Sonny Rollins
Sonny Rollins
Walter Theodore "Sonny" Rollins is an American jazz tenor saxophonist, widely recognized as one of the most important and influential jazz musicians. In a seven-decade career, he has recorded at least sixty albums as leader and a number of his compositions, including "St. Thomas", "Oleo", "Doxy", "Pent-Up House", and "Airegin", have become jazz standards...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionSaxophonist
Date of Birth7 September 1930
CityNew York City, NY
CountryUnited States of America
Jazz never ends... it just continues.
I'm not supposed to be playing, the music is supposed to be playing me. I'm just supposed to be standing there with the horn, moving my fingers. The music is supposed to be coming through me; that's when it's really happening.
No one is original. Everyone is derivative.
I feel that Jazz improvisation is the ultimate. You have to create on the spot, the essence of this music.
One very important thing I learned from Monk was his complete dedication to music. That was his reason for being alive. Nothing else mattered except music, really.
It's all about creation and surprise. It just needs to be appreciated and watered like flowers. You have to water flowers. These peaks will come again.
I simply want to reach a level where I will never cease to make progress...so that, even on the bad evenings, I may never be bad enough to despair.
Many jazz artists go to L.A. seeking a more comfortable life and then they really stop playing.
There was a period which I refer to as the 'Golden Age of Jazz,' which sort of encompasses the middle Thirties through the Sixties, we had a lot of great innovators, all creating things which will last the world for a long, long time.
I think we are in the midst of this period where we are committing this suicide on the planet and everybody is just using up all of our natural resources like a bunch of insane people. That's what I worry about more than I worry about jazz.
I guess I'm fortunate that I'm still around and I emphasize 'I guess', because you never can tell what musicians would be playing had they been around as long as I have.
Improvisation is the ability to create something very spiritual, something of one's own.
Charlie Parker stuck out in my mind.
I'm now a legend, whether I want to be or not.