Altissimo (The Cry)

In memory of Sonny Rollins

He lived 95 years, and played for most of them. ‘My Ship’ from The Standard Sonny Rollins playing as I write this, each note perfectly placed, perfectly askew. Rollins’ tone a shining surface the listeners’ ear glances off, resisting conventional signifiers of emotional depth, its tough veneer enamel, gleaming mirror, agate streaked with visible quartz, yet behind it a deep well, within it a whirlpool, a place of constant movement and vast depths.

It’s what I reached for by chance: but when I think of Rollins, I think most of the quartet with Don Cherry in the ’60s, the range of those nearly six hours of tapes from the Village Gate, and of the trio of Freedom Suite, the first Rollins record I heard, its diamond-hard sketches, the loose precision of its themes, and the political force embedded within the simple naming of the piece. And I think of how with Rollins, even at his most ‘out’, it’s always something about melody—indeed, that his very treatment of melody constitutes part of his ‘outness’.

There’s a radio recording from the Half Note in 1966 (or perhaps 1963, depending which discography you use): Rollins with McCoy Tyner, Walter Booker, and Mickey Roker, moving in and out of tunes at will; melody stacked free associatively on melody—rhapsody, in the sense of rhapsōidos, “stitcher of songs”, as if Rollins might play every song he knew, that act of association and recall a kind of survival force. Rollins was always walking around the club while he was playing, walking off stage while he was playing, playing within the form: having already begun as he stepped out of the taxi and walked into the venue, or deciding to take a trip up the stairs and out of the club to serenade Alice and John Coltrane in their home, followed by the remnants of the faithful. Sound bouncing off buildings, the walls, sound that would not be contained.

Walking while playing evokes the barwalkers, the entertainers of R&B, movement that refuses fixity; it’s a way of thinking, an exercise of freedom, a desite to get away, an impatience with the limitations of the form or the stage. This movement doesn’t translate to recordings; registers, instead, as a kind of sudden absence. In his unaccompanied cadenza on the Half Note recording, there are huge pauses as he moves around the room, testing the space: interruption, tension, void. All the more so given that these performances were broadcast on the radio, where they become dead air. But, rising again, resurrecting across the silence, Rollins comes back, the melody comes back, the force of remembrance, re-membered: a body put back together, gathering the limbs of Osiris. One tune becomes another, ‘Oleo’ to ‘Poinciana’ to ‘Happy Birthday’ to a newly abstract or abstruse motif: all those moments where what’s quoted and what is the thicket in which quotation occurs constantly blur and stretch, the earworm always within reach.

Once, towards the end of the set at Ronnie Scott’s in London, Rollins reportedly began to play to every song whose title contained the word “Goodnight”; as if to split the difference between language and music, lyric and its instrumentalised sublimation, songs without words—to make the gesture of farewell last forever. Or the time Gary Giddins talks about, when Rollins played the head of Billy Strayhorn’s ‘Take the A Train’ over and over and over again, for thirty to forty minutes; something in the melody that caught and wouldn’t let go. (Describing his own music, Cecil Taylor talked about “motivic possession”.) In all these occasions, the recall and repetition of melody lies between the obsession of a damage or an addiction or a blockage and the capacity for invention that leaps over it again and again. It’s the lifeline; it’s what won’t let go; improvisation as the capacity to create without ceasing, and thus, the capacity for life.

Sometimes Rollins would play nothing but the melody; other times, he would veer so far off the tune he was playing that the song itself seemed to disappear inside the variations spun on it, while remaining with the changes: song form. Fitting that he toured with Betty Carter in 1963, her invention with and away from song matching his own. There is an incadescence to Carter and to Rollins alike. Visible radiation. Thermal excitation. Energy release.

Perhaps it takes poetry to capture that in language: the line break and the chopping of the phrase, the extension or truncation of the word. Paul Blackburn, in ‘Listening to Sonny Rollins at the Five Spot’, transcribing Rollins’ extemporisations of ‘There will never be another you’ back into words—or what Nathaniel Mackey calls “stutter-like teasings of a tune”:

some
one
someone
some-one
some
some
some
some
some
some
one […]

anoth
noth
anoth-er
noth-er
noth-er […]

when there

never be
a-noth

“Apprehension and self-conscious duress, by way of dislocated phrasings in which virtuosity mimes its opposite”, writes Mackey, and then over that self-imposed block Rollins’ playing flows again—a constant self-overcoming and self-sabotage in the same or the adjacent breath. Rollins might pause and the void open up or play as though he might never stop, until the audience goes home, until the cleaners come in—and this applies most of all, as so many have written, to his live performances rather than to his generally more concise work in the studio; to their constant stitching, between the braided limbs of Frankenstein’s monster and the braided flowers of a garland cast on the river: deep river, the ocean swell…

But when I think of Rollins, perhaps most of all I think of the famous footage from Robert Mugge’s Saxophone Colossus in which he’s playing outdoors at the Opus 40 Sculpture Park in New York, walking around the stage in one of his a capella cadenzas, then leaping off it and breaking his heel: pausing, as the crowd gasps, nervously applauds, but then continuing to play, lying on his back.

The pause, the quote, the joke: the entertainer, the thinker-in-sound, inscrutably public, playing through and beyond the break, broken foot tapping on the ground, commitment beyond measure.

I mean, really—who else?

Below the paywall, an excerpt from a longer unpublished essay—on the Bridge, the Cry, and the Rollins/Coleman Hawkins version of ‘Lover Man’—lightly edited and posted here in memory of Rollins.

Altissimo (The Cry)

When Amiri Baraka wrote of the emerging ‘Jazz Avant-Garde’ for Metronome in 1961, he named Sony Rollins alongside Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane and Cecil Taylor. Reviewing Coleman’s newly-released Free Jazz alongside Taylor’s Into the Hot the following year, he termed Rollins and Coltrane “hired assassins [...] using the various