Remembering jazz giant Sonny Rollins

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This is Fresh Air, I'm David Bean Coolie.

When our saxophone is Sunny Rollins' died Monday, he was 95 years old. For decades, he had been hailed as the greatest living jazz musician. Today, we're going to listen to Terry's 1994 interview with Sunny Rollins.

“But first, we have this appreciation from jazz historian Kevin Whitehead.”

He says no figure in jazz was more universally revered. Wagon Wheels, old cowboy song, written for Broadway, Zigfeld, Follies of 1934. It's from the album Way Out West, an excellent introduction to a few things that made Sunny Rollins great. Like, how the saxophone is thrived in the bare bones trio format, which left them fully

exposed. Also the clarity of his best improvisations.

“When you have as much technique as Rollins, it's easy to overdo it, but he leaves”

so much space, the effect is more like singing and showing off. Wagon Wheels also speaks to Sunny Rollins' love of unlikely material. The way out west he also does on an old cowhand, just as he'd recently cut, there's no business like show business, and how are things in gloca mora. And then there's his imposing sometimes garage sound.

Sunny's saxophone tone in his 1950s pride is as durable and flexible as steel reinforced rubber, and he got plenty of mileage out of it. [Music] That's St. Thomas from 1956.

The first of many Rollins' caliposos, his parents came from the West Indies.

Theodore Rollins was born and raised in Harlem, and was nicknamed Sunny while still in diapers. He grew up surrounded by established and aspiring jazz musicians. Rollins started on saxophone at eight, practice like mad and developed quickly, cutting his first session under his own name before turning 21.

Months later, he'd record mumbo bounce, hinting at those caliposos to come. Even then, he could give you the impression that when he improvises, he's both deep in the moment and standing back to truly observe his progress. [Music] You can divide Sunny Rollins' career into three acts.

the all-time jazz hot streaks, knocking out one classic album after another.

“But in 1959, he began a two-year sabbatical from gigging to up his game.”

He practiced on the Williamsburg Bridge, blowing to the tugboats, and act so New York iconic, Spike Lee restaged it in no better blues. Coming back in the sixties, Rollins tried on new situations, a quartet with guitar, another with a hornet Coleman sideman, and a brassy big band, plus C-Rot music for the film Alfie. Sometimes his playing revealed a harder edge and harder rhythm that look ahead to his

next phase.

This is the 1965 Colipcio Hold 'em Joe.

“Three Rollins' Ford decade last act began after a longer sabbatical.”

In 1966, fed up with the music business, he stopped recording for six years. When he came back in the seventies, much had changed. He was now using electric instruments, which gave the band a rockier edge, but that may have also been a practical move. Easier to tour with a bass guitar than an upright bass.

Rollins was gearing up for the long haul, conserving his energy for the stage. But also, his glorious playable tone had become more metallic and yackety as his solo

“was became more riffy and groove oriented, it was still exciting, but different.”

Sunny Rollins 1981, on the Dolly Parton Favorite, here you come again. This lighter-day music was designed to be more accessible. Making musicians came and went, but it hardly mattered. His old bands were gloriously interactive. Now they were the curtain behind the star, and Sunny for his part didn't hold back.

It was the most big-hearted embrace of the public by a jazz horn player since Louis Armstrong. But where pops had set solos, Rollins, the improviser, shared his musical thoughts in real time.

That made him famously self-critical, but the candor was brave no matter how it all turned

out, and even skeptics went to his shows in case he'd have one of those inspired nights. He'd had a few, like in Boston, four days after 9/11. And yeah, with Sunny Rollins as with Louis Armstrong, when it comes to their records I tend to reach for the old classics, those first explosions of the creativity they'd

later learned to measure out in more sensible doses to keep themselves from burning out. Sunny made it to 95 and performed into his 80s, for guy who blazed so brightly early on, he paced himself well. Jazz historian Kevin Whitehead, coming up, we listened to Terry's 1994 interview with Sunny Rollins.

This is fresh air. Today, we're remembering the great tenor saxophonist and improviser Sunny Rollins. He died Monday at the age of 95. Sunny Rollins started recording in the late 1940s.

Charlie Parker, Bud Powell, Thelonius Monk, Miles Davis, Max Roach, and Clifford Brown.

Terry grows spoke with Sunny Rollins in 1994. They began with his tenor saxophone solo from his 1972 recording of the Hogi Carmichael song "Skylark". The song "Skylark" is a song that has been sung by the old man. [Music]

Monk set to me one time, that if it wasn't for music, life wouldn't be worthwhile living.

