Jazz Biography

Sonny Rollins

"Saxophone colossus" is not a bad description for a tenor player who is one of the greatest living jazz artists. Sonny Rollins made his first record date at the age of 19 in the late 1940s, and unlike Parker and Coltrane, the magnitude of his talent was immediately apparent. After strip-mining the hard-bop vein in the early '50s, he absorbed from Monk the notion of using the melody rather than the changes in his improvising. An urbane, sardonic counterpart to Coltrane's incantatory searcher, Rollins is capable of playing hour-long unaccompanied solos of flawless invention with the most powerful sound ever wrung from a saxophone.