BENJAMIN GIVAN Becoming Sonny Rollins

In late 1939 a twenty- five- year- old Harlem resident named Ralph Ellison stopped to talk to a small boy on the sidewalk near the corner of 135th Street and Lenox Avenue. Ellison, who had arrived in New York three years earlier from Tuskegee, Alabama, was on a job collecting urban folk- lore for the Federal Writers’ Project. Pencil in hand, the aspiring novelist asked the child whether he knew any rhymes. His youthful informant cheerfully offered a few lines about the local elementary school, which was just a stone’s throw away: “Remember the Eight, Remember the Nine, Remember that ‘City Dump’ 89.”1 Public School 89 was one of upper Manhattan’s most overcrowded, underfunded city schools; in dimly lit classrooms with broken black- boards, pupils as old as twelve sat cramped in seats meant for kinder- gartners.2 The dilapidated building nevertheless stood at the bustling epicenter of Depression- era African American urban life, near an intersec- tion where crowds often congregated around soapbox orators.3 Within a couple hundred yards’ radius could be found the Harlem branches of the New York Public Library and YMCA, the local NAACP and Urban League headquarters, the offices of the Amsterdam News and New York Age, and Harlem Hospital.4 A few minutes’ walk southward, an array of clubs and saloons known as “Jungle Alley” was clustered along 133rd Street.5 Ninety- eight percent of those inhabiting the congested blocks surrounding the four- story schoolhouse were African Americans; scores hailed from the southern states, and many were Caribbean migrants and

Benjamin Givan is associate professor of music at Skidmore College. His previ- ous research on Sonny Rollins appears in the articles “Gunther Schuller and the Challenge of Sonny Rollins” (Journal of the American Musicological Society, 2014) and “On Intergenerational Jazz Performance” (Epistrophy, 2018).

American Music Winter 2019 © 2019 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois 494 Givan their offspring.6 Among the latter was another young boy enrolled at PS 89, a nine- year-old whose family rented a nearby apartment at 69 West 135th Street.7 His name was Walter Theodore Rollins.8 Everyone called him “Sonny.” His parents, Valborg (1904–58) and Walter William Rollins (1903–76), had arrived in New York ten years earlier from the US Virgin Islands, not long after the formerly Danish West Indian colony’s residents were granted American citizenship.9 The couple brought with them two small children, a boy and a girl; Sonny, their youngest, was born a year later, in 1930. Like many Harlem families, the Rollinses moved often, and within a decade they had lived at four different addresses in the same neighbor- hood.10 One day, around 1939, walking home from PS 89, Sonny passed by a local nightclub called the Elks Rendezvous and gazed up to see a captivating photograph of the venue’s tuxedo- clad resident bandleader, Louis Jordan (1908–75), clutching a shiny King Zephyr alto saxophone.11 Not long afterward, he asked his mother to buy him a horn. In the decades to come, with a horn in his hands, Sonny Rollins would make countless international tours and record dozens of albums; he is today acclaimed by many as the world’s greatest living musical impro- viser and widely regarded as, along with John Coltrane (1926–67), one of jazz’s two most influential tenor saxophonists since World War II.12 Rollins has also come to epitomize a popular romanticized notion of the individual jazz artist as a lone creative spirit. He has been called “a heroic figure,” and the critic Nate Chinen even described one of his late career outdoor summer performances in New York City, attended by thousands, as a “descen[t] from Mount Olympus.”13 There is something to all this: the saxophonist has long relished solitude, and the musicologist Barry Kernfeld proposes that “if ever there was an argument for conceiving of jazz group playing . . . as being dominated by a great individual artist, that artist is Rollins.”14 Yet Rollins has always rejected any heroicization of his personal achievements, preferring to credit the experiences of his youth—the music suffusing his daily world, the performers who influ- enced him, and those with whom he played and studied.15 When honored with accolades or awards he typically insists, “My idols . . . deserve to get this award and in getting it I am getting it for them.”16 Looking back, he says, “I just was born in the right place at the right time.”17 It would be hard to imagine a musician who better personifies jazz’s deep roots in the communal environment of black America during the first half of the twentieth century. For all that some scholars have jus- tifiably viewed the idiom as “transnational”—the “lingua franca” of a “global musical culture”—jazz, as Rollins experienced it during his early years, was very much a local phenomenon.18 This stands to reason. “The greatest quantity of immaterial culture,” anthropologist Greg Urban notes, “is transmitted through propinquity,” and as Travis A. Jackson adds, even “face- to- face contact has to be qualified” inasmuch as jazz’s Becoming Sonny Rollins 495 sonic properties can potentially be replicated or adapted without any concomitant recognition, understanding, or preservation of the music’s attendant social meanings and functions.19 Historically, the best route to learning how to play and understand jazz has always been to live