Who is sonny rollins main influence

Upon graduating from high school, Rollins made his first recordings with Babs Gonzales, J. Johnson, Bud Powell, and Fats Navarro. In , he recorded Freedom Suite , which received a limited release before being repackaged by Riverside Records.

In , Rollins spent two years practicing yoga and playing saxophone on the Williamsburg Bridge. He also produced five other albums. Rollins experimented with free jazz and noise on East Broadway Run Down , released in He took another hiatus from to , travelling to Jamaica and to an ashram in Powai, India. In , Rollins, a dedicated environmental advocate, released Global Warming. Rollins recorded over sixty albums, and was the subject of many documentaries.

He received numerous awards and honors, including the Grammy Award for lifetime achievement. Rollins formed his own record label, Doxy, through which he issued Sonny, Please in Into his eighth decade, Rollins continued to perform, and was documented on the three-volume Road Show series, also released on Doxy and Okeh. In , Rollins was awarded the National Medal of Arts. The following year he was the subject of a documentary by Dick Fontaine, Beyond the Notes.

Due to health problems, Rollins stopped playing in public in In , the album Holding the Stage , a companion to the Roadshow series, appeared. The following year, Rollins announced that he had been forced to stop playing altogether and expressed some disappointment that he had not achieved -- artistically -- all he wanted to.

AllMusic relies heavily on JavaScript. Please enable JavaScript in your browser to use the site fully. Blues Classical Country. Electronic Folk International. Jazz Latin New Age. Aggressive Bittersweet Druggy. Energetic Happy Hypnotic. He also has a keen appreciation of his audience; when performing he often walks into the crowd as he plays, hoping to draw inspiration from them.

A compilation of two recent live shows, including his 80th birthday concert at the Beacon Theater in New York, the record captures Rollins playing with the energy of someone half his age. By the time he was 21, he was playing with Miles Davis. Within the next five years, he achieved the kind of success that most jazz musicians might hope for in a lifetime: he was leading his own groups and recording albums which were widely praised.

Here is Balliett on how Rollins melded his chief influences, the tenor saxophonist Coleman Hawkins and Charlie Parker:. And over all this he superimposed a unique and witty garrulity that made his immensely long solos seem, paradoxically, like endless strings of epigrams. For many, this period was Rollins at his best. On Way Out West , another album released in these years, Rollins plays with a stripped down, pianoless trio, using hackneyed songs from the cowboy movies he grew up watching at the Apollo as vehicles for wonderfully complex improvisation.

In spite of this success, Rollins quietly withdrew from the jazz world in , citing dissatisfaction with his playing. For two years he did nothing but practice in his apartment.

When a neighbor had a new baby, he moved his practice sessions to the Williamsburg Bridge. The first was John Coltrane, who released the revolutionary Giant Steps —one of the most harmonically complex jazz songs ever written—in , and thereafter began an ascent that would stop only with his untimely death in Second, and more radical still, was Ornette Coleman, the creator of free jazz.

Suddenly Rollins was regarded—unfairly—as a conservative, a remnant of the old bebop and post bop tradition. When he returned to New York in he began what some have seen as the beginning of a long slow decline. Yet in this instance he seems to have gone too far.