.

JR: Do you listen to them afterward?

SR: No, never. If there's something good that I have and it needs to be released, I might listen. But right now, Joshua, I still have hopes of improving and sounding better and making a better record. Hope burns eternal. I'm going to put off going into the vaults and trying to find something I've done before. This [new CD] was a special occasion and we'll see what happens in the future.

JR: Everything that you've done musically over the years, everything you've done for the music-I can't imagine anything greater. But to hear those words coming out of your mouth, it's inspiring, because it makes me realize even for the greatest musicians it still is an adventure, it still is a journey.

SR: For me it is. I'm not reticent about saying that; it's a journey because I haven't felt comfortable to say that I've reached my goal. If I did, I'd be happy-maybe I wouldn't be happy; maybe then I'd be sad because I wouldn't have anything to strive for. But it hasn't happened. As you know, being a musician and a saxophone player-well, you may not know because you're young and strong and these things haven't affected you-but you know, I still feel that I haven't gotten to what I want to get to. I'm really hoping that I get there, but there's no doubt in my mind that I haven't done enough. I haven't gotten to something that I know is there.

JR: Wow. I know I'm never satisfied. In the past I feel like I've been self-critical to a fault. I love playing music, but I'm so unhappy with the way that I play that sometimes I fear it becomes debilitating. Sometimes it's definitely not about youth or strength. I find myself getting older, and some things get easier and some things get more difficult in terms of playing the saxophone. But in terms of being happy or satisfied with what I play, that's something, man, I've never felt.

SR: Well, that's good! There's a lot of guys that come off the stage and, boy, they get some applause and they look at their fingers and say, "Wow, did these fingers do that?" Which is fine, to each his own, really! But I've heard too much great music in my lifetime, fortunately, to phone it in. I know what's great and that's where I want to be, that's what I want to play, and I'm going to keep trying as long as I'm able to. And again, if the point comes where I'm not, I'll begin listening to the vaults.

JR: How do you feel about your relationship to your audience? Do you feel like you're there to inspire them, to educate them, to challenge them, to entertain them?

SR: Right, well, I would say all of the above. But you've got to be careful: You don't want to play for your audience. I don't. I don't want to play for my audience. I'm playing for myself. If, in playing for myself, the audience gets it, then I know that I succeeded.

You have to respect your audience, and you're grateful for your audience, but you have to play your own feelings and your own truth. Play for yourself because that's ultimately what the audience wants to hear. They want to hear what you're feeling-that's the music. That's jazz.

Very well put.

http://jazztimes.com/articles/15731-sonny-rollins-interviewed-by-joshua-redman-newk-s-time