Jazz legend Sonny Rollins dies aged 95
Source: BBC
Jazz legend Sonny Rollins dies aged 95
2 hours ago
Toby Mann
Getty Images
Legendary Jazz musician Sonny Rollins, who was known as the "saxophone colossus", has died aged 95. ... He died at his home in Woodstock, New York, on Monday afternoon according to a statement from his publicist, who called him "one of the most honored and influential figures in American music".
Rollins had a prolific career that began in the late 1940s. He worked with artists including Miles Davis, Charlie Parker and John Coltrane and released more than 60 albums as a band leader. He won two Grammys before respiratory illness forced him to retire in 2014. ... No cause of death was given.
A 2009 quote of his accompanied the announcement of his death: "I think when the creative person ends, he continues in the next existence. I'm a person who believes this life isn't the be-all and end-all of everything. A spiritual person doesn't feel like that."
In an interview with Jazz Times, Rollins described his immediate fascination with the instrument with which he would build his fame. ... "My mother gave me my first saxophone, an alto saxophone, when I was 7 years old. I got the saxophone and I went into the bedroom and I started playing - that was it. I was in seventh heaven... I could have been there forever," he said.
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Even by the standards of a music that prizes individuality, he stood out, as both a musician and a personality.
Sonny Rollins in 2006. He flirted with the avant-garde, jazz-rock fusion and other styles over the years, but he was ultimately unclassifiable. Stephanie Berger for The New York Times
By Peter Keepnews
May 25, 2026
Sonny Rollins, whose forceful and imaginative approach to the tenor saxophone made him one of the dominant jazz musicians of the post-World War II era, died at his home in Woodstock, N.Y., on Monday. He was 95. ... His death was announced in a statement from his publicist, Terri Hinte.
Even by the standards of a music that prizes individuality, Mr. Rollins stood out, as both a musician and a personality. ... In the late 1940s, when most young jazz saxophonists favored a light tone with minimal vibrato, he developed a fat, full-bodied sound that was a throwback to the older style of Coleman Hawkins, the first great tenor saxophonist in jazz. In the late 1950s, when his career as a bandleader was just getting off the ground, Mr. Rollins abruptly began a hiatus that lasted more than two years — mostly, he explained later, because he was not satisfied with the quality of his playing.
Mr. Rollins came of age when a new kind of jazz known as bebop was in ascendance, and from the start his playing was suffused with bebop’s harmonic sophistication and rhythmic daring. To classify him as a bebopper, however, would be an oversimplification. ... Over the years he flirted with the avant-garde, jazz-rock fusion and other styles. But with his ferocious energy, his penchant for playing the unexpected note at the unexpected moment, and his unusual sound — sometimes harsh and mocking, sometimes lush and romantic — he was ultimately unclassifiable.
Mr. Rollins performing at the Detroit Jazz Festival in 2012. He played his last concert that year; two years later, he stopped playing altogether. Jack Vartoogian/Getty Images
“The music I play is too big to be put into any one style,” he told an interviewer in 2002. “Every time I pick up the horn, I want to hear something fresh.” ... That commitment to freshness was the key to Mr. Rollins’s approach, and to his appeal. The jazz critic Francis Davis wrote in 2000 that Mr. Rollins “is the greatest living jazz improviser, and if we redefine virtuosity to include improvisational cunning as well as instrumental finesse (as we probably should when discussing this music), he may be the greatest virtuoso ever produced by jazz.”
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@wsj.com
“When he’s on,” one critic wrote, he “seems immense, summoning the entire history of jazz, capable of blowing a hole through a wall.” on.wsj.com/4e1XOUS
Sonny Rollins, Acclaimed as a Virtuoso Jazz Improviser, Dies at 95
“When he’s on,” one critic wrote, he “seems immense, summoning the entire history of jazz, capable of blowing a hole through a wall.”
on.wsj.com
11:37 PM · May 25, 2026
“When he’s on,†one critic wrote, he “seems immense, summoning the entire history of jazz, capable of blowing a hole through a wall.†on.wsj.com/4e1XOUS
— The Wall Street Journal (@wsj.com) 2026-05-26T03:37:34.916076Z
‘When he’s on,’ one critic wrote, he ‘seems immense, summoning the entire history of jazz, capable of blowing a hole through a wall.’
Sonny Rollins performing in Perugia, Italy in 2012. BARBARA ZANON/REDFERNS/GETTY IMAGES
By Jon Mooallem
May 25, 2026 at 11:08 pm ET
“I was filled with question marks,” the tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins told the New Yorker in 1961.
He was explaining why, about two years earlier, at age 29 and seemingly at the height of his creative powers, he had vanished from the jazz world, embarking on an almost monastic hiatus of intense introspection and even more intense practicing. Later in life, Rollins would further explain the choice by telling interviewers that he had no longer felt confident in his playing; that he had wanted “a certain peace inside of myself. And I want that peace at the risk of giving up everything…. I have to be sure that I’m making myself right inside in every way”; and that, starting to feel outshined by newer, buzzier saxophonists like John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman, Rollins—suddenly a traditionalist, by comparison—had told himself, “You better get your s—together, because these cats have something to say.”
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