I'm not so the paraphrasing what he said, but if I don't play for a little while, I get

physically sick, if I don't play my horn for a few days or whatever, I actually begin to get sick and I wonder what's the matter with me, didn't I realize what I haven't played my horn for a few days? When you're performing, and you're improvising, are you thinking, "Ah, well, no, not really,

“no, no, I don't think, that's why I really practice and I keep these exercises”

and so on."

Because when I'm actually on the stage in performing, the optimum condition is not

to think. I just want the music to play itself, I don't want to have to think about it. If I have to think about what I'm doing, then the moment is already gone, you know? So there's certain times when I actually, it's out of body experience so to speak. What do you do when you practice now?

You're a brilliant player, you're a veteran player. I think a lot of people of your statuette probably just perform and not exactly practice anymore. Well, when you play a read instrument, it might be true with other instruments as well, but

“when you play a read instrument, you have to deal with your ambiture, which is the position”

of your lips around your teeth and the instrument and the mouthpiece of the instrument. This has to form a sort of a cushion and if you don't play for a while, what will happen is that your lips would bleed when you play and even a split, you might split. But it's happened to me when I've had to lay off for a period of time. For other things, I'm not certain.

I practice a lot of things, but I read once where my friend Mike's road said that a lot of musicians shouldn't really practice, practicing is cheating after certain after you reach a certain point. So that may be right, but in the case of just keeping my ambiture from bleeding and my lips from splitting, I like to play a certain amount every day.

One of the things that I love about your playing is your repertoire, the songs that you choose to play, and you have a really diverse repertoire and you play a lot of old pop songs that many people don't know or have forgotten, as well as some songs that are like novelty

“songs like Tutsi and I'm an old cow hand and old coward songs. Are these songs you grew up with?”

Yeah, a lot of them, but songs that I heard when I was a youngster, when I was going up the big thing to do every week was go to the movies on Saturday and on Saturday we used to see a lot of these movies that had this scores on it by some of the composers and we'd see Louis

I also heard music around the house and so on, but the movies did provide a certain

“large part I think of some of the things that I play today, you know.”

When you started performing, was it hard to find other musicians who liked the same songs you did and who wanted to play them? You'd even back in the days when you were playing with Miles Davis or with Clifford Brown, did they share your musical tastes?

I would say, basically yes, people like co-trained and Clifford Brown, we all had an appreciation

of what they would call today the standard songs. In my case, I might have found some

“more obscure songs. Did you ever like propose playing something like Titutzi and have other”

musicians looking at you like you were crazy? Well, they might have thought so, but they wouldn't dare to say it.

Well, why don't we pause here and...

It's my gig, you know. Right, right. Why don't we pause here and play your recording of there's no business like show business? I love what you do with it. This is Sunny Rollins. There's no business like show business. [Music] [Music]

[Music] [Music] [Music]

“Sunny Rollins is my guest. You grew up in Harlem, in New York, and your parents, I believe”

both of your parents, from the Virgin Islands? That's right. What were your parents' ambitions for you? Did they push you to Excel when you were young? Yeah, well, I was the youngest child. I have older brother who was very fine, classical, while Lennie ended up being a physician, then I had an older sister who was also saying a lot in church and everything. And so, I was supposed to follow in their footsteps. Of course, I didn't because I was somewhat of a black sheep. They were

much more studious than I, and I wanted to hang out and play ball, and I see years went on. I was really the guy that was out, going to jazz, clutch, and all that. These things were frowned on at that time. Sunny Rollins recorded in 1994. He died Monday at age 95. Coming up after a break, we continue our interview with Rollins, and here from Film Critic Justin Chang, who was just returned from Can. Here's Sunny Rollins and Talonius Monk. I'm David B. and Coolie, and this is Fresh Air.

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The jazz life, when you started to play, actually had a lot of heroin involved with it.

[music] You got involved with that for a while when you were young. Do you think you would have tried something

“like that if it weren't for it being in such a part of the jazz world in the 50s?”

I don't think I would have actually, there would really have been no reason. I don't think to get involved with that. I got involved with it because a lot of my idols were doing it and so we thought that using drugs was sort of the thing to do, but there's just something like asking whether Billie Holiday would be the singer she is if she didn't use drugs.

I've had this discussion often with people, and my answer is that yes, I think Billie Holiday would be

the singer she is regardless of what happened to her. Even though she may sing about hard times and all that, she was a consummate musician and beautiful singer. Yes, I think that she would sing the way she did. Charlie Parker would play the way he did. Everybody would do what they did.