near those who already know how. Although the structural and ideologi- cal forces shaping interwar Harlem’s culture and demographics were far from universal determinants of its residents’ artistic interests and accomplishments—most of the area’s inhabitants were certainly not des- tined to become jazz musicians—these particular conditions provided unique opportunities and increased the odds of serendipitous individual circumstances and personal encounters that all would be enormously advantageous for would-be musicians with the desire and perseverance to capitalize upon them. For those so inclined, Rollins among them, few times and places have been so propitious. Embarking on his life’s musical journey, Rollins acquired expertise through exposure to myriad people, places, and things.20 There were the relatives, acquaintances, and professional associates who taught, men- tored, and encouraged him. There were technologies and media of musi- cal production, reproduction, and distribution: radio broadcasts, feature films, and material objects such as records, books, and of course musical instruments. And there were venues and locales: homes, schoolhouses, clubs, cafés, and ballrooms where the music was practiced, rehearsed, and performed, as well as streets, parks, and indoor public gathering spots where friends congregated to share thoughts and ideas as they went about their daily lives. In this milieu, bearers of musical knowledge habitually imparted their wisdom informally, a social practice that was as much about fostering communal ties and nurturing spiritual well- being as it was about conveying aesthetic principles and their associated methods and techniques.21 Yet this musical “gift economy” was also suffused with commercial modes of transmission whereby music was commodified and knowledge was exchanged via monetary transactions, through relatively standardized pedagogy, and within public and private educational institutions.22 In actuality, the commercial musical sphere subsidized the gift economy: professional musicians happily offered their expertise free of charge because they earned their living as performers.23 As the years passed and jazz grew less commercially viable, they became less disposed to do so; grade- school and conservatory jazz performance programs with remunerated instructors gradually supplanted the custom of gratis knowledge sharing, a turn of events that could scarcely have been foreseen in Rollins’s day. One thing is certain: the community that fostered Rollins’s early musi- cal aspirations was wrought by racial residential segregation. This white supremacist system of social control was, historian Richard Rothstein observes, “a nationwide project of the federal government in the twen- tieth century,” and its instruments of enforcement included covenants 496 Givan imposing racially discriminatory prohibitions on home sales.24 Such legally sanctioned practices were directly experienced by innumerable individuals, including Sonny’s childhood friend Andy Kirk Jr. (1929–67), whose father, the famed bandleader Andy Kirk (1898–1992), sought in 1942 to move his family away from Harlem but was thwarted from pur- chasing a house in the outer city borough of Queens when the Kirks’ pro- spective new white neighbors filed an injunction compelling the proper- ty’s seller to honor a restrictive covenant.25 Rollins now considers bebop, the new jazz of his adolescence, to have symbolized the gradual—if far from total—alleviation of these oppressive forces. “Bebop represented the freedom people felt in being able to go where they wanted—geographi- cally, politically and artistically—and no longer being confined to one area,” he asserted in the early 1990s. Yet the saxophonist also acknowl- edges the cruel irony that African Americans’ conditions of involuntary proximity yielded robust, valued communal ties: “It’s only now that I look back and say, ‘Damn, what happened to the community?’ There was nothing wrong with living in Harlem; it was a great environment when I was young. The freedom was great; it had to happen, but it was not an unmixed blessing.”26 In 1940, when Sonny was ten years old, the Harlem Renaissance writer Claude McKay noted that, because the city’s African American popula- tion was then so geographically concentrated, “there is no other minority group in New York having such an extraordinary diversity of individu- als of achievement and wealth who are compelled to live in the midst of the mass.”27 Rollins remembers his own neighborhood as “the sort of place where most of the black artists—who were able to—lived. . . . And all of the great [musicians] lived there. . . . So it was a beautiful place to grow up.”28 A fellow resident of his block during their teenage years was Roy Eaton (b. 1930), a future advertising professional and accomplished classical pianist who later recalled, “It was segregated, yes. But it was a segregation that allowed seeds to be planted and blossoms to occur that could not have occurred in any other environment.”29 Of all the art forms that flowered in this setting, none has proven more vibrant, distinctive, and enduring than jazz, and few artists of the interwar generation have become more visible beacons of the music’s cultural influence than Sonny Rollins. If we hear in his improvisations a remarkable individual creative mind at work, we also hear the deep collective wisdom of a great com- munity at a unique historical moment.

