Saxophonist Sonny Rollins, who spent more than two years practising in solitude as a young man on a windswept New York bridge to reinvent his playing and \u2060become one of the giants of jazz, died at the \u2060age of 95 on Monday, his publicist said.<\/p>\n
Rollins had recorded the confidently titled Jazz Colossus album \u2060in 1956. But the saxophonist remained wracked with self-doubt.<\/p>\n
So, in the summer of 1959, he began to play on the windswept pedestrian walkway of New York\u2019s Williamsburg Bridge. Initially a place where he could avoid disturbing his pregnant neighbour, the walkway became the site of endless practice.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat made me withdraw and go to the bridge was how I felt about my own playing,\u201d Rollins told the Guardian newspaper in 2022. \u201cI knew I was dissatisfied.\u201d<\/p>\n
He ended up spending more than two years there, often for 14 or 15 hours a day.<\/p>\n
The resulting record, The Bridge, was not a complete break from his previous style but took his soloing and improvisation to a new level. A review in the Jazz Journal at the time said Rollins was able \u201cto extract the last ounce of meaning from a particular phrase taken from the melody of the song\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Saxophonist Sonny Rollins, who spent more than two years practising in solitude as a young man on a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":665324,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[290805,23,290808,290802,31741,290809,231141,290807,290803,16050,1346,290804,201538,123658,94148,290806,3,21,19,22,20,25,24],"class_list":["post-665323","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-states","tag-alfie","tag-america","tag-art-blakey","tag-bud-powell","tag-charlie-parker","tag-coleman-hawkins","tag-cotton-club","tag-east-broadway-run-down","tag-fats-waller","tag-grammy","tag-harlem","tag-jazz-colossus","tag-john-coltrane","tag-miles-davis","tag-monk","tag-national-academy-of-recording-arts-and-sciences","tag-news","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/665323","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=665323"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/665323\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/665324"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=665323"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=665323"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=665323"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}