Many words will be written about Sonny Rollins in the coming weeks. The saxophone titan was, himself, a man who clearly loved words and knew what to do with them; he possessed a distinct and expansive artistic philosophy, and gave a number of incredible interviews in his time. But as usual, I’ve found that the best way to celebrate his legacy has been to simply listen to him play.

Rollins, who died this week at the age of 95, could be harder to pin down as a player than some other notable jazz instrumentalists. He swung really hard, and had a bracing, easily identifiable sound. But he wasn’t a disruptive innovator or a creative radical; he didn’t seek to reinvent the horn, or to tear down and rebuild the fundamentals of small-group jazz.

Rather, he was one of the all-time great improvisers, a genius of spontaneous composition with an ability to snatch melodies out of the air, or…. no, that actually isn’t quite right. He famously liked to play with his horn high above his head, but he often found his next idea by digging down, into the music, tossing a cascade of rhythms and melodies out behind him like a cartoon mole in a mining hat.

Most jazz students start with Saxophone Colossus, the 1957 quartet record that cemented Rollins’ legacy as one of the hard-bop greats. We all learn “St. Thomas,” “Blue 7,” plus “You Don’t Know What Love Is” or maybe “Strode Rode” if we’re diving deeper. I have to imagine Rollins enjoyed how beginning jazz musicians around the world would learn the sporadic, not-quite-a-melody melody of “Blue 7” alongside more straightforward starter blues tunes like “Now’s The Time” and “Bag’s Groove.”

My high school friends and I were also fans of trumpeter Clifford Brown and his band with drummer Max Roach, and I have long loved their 1956 record Clifford Brown and Max Roach At Basin Street. Brown’s final album as a bandleader before his tragic death in a car accident, Basin Street also featured Rollins stepping in for the band’s usual tenor saxophonist, Harold Land. I’ve come to think of Land as an underrated player, but there’s no denying Rollins brought something exciting to the group. That year, the same quintet would record under Rollins’s name on Sonny Rollins Plus 4, another terrific album. If Brown and pianist Richie Powell hadn’t been on the road that night, there’s no telling what that quintet might have done.

Speaking of Max Roach, it’s fitting that the drummer’s playing on Saxophone Colossus is as notable as Rollins’s. Sonny had a knack for pulling something interesting out of the drummers he hired, thanks in no small part to his own ferocious and unpredictable rhythmic style. Elvin Jones recorded his most famous work with John Coltrane, but his playing with Rollins, captured most notably on 1958’s A Night at the Village Vanguard, sticks with me just as strongly. Similarly, Tony Williams may be best known for the records he made in the ‘60s with Miles Davis, but I’m partial to his playing with Sonny a decade later, best captured on the 1978 live record Don’t Stop The Carnival.

Sonny Rollins has turned up several times on Strong Songs: I dedicated a big chunk of the first “Strong Solos” episode to his playfully motivic solo on “St. Thomas.” I also recorded a second bonus episode with more thoughts on his playing, as well as Roach’s drumming on that record. I’ll always love Saxophone Colossus, along with the other canonical records above. But it was actually a split-billed Verve record that fully won me over to Rollins’s way of doing things.

1959’s Sonny Side Up is a straightforward blowing session recorded for Norman Granz’s Verve label. The rhythm section consisted of brothers Ray and Tommy Bryant on piano and bass, with hard-bop stalwart Charlie Persip on drums. For the horns, the idea was to get two of Charlie Parker’s homonymous heirs apparent - Sonny Stitt and Sonny Rollins - into the room with Bird’s former compatriot Dizzy Gillespie to see what would happen. Turns out, a lot of good things!

The most well-known track on the record is “The Eternal Triangle,” a cascading sprint through modified rhythm changes that is often counted among the great jazz tenor battles. (Trane and Rollins’s much ballyhooed 1956 face-off Tenor Madness is practically sedate by comparison.) Hearing “Triangle” for the first time as a teenager at Jamey Aebersold’s Louisville jazz camp, I found that while I enjoyed Rollins’s opening solo, I was exhilarated by Stitt’s rejoinder. Afterward, I decided Stitt had “won” the exchange.