“You Were Expected to Play a Musical Instrument” Rollins was raised in a musical home. His paternal grandfather, Stedman Rollins, was, according to family lore, an amateur singer in St. Croix, and his father, who was enlisted in the US Navy and stationed in Annapolis, Becoming Sonny Rollins 497

Maryland, during most of his children’s youth, had at one time played the clarinet a little “just for amusement.”30 His mother, who worked as a domestic for a family on Park Avenue and had studied music as a teenager, brought her offspring to Caribbean dances in Harlem and owned records by calypso artists such as Gerald Clark and his Caribbean Serenaders.31 She sang to them. (Rollins learned from her the traditional West Indian melody “Fire Down There,” which he later recorded as “St. Thomas,” retitled after the island where she was born.)32 And she took them to hear European operettas; as a youngster, Rollins saw a summer outdoor performance of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance at Harlem’s Colonial Park (since renamed Jackie Robinson Park), most likely in 1935, as well as other productions at New York’s City Center, which opened in 1943.33 From early on, he heard a wide range of musics from different parts of the world. The family owned a banjo, a xylophone, and a player piano along with some piano rolls by the stride pianist James P. Johnson.34 Sonny’s sister, Gloria (1928–2008), took piano lessons, and their brother, Valde- mar (1925–2018), occasionally played songs by Duke Ellington at the keyboard.35 Valdemar’s main instrument was the violin, however; both he and Gloria were classically trained and attended New York’s High School for Music and Art.36 The two elder siblings become proficient enough to play Mendelssohn’s violin concerto together at home, and after finishing high school Valdemar was recruited by the Pittsburgh Sym- phony Orchestra, though he instead enrolled at City College and, after receiving a degree from Meharry Medical College, became a physician.37 Among Virgin Islanders, elite European music was considered a mark of class status and social cultivation, and the Rollins family subscribed to the integrationist ethos that has more recently been termed a “politics of respectability.”38 “In a West Indian family you were expected to do well in school,” Gloria recalled. “You also were expected to play a musi- cal instrument. . . . From the Virgin Islands, you had to play the piano or the violin, or something to ensure that you were inclined toward the better things in life—I’ll put it that way.”39 Her younger brother, Sonny, remained conversant with Western classical music throughout his life, citing a love for composers from Bach, Beethoven, and Mozart through Debussy, Ravel, and Puccini, quoting works by Verdi, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Prokofiev in his improvisations, and even at one point recording a theme from Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique Symphony.40 Religious music was another strong presence. Gloria Rollins sang in the choir at the Moravian church that the family regularly attended (probably Beth-Tphillah Fourth Moravian Church on West 136th Street, where Reverend Charles D. Martin preached).41 Most congregants were of West Indian origin, and the denomination’s liturgical music was heav- ily Europeanized.42 “It wasn’t gospelly,” Sonny remembered. “It was 498 Givan very straight hymns and Bach Cantatas. . . . The Moravian church was very straight-laced with the organ and this type of thing.”43 His maternal grandmother, Miriam Hansen (née Walcott), also occasionally took him to services elsewhere, from Harlem storefront churches to major houses of worship such as the Abyssinian Baptist Church, on West 138th Street, and the Pentecostal Faith Church, on Lenox Avenue at 130th Street, pre- sided over by Mother Rosa A. Horn, a South Carolina native.44 Mother Horn’s sermons, which Rollins also heard on radio broadcasts, were demonstratively impassioned affairs, with congregants often falling out during the services.45 “It was one of these real sanctified churches that had band instruments playing,” he remembered, describing the music as “sort of jazz- gospel.”46 He recalls “hearing a trumpet player playing with Mother