Sonny Rollins and Charles Mingus at Mingus’ surprise 56th birthday party, New York, April 1978 (photo courtesy of Sonny Rollins/Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division, The New York Public Library)
Sonny Rollins at the Turning Point
An exclusive excerpt from Aidan Levy's definitive new biography of the jazz giant captures him in the midst of his Bridge years.
In his new book Saxophone Colossus: The Life and Music of Sonny Rollins (written with Rollins’ full participation), Aidan Levy expertly examines this crucial period. The following excerpt finds the saxophonist still in the midst of his Bridge time, but beginning—with encouragement from his equally legendary friends—to feel that he could safely make the transition back to performance and a richer public life.
…Sonny got more of a push to come down from the Bridge that June (1961), when Charles Mingus and Max Roach, who cofounded Debut Records together, came to visit him on Grand Street. Mingus was taken aback by Sonny’s chiseled visage. But the change was more than skin deep. Sonny even gave Mingus a copy of H. Spencer Lewis’ Mansions of the Soul. “Yes you have changed, Sonny, and I’m sure you realize I love that change,” Mingus wrote. “It is rather quietly screaming at the top of your voice, muscles, and quiet attitude.” That month, Mingus went to London to film All Night Long (1962), where he encountered a racist atmosphere as soon as he got off the plane, and he wrote Sonny a six-page single-spaced letter on June 20 after several sleepless nights demanding his return to the scene.
Mingus hadn’t written anyone in years, and what came out of the typewriter was a torrent of emotion. It could be expressed only in writing, Mingus wrote, in order to keep his ego out of it and to grapple with his “many more than two selves that I have rather hesitantly learned to live with, as perhaps you have done obviously with yourself.”
Mingus could follow Sonny and seek salvation through the Sisyphean pursuit of study Sonny seemed to favor, he wrote, but “I’d much rather you’d save me immediately, and Max, with your saxophone. I’d like to discuss some of this on the bandstand with you. I haven’t cared and have cared too much also. But since I’ve seen you with Max I have been born again.”
Mingus’ theory was that Sonny’s physical transformation was motivated by more than fitness for its own sake. “I think that aside from your faith you don’t want anybody messing with you,” he wrote. “I know the time Jesus got the whip out on the dealers in his temple. He was a pretty strong fellow in many ways that you’re not, but I don’t think he could press no 215 pounds.”
To Mingus, salvation could not be found in the self without being found in the community. “I’m still old-fashioned in the belief that part of finding God is finding yourself in relation to man and with man as your brother,” Mingus wrote. Together they had lived through hell, and if Sonny had found a little piece of heaven, Mingus hoped they could live through that together as well.
It is a further belief that if we seek in our music together, somewhat like the olden days when people played for beauty other than money, there we will find and give to the others and ourselves. But if we have found the sound of God itself and keep it to ourselves, there are those who must seek without you or the finder who pleases himself only with the sound of the Lord pouring from his horn. We must seek another and another so that all with ears can have the voice of God so needed. If you have this voice take it from your locked doors. Open your case. We will hear you as you hold your horn to let Him speak.
Your friend,
Chazz
Max, Mingus, and Sonny never did form that trio, but soon thereafter, Sonny came down from Sinai.
Excerpted from SAXOPHONE COLOSSUS: The Life and Music of Sonny Rollins by Aidan Levy. Copyright © 2022. Available from Hachette Books, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
Source: https://jazztimes.com/features/profiles/sonny-rollins-at-the-turning-point/