“It must have been your parents' worst nightmare when you entered the jazz world and then started using.”

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Well, you know, my mother was pretty. Since I was a baby, my mother really she stuck by me. We all said what I did. She was really in my corner, but I had a lot of problems from the rest of my family, my father, my grandmother. They really were pretty down on me. And my siblings didn't really understand where I was coming from anyway. But I have to say that my mother really believed in me all the way.

And I'm really happy that I was able to get myself together before she left the scene. So she kind of saw me make start to make records and so on like like that. So I sort of made her feel that her trust was an exactly all in vain, you know. What were you ever arrested? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, I was arrested. Unfortunately, I had to

get involved with the just the system and all of this stuff. You know, but I was always lucky because

I was able to get involved with music programs and in the prison. Right. And in those days, there were other musicians there, you know, so.

“Did it scare you when you were in prison? You say something like what, what am I doing here?”

Yeah, it scared me a lot. It scared me a lot, but again, I was lucky because I could play an instrument and a lot of the other prisoners, a new of me, so I immediately had respect from them. But of course, you know, being locked up is no joy right. How did you straighten out? Well, it took a little while, but you know, I slid back a couple of times and everything.

But I eventually had gotten down to the complete bottom, so I couldn't have gotten any worse. You know, I mean, I was really in the complete, what was the bottom? Well, the bottom was was sleeping in park cars and in garages and all this stuff, you know.

I guess today they would just say, it's homeless. But I did this mainly when I was in Chicago. Chicago was where I was sort of was out there on my own.

In New York, even though I was persona non-graded at home, I could always perhaps get by sneak in the house and something.

But when I was really away from home, I really had to pay a lot of dues as we used to say.

“How would you protect your horn during the birds on your homeless?”

Well, I didn't protect my horn. I mean, I didn't have a horn, really. Were you barring other people's hands? I was barring other people's hands, yeah. What did you learn about yourself during that period? Well, what I learned about myself, well, I learned that I had the strength to get over something,

which was really deep.

And I think one of the things that I'm always, that always feel good about myself was that I was able to overcome that.

Because I really had to struggle. When I came away from the hospital one time and I went back to the nightclub. It was really the classic scene of the old drug push that's standing there saying, "Come on, man. Come on. This is good." I really went through the classic scene of fighting myself.

Saying, "Well, gee, if I go with them, it wouldn't be so bad. It's just one time." Maybe I should do it and why not. And then the other part of me saying, "No, don't do it." I mean, the real classic battle between good and evil, right and wrong, whatever you want to call it. But anyway, I won out, and that's one thing that I really feel good about myself.

I really went into the lion's den and it came out alive.

“Once you found that strength and knew that you had it, how else were you able to use it in your life?”

Well, then I felt like I could do anything, and I could get back to what I really wanted to do, which is my music. So how do you use that strength in your music?

Well, I don't know. I think actually I think I always had strength in my music.

Even when I was a kid and I used to practice for hours and hours and hours at a time. I mean, I always had something within myself, which enabled me to be alone and play and get into what I'm doing. And not think about anything else and really get into this stuff myself. So actually, by getting rid of these negative elements, I was just able to return to what I had in the beginning. Over the years, you've taken several hiatusists. There have been several periods where you haven't performed.

“I think one period like that lasted was five years, was that the longest?”

Oh, my think about, well, it's hard to say. I took a hiatus on the bridge, which was pretty well documented. Right, this was during the period when you were practicing on the Williamsburg Bridge in New York because it was too loud for you to practice in your apartment. So when you take a hiatus, when do you know it's time to get back to performing? Well, when I took my hiatus on the bridge, it became apparent because I sort of gotten what I wanted to do. I was trying to really accomplish something musically. And I sort of gotten close enough to what I was doing. That I felt if I stayed there might have turned into a self-indulgence.

And that's not what it was about. I'd love to know what it feels like to play your horn on the Williamsburg Bridge. And this was the period when you were in performing, but you were practicing a lot on the bridge, I guess, in the middle of the night. Well, yeah, replay it in the night and in the daytime, anytime. It was actually a beautiful place to play because it was a nice space up there.

You were really on top of the subway. The trains came across your bridge and underneath you.

Yeah, the pedestrian walk. So it was really a nice space up there.

“And you sort of write in the middle of everything you can see the Manhattan and on the other side, Brooklyn.”

