Saxophonist Sonny Rollins, who spent more than two years practising in solitude as a young man on a windswept New York bridge to reinvent his playing and become one of the giants of jazz, died at the age of 95 on Monday, his publicist said.
Rollins had recorded the confidently titled Jazz Colossus album in 1956. But the saxophonist remained wracked with self-doubt.
So, in the summer of 1959, he began to play on the windswept pedestrian walkway of New York’s Williamsburg Bridge. Initially a place where he could avoid disturbing his pregnant neighbour, the walkway became the site of endless practice.
“What made me withdraw and go to the bridge was how I felt about my own playing,” Rollins told the Guardian newspaper in 2022. “I knew I was dissatisfied.”
He ended up spending more than two years there, often for 14 or 15 hours a day.
The resulting record, The Bridge, was not a complete break from his previous style but took his soloing and improvisation to a new level. A review in the Jazz Journal at the time said Rollins was able “to extract the last ounce of meaning from a particular phrase taken from the melody of the song”.