Horn’s church who was really swinging.”47 During his youth, Rollins often heard gospel music over the New York airwaves as well: he would tune in to popular national Sunday broad- casts by the Golden Gate Quartet and the Wings Over Jordan Choir, a large vocal ensemble that sang African American spirituals.48 By the 1930s commercial radio had become a major cultural force in the United States, and Rollins became an avid radio devotee as a small child, once even asking his grandmother to pause while midway through saying dinnertime grace so that he could listen to The Lone Ranger.49 Decades later he was still playing songs that he first heard as Depression- era radio show themes.50 “All of these things stay with me,” he reflected. “And I try to use them in my own expression.”51 “Radio more than any other medium,” according to historian David W. Stowe, “was at the heart of the synergy that drove the swing industry,” and by his midteens Rollins was regularly listening to jazz shows presented by New York disc jockeys such as Fred Robbins and “Symphony” Sid Torin.52 Though American radio networks were routinely broadcasting nationwide, much of the music he heard on air originated only blocks away, such as the weekly live transmissions from the nearby Apollo Theater’s amateur night, hosted on Wednesday evenings by Ralph Cooper and Willie Bryant.53 One of the first jazz musicians he remembers hearing on air was the stride pia- nist and singer Fats Waller, who grew up on West 134th Street, attended PS 89 a generation before Sonny did, and began his career playing the organ for silent films at the Lincoln Theater on West 135th Street, across from where the Rollinses lived during the late 1930s.54 Sonny cites broad- casts of Waller singing “I’m Going to Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter” as “one of my earliest memories of jazz. . . . It struck a chord someplace in my back lives.”55 He thought Waller “a fantastic musician/ entertainer . . . [a] great guy and comic similar to Louis Armstrong,” and he was also greatly impressed by Waller’s keyboard playing.56 At around the same time, Rollins was spending many hours in the care of his mother’s half-brother, Reuben Victoria (1908–81), whose girlfriend, Becoming Sonny Rollins 499

Lizzie, a Georgia native, owned several country blues records by guitarist Lonnie Johnson and singer- guitarists Big Joe Williams, Tommy McClen- nan, and Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup.57 But the discs in Sonny’s aunt and uncle’s collection that truly captured his attention were by another artist: Louis Jordan, his first musical idol.58 “It’s really [Jordan] who inspired me to take up jazz,” he recalled. “You can’t imagine how much I admired him!”59 By the early 1940s Rollins had acquired his own copies of several Jordan records, including “Knock Me a Kiss” and “I’m Gonna Move to the Outskirts of Town,” a two- sided hit 78 recorded in late 1941, and songs such as “Five Guys Named Moe” and “It’s a Low Down Dirty Shame,” from the following year.60 A rambunctious showman, ebullient singer, and adept horn player, Jordan was one of the era’s most popular African American artists, somewhat underrecognized by jazz scholars because he has tended to be classified as more of a rhythm-and- blues forerunner.61 Still, in later years Rollins looked back on Jordan’s Tym- pany Five, with its lineup of two saxophones and trumpet plus a rhythm section consisting of piano, bass, and drums, as “the model for a lot of jazz, almost to this day, instrumental small band jazz.”62 “That led into the [bebop] Charlie Parker–Dizzy [Gillespie] group—I mean that type of sound,” he observed.63