And the boats would be coming by at night and you could blow as loud as you want. Nobody would even look at you. You know, every now and then people would walk by, but nobody would even look. You know, I mean, this was the sophistication of New Yorkers. Yeah, New Yorkers are immune to everything. It's just been a pleasure to talk with you. We've been wanting to talk with you on the show for so long.

Thank you so much for doing it. It's been wonderful.

Thank you. Sunny Rollins talking with Terry Gross in 1994. Rollins, it's worth noting, was the inspiration for a character in the long running popular Fox cartoon series The Simpsons. The character is a musician known as Bleeding Gums Murphy, who, like Rollins, takes the sabbatical to practice nightly on a bridge. In 2013, Rollins himself made a guest appearance on the show in an episode titled Whiskey Business. He plays himself, not Bleeding Gums Murphy. Young Lisa Simpson, who was a big jazz fan, is writing a letter of complaint because a music company has started taking advantage of artists and their catalogs by presenting them as performing holograms.

Sunny Rollins visits Lisa in response, but eventually she realizes he's a hologram too. Dear, she done left me records. Once again, I write protesting your holographic exploitation of blues icon, Bleeding Gums Murphy.

“I call for a boycott and girlcott of your entire catalog, and tell you what, Sunny Rollins?”

That's right, Lisa, and I'm here to beg you to stop writing those letters. More siding with record companies? This isn't about money, Lisa, from two packs your core to Dwight Eisenhower, holograms have introduced some of our leading dead people to a new audience of people with money. We're setting, we're setting, from two packs your core to Dwight Eisenhower. You're a hologram, aren't you?

No, we're setting, we're setting. Have you not shame? Coming up, more with Sunny Rollins. This is fresh air. Terry spoke to Sunny Rollins again in 2005. At the time, a concert album had been released recorded in Boston four days after the 9/11 attacks.

Rollins lived six blocks away from the World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan and saw the second tower fall.

Rollins had to evacuate his apartment in Lower Manhattan on the 39th floor. He grabbed his horn, but some things he had to leave behind. Most of the things in there, I had to eventually throw away, get taken away. You know, I had left my piano there, which was very sentimental to me. A lot of the guys played on that monk you could play on it.

People came by to my house, and lots of clothes that I had there, lots of books. What did you leave your piano behind? Well, because I was so afraid of the fact that toxic material might have might have gotten into the mechanism of your piano. I was afraid that I would be handling something of that slot. Do you know what happened to your piano?

No, I don't. I tried to give it to itself as an army, so I ended up leaving it in the apartment and explaining to the people in the apartment. I was certain that they would be able to handle it and take care of it in the proper way. I hope so, you know. Well, after you were evacuated from your building on September 12th, you drove to Boston where your schedule to play on September 15th.

So many events were canceled in the days after September 11th.

“Did you speak to the producers of that event and have a long talk about whether you should go on with the show or not?”

Well, I spoke to my wife Lucille, and I was also all for not doing this show because I was really very insidient in my feet. Did that have to do a part with having walked down 39.

And she also may have had a feeling that it would be important to do a concert at that particular time.

“You know, so anyway, she convinced me to play the concert.”

I thought I'd play another track from your new CD without a song, the 9/11 concert. And this is a night in Galsang and Barclay Square. It's a beautiful version of it.

How did you first hear this song?

“Well, you know, a night in Galsang and Barclay Square.”

I guess I heard it during the 40s when I used to see all the movies that came in town every week. And it's funny that a night in Galsang and Barclay Square may have had some connection to World War II. And the scene when I was evacuated and I walked down those steps that day. When I came downstairs, it was very reminiscent of those World War II pictures. And there was a blitz of London with all of the emergency vehicles and the smoke and the fumes.

I mean, it was really something that I guess is something I'm trying to say that it's stored someplace in my mind. So I guess since I'm still alive, I might have a way to turn it into some kind of a positive experience. [Music] [Music] [Music]

[Music] [Music] [Music] That's tenor saxophone is Sunny Rollins from a live album recorded in Boston four days after 9/11. Rollins spoke with Terry Gross in 2005.

He died Monday at the age of 95. Coming up, Justin Chang tells us about the films he saw at Can. This is fresh air.

“The Can film festival has been a launch pad for some of the most acclaimed films in recent years, including drive my car, the zone of interest, a Nora, and last years sentimental value and the secret agent.”

Our film critic Justin Chang returned from the festival earlier this week. He says that although it wasn't a banner year for Can, there's still where many good movies and even a few great movies to look forward to.

