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 is the type of music that can absorb so many things and still be jazz.
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.
What I am more concerned about is whether our whole civilization will be around in the next 25 years.
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 have always been a person who is concerned with the dignity of jazz music and the way jazz musicians have been treated and are treated, and the fact that the music has not been given the kind of due that it deserves.
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.
We have to make ourselves as perfect as we can.
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 the problem starts with the general appreciation of the music in the larger society.