Sonny Stitt was a fiercely competitive player, well-known as a jam session cutting artist. His approach to “Triangle” seems to bear that out; he goes second and takes a longer solo than Rollins did, diving midway through into a death-defying diminished scale ascent followed by a high register blues riff that still knocks me out. There’s no question that Stitt played the most jazz on that track; at the time, I would have also said he played the best.

Years later, toward the end of my collegiate jazz studies, I transcribed each solo, eventually performing both sides of the battle for my peers in the saxophone department. This time, I found myself more enamored of Rollins’s solo than Stitt’s, a shift that reflected how I had changed both as a saxophonist and an improviser.

The moral of the story isn’t actually that “both guys are great, and music isn’t about winners and losers,” though of course both players are great. And music shouldn’t be about declaring winners and losers. I really do now see Rollins’s solo as the more interesting, creative, and surprising of the two. Stitt is ripping through his best licks; the guy could just wind up and go without ever stopping. His solo is unquestionably excellent. But Rollins seems to be actually exploring something. I can hear him listening to each new idea he plays and then following it, seeing where it might take him.

I don’t want to present Rollins as some purely cerebral player; the guy could absolutely shred when he wanted to. The final track on Sonny Side Up, a songbook standard called “I Know That You Know,” bears that out. The band kicks into it with gusto, at a tempo in excess of 300 beats per minute. It sounds more like a loose jam session than any other track on this very jam-session-sounding record. The rhythm section barely has time to find its footing before they hit Rollins’s solo, but the moment they do and he begins to blow, it all locks into place.

Rollins’s solo is entirely in stop-time, meaning that the rhythm section plays only downbeat hits every other bar while Rollins blows through the spaces in between. Over the course of a handful of breakneck choruses, he lets fly a rhythmically wild, almost comically inspired cavalcade of ideas that leaves no inch of the saxophone unexplored. In another world, Stitt might once again have followed Rollins with a flashier solo, successfully matching if not outshining his bandmate. And he gives it his best shot, filling several choruses with his usual impressive machine-gun swing. But to my ear, there’s no touching Rollins. The song had been his from the moment he began to improvise.

I sometimes imagine what it must have been like in the studio that day, listening to Rollins blow and knowing that you were going to have to follow that. Then again, maybe I know exactly how that feels. It’s what I and countless other musicians have been doing for years: trying to figure out how to follow Sonny Rollins.

I’ve been bad about keeping my newsletter updated lately, and have got a lot of new things to share with you all, in case you missed them. Let’s start with Strong Songs:

Each of those episodes is accompanied by a bonus video/podcast on the Strong Songs Patreon in which I go inside the recording session, share some extra bits that didn’t make the finished episode, play some music, and just kind of hang out. The most recent one on Kind of Blue featured some saxophone playing, which I haven’t gotten to do enough of this season.

I know it’s an uncertain time for a lot of people financially, so I really appreciate everyone who continues to support the Patreon. If you’re reading this, I hope you’ll also consider signing up, or making a one-time donation to support this newsletter. Listener and reader support is the only way I’m able to keep doing what I’m doing.

After publishing my recent Mixtape essay, I re-recorded it as a video essay and posted it to YouTube. It’s been steadily finding an audience, which is nice, and I’ve gotten some thoughtful comments in response to it. if you thought that essay was interesting and want to see what the game actually looks like, go check the video out.

This morning, the game’s PR got back to me to clarify that the game’s composers, Johnny Galvatron and Josh Abrahams, wrote the mystery songs that I had struggled to identify. The developers provided further detail in a comment sent to Vice, published today. I’ve added an update to the original essay, and followed up to ask why the songs aren’t accounted for in the credits, given how they’re presented in-game.

Outside of Strong Songs and my burgeoning career as a small-scale YouTuber, most of my attention is on Strong Songs Live, which you should definitely get tickets for if you’re gonna be in town! The band is locked in, the songs are picked out, and I’m writing out charts and scheduling rehearsals. I can’t believe it’s actually happening.

July 11! Portland! Be there!

That’ll do it for now. I hope you’re taking care out there, and finding time amidst all the hullabaloo of spring (or fall) to relax with a good record and just let a little time pass.

I’ll leave you with this pic of Appa, who looks like she’s being cute and cuddly but was actually just bugging me to give her dinner. May we all be so gently persuasive.

Take care, and keep listening-
~KH
5/27/2026 - Portland, OR