Saxophone Colossus

Saxophone Colossus: A Portrait of Sonny Rollins, by Bob Blumenthal and John Abbott, Abrams RRP£22.50, 160 pages

These days the great American saxophonist Sonny Rollins will take only those jobs “that put myself, and jazz, in high esteem”. It’s a statement that reflects the distance the New York-born musician has travelled from the circumstances in which he found himself when he recorded the now legendary album Saxophone Colossus in 1956.

Bob Blumenthal and John Abbott’s text-and-photograph collaboration takes that triumphant early album in order to track Rollins’s tumultuous journey from youthful miscreant to venerated statesman – via punishing routines, titanic gigs, heroin addiction and self-imposed exile from performance.

Abbott’s 90-odd photographs present Rollins – who is 80 next month – at work and at home over the past 20 years. The images capture Rollins’s vigorous intelligence and creative mischief in sharp contrasts. Abbott describes Rollins’s music as “the sound of inspiration”, and his live shots vibrate with the heroic scale of the saxophonist’s stamina-sapping virtuosity. Rollins is playing as well as ever and the sense of purpose is as vivid and fine-tuned as the notably stylish saxophonist’s choice of silk shirt.

Blumenthal weaves his insightful five-essay assessment of Rollins’s life and music into the fabric of Abbott’s portfolio. Each essay takes a track from Saxophone Colossus to investigate elements of Rollins’s music-rhythm, sound, penchant for obscure songs – and traces its development. Blumenthal also shows how an improvised jazz album that was taped in a single three-hour session with a rhythm section convened on the day became a masterpiece.

Something of the saxophonist’s humility and social engagement also emerge, thanks to the liberal sprinkling of quotes from Rollins himself. He is uncomfortable with the sobriquet “colossus” and has long felt that he “couldn’t be a musician and just go through life playing”. Even as a teenager, he was drawn to his primary saxophone influence, Coleman Hawkins, for the way his ballad artistry “changed the minstrel image, if I may use a term that radical; he showed that a black jazz musician could depict all emotions with credibility”.

Blumenthal traces his early influences, withdrawals from performance and contribution to jazz with an informed balance of biography and context. Rollins’s ability to “pull at the pulse” reflected the professional demands of a richly diverse Harlem neighbourhood as much as the home environment of his West Indian-born parents.

Rollins was not the only jazz musician to rescue show tunes from obscurity, or get caught up in the postwar heroin epidemic. A five-year fight with addiction ended in rehab and a lay-off from performance. A second lay-off, to avoid burnout, began in 1959. For two years Rollins maintained a routine studying “metaphysics and Utopian man” (swapping books with fellow saxophonist John Coltrane). All the while he was wading into music theory and sharpening his technique – frequently practising on the upper reaches of Williamsburg Bridge in deference to a pregnant neighbour.

Mike Hobart is the FT’s jazz critic