“Where to Put Your Fingers” At his parents’ behest, Rollins started taking piano lessons at about eight, but he showed little interest in the instrument; it was at around the same age, while enrolled in elementary school, that he took up the saxophone instead.64 Many upwardly mobile African Americans of the era took a dim view of jazz, regarding it as, in Ellison’s words, “a backward, low- class form of expression,” and Rollins’s immediate family, which he recalls as “middle class,” disapproved of his eventual decision to pur- sue the music professionally.65 But his mother, at least, was happy to encourage his initial enthusiasm for the saxophone and introduced him to an alto player named Hubert Myers, a family friend (or possibly an uncle or other distant relative—Rollins is unsure) who was performing at Harlem’s Renaissance Ballroom around that time.66 Myers procured for the youngster a secondhand alto saxophone.67 Rollins practiced long and hard from the moment he received his first horn.68 Although he has always considered himself largely “self taught,” he received a smattering of formal instrumental instruction during his early years, beginning with some tuition at the New York Schools of Music.69 With over a dozen sites throughout the city and surrounding suburbs, the New York Schools of Music offered twenty-five- cent lessons in folk and popular instruments such as the banjo, ukulele, and accor- dion, as well as in traditional classical instruments such as the piano and 500 Givan violin.70 At the school’s Harlem branch, at 101 West 125th Street, Rollins was given a few elementary technical pointers in “how to hold the horn, where to put your fingers.”71 He recalls that his teacher was “Mr. Bas- tien”—most likely Tony Bastien (1917–74), a white jazz musician who had recently arrived in New York from Minnesota and was soon to join big bands led by Sonny Dunham and Vaughn Monroe; he was, according to Rollins, “one of these saxophone players that played with a double embouchure.”72 Closer to home, Sonny also studied for a short time at the 135th Street branch of the YMCA, and his mother asked Tapley Lewis (1910–84), a West Indian baritone and alto saxophonist living nearby who played briefly with Don Redman and Louis Armstrong, to give her son a few lessons.73 Throughout all his early instrumental instruction Rollins always played mainly by ear, but he also learned to read Western staff notation, at one point practicing études and tone- production exercises from a saxophone method book by Ben Vereecken.74 In Depression- era Harlem many musical idioms—European and American, black and white, old and new, religious and secular, rural and urban, middle and working class, art and entertainment—coexisted and intersected in ways that belie any notion of jazz as a discrete idiom with markedly distinct aesthetic practices.75 Jazz notably differed, how- ever, from other genres in uptown Manhattan in the degree to which it was a local music as much as a national or global one. All of the artists who initially inspired the young Rollins—most of them major figures in jazz—lived or performed close by. He described “walking by the Savoy Ballroom and seeing the pictures of all the celebrities appearing there,” recalling the well- known dance venue on Lenox Avenue at 140th Street. “And many of them lived in our neighborhood.”76 At the same time, tech- nologically mediated music was omnipresent. Some jazz scholars have rightly argued that the many fans, critics, and historians who encounter the music at a geographical or temporal distance from its origins, with more limited opportunities to hear it played in person, are prone to over- estimate the importance of recordings.77 Yet in Sonny’s youth technolo- gies of reproduction and dissemination—piano rolls, radio, and films, as well as commercial discs—were as commonplace as live events. At the movies he heard many popular songs that remained in his professional repertoire decades later; he was enthralled by Hollywood film musicals such as the 1936 Fred Astaire–Ginger Rogers feature Swing Time, with songs by Jerome Kern, which ran at the Lincoln Theater, and the 1943 black- cast extravaganza Cabin in the Sky, starring Lena Horne and Ethel Waters along with an appearance by the Duke Ellington Orchestra, which he saw during a summer visit to his father in Annapolis.78 In fact, even though most of his greatest musical influences often played nearby, he first heard them all through media. At first he was too young to hear live jazz. (In the late 1930s, Louis Jordan’s earliest evening set at the Elks Becoming Sonny Rollins 501

Rendezvous, a cabaret that of course served alcohol and did not admit children, opened at 10:00 p.m.)79 But even when he grew old enough to attend shows, they could never be as conveniently and cheaply acces- sible as radio and records.

