Recommendations of the Editorial team
Sonny Rollins was considered a celebrated jazz musician – but behind the scenes, the Grammy winner and National Medal of Arts recipient remained a mystery.
In a collection of personal texts published as a book in 2024, the saxophonist and composer, once called “the only jazz hermit,” revealed that he often questioned the acclaim surrounding him. “I am faced with the frightening and fascinating reality that there is a force working within me that is working tirelessly toward my own destruction,” he wrote, “even as I try to improve myself.”
These intimate reflections are captured in The Notebooks of Sonny Rollins – a collection of the jazz legend’s personal notes from 1959 to 2010.
Published in April 2024 by New York Review Books, “Notebooks” was edited by jazz critic and researcher Sam VH Reese, who also wrote the introduction.
Rollins’ notebooks donated to the New York Public Library
“The Notebooks of Sonny Rollins” is experiencing a surge in demand following Rollins’ death over the weekend. Although he performed for audiences around the world, the musician was also deeply attached to solitary practice. As the book describes, “a turning point in his legendary career came in 1959, when Rollins put aside performing and recording to begin a new regime of musical exploration – practicing for hours, sometimes all night, on the Williamsburg Bridge.”
This was also the time when he began writing in the notebooks that would become a “familiar companion in the years to come,” as Reese writes – “as a place where [Rollins] “I was able to reflect on art and life and his own search for meaning in words and images.”
Rollins’ notebooks were eventually donated to the New York Public Library and are said to have filled six boxes. The recordings reveal everything: the musician’s to-do lists, rehearsal notes and songwriting fragments. He ponders “nightclub culture, racism and the mysteries of inner life,” as the book description puts it. Additionally, Rollins notes his “motives and goals” in life and writes that his only desire is to “uplift and inspire people.”
The saxophone, says Rollins, enables people to “see a better and more beautiful world. We saw and see the means to a better person; to the perfection of ourselves.”
A further insight into Rollins’ life is offered in “Saxophone Colossus”, the first complete biography of the jazz legend. The book, published in 2022, includes more than 200 interviews with Rollins himself as well as family members, close friends and companions.
“Part oral history of jazz in the musicians’ own words, part chronicle of a man’s quest for social justice and spiritual enlightenment, this is the definitive biography of one of the most enduring and influential artists in the history of jazz and America,” the publisher’s announcement states.
Rollins died Monday at his home in Woodstock, New York. He was 95 years old.
