“HE PLAYED WITH CHARLIE PARKER, MILES DAVIS, AND COLTRANE — AND OUTLIVED THEM ALL. SONNY ROLLINS, GONE AT 95.” Sonny Rollins didn’t quit music. He quit the stage. In the summer of 1959, at the absolute peak of his fame, he walked up the steps of New York’s Williamsburg Bridge and started practicing alone. Sometimes 16 hours straight. No audience. No applause. Just wind and sky and saxophone. He’d already played alongside Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Coltrane, Thelonious Monk. He’d recorded “Saxophone Colossus” — the album that changed everything. But something inside told him he wasn’t good enough yet. What happened when he came back stunned the jazz world. And that was only the beginning. For six more decades, Sonny kept reinventing himself — even recording a sax solo on the Rolling Stones’ “Tattoo You.” Yesterday, at 95, the Saxophone Colossus fell silent at his home in Woodstock, New York. The man jazz critic Gary Giddins once called “the most commanding musician alive” — gone, but with a sound you’d recognize in two seconds flat.
Sonny Rollins: The Saxophone Colossus Who Never Stopped Searching Sonny Rollins did not quit music. He quit the stage. That…