Saxophone Colossus by Aidan Levy, review 📙 A magisterial portrait of jazz great Sonny Rollins
Sonny Rollins and Bob Cranshaw during Voll-Damm Festival Internacional de Jazz de Barcelona at Palau De La Musica on 20 November 20, 2012 in Barcelona, Spain It’s hard to think of anything more romantic. From the summer of 1959 to the autumn of 1961, pedestrians crossing New York’s East River via the Williamsburg Bridge were serenaded almost every day by jazz great Walter “Sonny” Rollins.
Rollins is 92 now and in fair fettle for a former heroin addict and erstwhile inmate of New York’s unspeakable Rikers Island prison, where the smell was “a devil’s mix of shit, urine, and disinfectant”. He is the last major living link to 1930s Harlem and jazz’s golden age, but his story is also almost that of 20th century black America and Levy deftly entwines the personal and the bigger picture.
His first school, PS89, was “probably the worst in the Negro section of Harlem,” according to a 1936 mayor’s office report that Levy cites, a “center of vice and the hideout of vendors of narcotics and other criminals”. But Rollins’s upbringing was stable and reasonably affluent, although his multi-lingual father, Walter Sr, a navy ship steward who “worked fifty-two weeks a year, seventy-two hours a week” was jailed on highly dubious charges of cavorting with a white woman.
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