The first Can film festival I ever attended in May 2006 was a deliriously star studded affair.

Penelope crews, Ethan Hawke, and Kirsten Dunst walked up the red carpeted steps. Future Oscar hopefuls like Volver, Babel, and Marie Antoinette, competed for the Palm Door, the festival's top prize.

And near the end of the festival, I walked into a film I knew nothing about, called Pan's Labyrinth, and emerged, knowing I'd seen a classic.

“This year's Can kicked off with a 20th anniversary screening of Pan's Labyrinth, but otherwise there wasn't much of that 2006 era-rasal dazzle.”

The major Hollywood studios tightened their belts and stayed home, perhaps with still fresh memories of the stinging Can reception for the last Indiana Jones movie back in 2023. But there were stars here and there, to me more and still in Skarsguard were on this year's jury. Adam Driver and Miles Teller showed up for the world premiere of James Gray's terrific 1986 set crime drama, Paper Tiger, in which they play brothers, who unwisely go into business with the Russian mob. Driver and Teller are outstanding, and Scarlett Johansson is heartbreakingly good, as a family member forced to deal with the fallout.

“Paper Tiger deserved a prize, but it left the festival empty handed. Instead, the jury awarded the palm door to the gripping and sometimes infuriating small town drama, Fjord.”

It's the second palm win for the Romanian filmmaker, Christian Munju. He won his first in 2007 for the movie Four Months, Three Weeks, and Two Days.

In Fjord, Sebastian Stan and Renata Reinspe, are almost unrecognizable as an evangelical Christian couple, who have recently moved from Romania to a small Norwegian town with their five children. In this scene, they sing a hymn with their church friends. When the couple are accused of child abuse, Fjord becomes a fierce battle between the forces of religious conservatism and secular liberalism.

“It may be set in Norway, but it's likely to resonate with American audiences when it opens later this year. I hope there will also be Robust turnout for Minitar, a perfectly chilled tale of adultery and murder that won the Grand Prix or second place.”

It's a remake of the 1969 Claude Scherbrall drama, La Fam and Fjord. This time set in Russia, not long after the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The director of Minitar, Andre's Viagansov, nearly died of COVID during the pandemic, and it was moving to see him back in Can, with a film this powerful and uncompromising in its critique of the Putin regime. One of the busiest out-of-competition titles was Club Kid, a hugely enjoyable comedy directed by the actor, writer, comedian, and social media star, Jordan Firstman.

He plays a gay New York City Club promoter who's sent and reeling when he learns that he has a ten-year-old son.

The result is basically a ketamine-laced version of every adult bonds with cute kid movie you've ever seen, but Firstman is a real talent.

He's also one of several queer filmmakers who made a bold impression of the festival this year. Jane Shonenbrun, the director of the inventive transgender allegory I saw the TV glow, came to can with their third feature, a teenage sex and death at Kami Osma. Starring a very game Hannah Inbinder and Julian Anderson, the movie is a clever homage to and deconstruction of 80s and 90s slasher thrillers, digging deep into the often unspoken connections between our love of pop culture, and our hangups about sex and desire.

Along with paper tiger, Club Kid and Kami Osma were welcome reminders that American cinema isn't close to dead at can or anywhere else. Even so, I can't say that I minded the general absence of Hollywood at the festival this year. One of the reasons I keep returning to can is that it shows interesting movies from all over the world. Movies like the gorgeous and moving Rwanda set drama, Danyamana, about efforts to bring about truth and reconciliation years after the 1994 genocide. The film earned its director, Maki Klemantin to Sabajambo, the camera door prize for best debut feature.

My favorite film at Can This Year was all of a sudden, from the Japanese director Rwisuke Hamaguchi. Set in and around a Parisian elder care home, it uses the close bond between two women, one French and one Japanese, to raise haunting questions about how we live, how we die,

Like Hamaguchi's Oscar winning drive my car, all of a sudden is a reminder that something as simple as a conversation between friends can make for sublimely moving cinema.

“I can't wait to see it again, and I can't wait for you to see it too.”

Justin Chang is a film critic for the New Yorker.

On Monday's show, historian Elizabeth Storedoor prior spent years lecturing on the most charged word in American English, and never told a soul that her father was the man who infamously used it, the legendary comic Richard prior.

“We talk about the end word, growing up as prior's daughter, and why, late in his career, he swore to never say the word again.”

Hope you can join us.

For Terry Gross and Tanya Mosley, I'm David Bean Coolie.