Jazz

Artist: Sonny Rollins

Title of piece: The Bridge

Year and place of recording: New York City, January-February 1962

Other performers within the piece: Jim Hall, guitar; Bob Cranshaw, double bass; and Ben Riley, drums

Sonny Rollins was born and raised in New York City, during Harlem’s vibrant jazz scene. When he was younger he first started with alto saxophone, but switched in his teens to the tenor (Hopkins, Lesson 9). Rollins style mostly came from Coleman Hawkins, a jazz tenor saxophonist, he was associated with swing music and big band era, but also had a development in the bebop (Hopkins, Lesson 5a). He also drew his style from Lester Young as well, who used a “free- floating” style in his harmonies (Hopkins, Lesson 6).

In the early fifties he become the most creative young tenor due to working with Miles, Monk and MJQ (Sonny Rollins, 2016). After some time in Chicago Rollins “reemerged” at the end of 1955 as a member of the Clifford Brown- Max Roach Quintet.

The year 1956 consisted of, Rollins releasing his first recordings under his own name titled Valse Hot, these were playing in a ¾ meter. There were several different patterns that were explored, one was St. Thomasinitiated, and the pattern for this was calypso (Sonny Rollins, 2016). Calypso is a style of Afro- Caribbean music. Then there was Blue 7 which should thematic improvisation. Thematic improvisation is where the procedures can be divided roughly into two broad and sometimes overlapping categories, the paraphrase and chorus (Gunther Schuller, November).

Eventually, Rollins started unaccompanied solo playing, this was a specialty during this period, he was dissatisfied with the acclaim his music was attracting and withdrew from public performance for a couple of years. He didn’t want other people to push him, he wanted to do things his way. Over the years he has been striving and working for more solos, he returned in the late sixties with his first recording called The Bridge (Sonny...