Edgecombe Avenue Nevertheless, Rollins’s urban surroundings offered unique daily experi- ences and opportunities that were crucial to his musical development. In 1940 his family moved a mile north to Sugar Hill, a somewhat more prosperous Harlem neighborhood where many of New York’s prominent African American citizens made their homes.80 “That was sort of the elite section where black celebrities, socialites lived,” he remembered. “Doc- tors and lawyers and intellectuals—the intelligentsia.”81 Local residents included the sociologist Kenneth Clark, singer/actor Paul Robeson, and boxer Joe Louis.82 Even so, the area was quite economically diverse. “Everybody that lived on Sugar Hill was not necessarily well-to- do,” recalled Rollins, whose father’s income in 1939 was $1,260 (under $23,000 in 2019 dollars).83 At 377 Edgecombe Avenue, on a quarter- mile- long block rising gently northward from 150th Street, the Rollinses’ new apart- ment building faced a wide bench- and- tree-lined sidewalk that abutted a cliff overlooking Colonial Park, where a public swimming pool had recently opened.84 Within earshot, a couple of blocks uptown across 155th Street, stood the Polo Grounds, home of the New York Giants baseball team; farther off to the east, one could see Yankee Stadium over the Har- lem River in the Bronx (major league ball was all- white at the time).85 Sonny, a Yankees fan, often played ball with friends in the street and was even made captain of his neighborhood team, the Edgecombe Avenue Aces.86 Local luminaries often passed by. Rollins remembers being “a little kid playing what we would call stoop ball, and we’d be hitting the ball up against the side of the building. So here comes W. E. B. Du Bois, walking down the avenue.”87 The renowned sociologist, historian, and campaigner for racial equality, then in his seventies, lived at the north end of the block, at 409 Edgecombe Avenue, as did the future Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall, NAACP officials Roy Wilkins and Walter White, and the painter Aaron Douglas.88 An aristocratic elitist by temperament, Du Bois showed little outward conviviality toward his working- and middle-class neighbors.89 “He’d sort of be looking at us in a disdainful way,” Rollins thought. “Like, ‘Here are these little ruf- fians.’ I’ll always remember that. He was sort of a strict-looking guy.”90 “That whole area was great,” Rollins said, years later. “It was the center of the Harlem cultural community.”91 There was no shortage of night- spots and eateries. On 155th Street, a few blocks eastward at the foot of the hill, stood the Rockland Palace (formerly the Manhattan Casino); closer 502 Givan by on the same street the Fat Man’s Bar- and- Grill drew celebrities from afar.92 A block west of Edgecombe Avenue, on St. Nicholas Place, were Lawson Bowman’s Melody Room and, a little southward, Estelle and Edwin Craigg’s Colony Club.93 In 1943 the stride pianist Luckey Roberts opened a bar, Luckey’s Rendezvous, three short blocks farther down- hill to the south, where St. Nicholas Place dovetailed with St. Nicholas Avenue.94 A few doors beyond Luckey’s was Jimmy’s Chicken Shack— where, around that time, both Charlie Parker and Redd Foxx washed dishes and Malcolm X briefly waited tables—and across the street was Al’s Luncheonette, a diner with a jukebox that Sonny and his friends would frequent in the years ahead.95 They would also congregate on the nearby benches at Donnellan Square, a tiny sliver of a park colloquially known as “Goof Square,” where 150th Street intersected St. Nicholas Avenue.96 In his new neighborhood, Rollins enrolled at Edward W. Stitt Junior High School, a half mile uptown on Edgecombe Avenue at 164th Street, not far from the Audubon Ballroom.97 As with most middle- grade US public schools of the era, musical instruction at Stitt Junior High focused on singing, with some additional time spent on music appreciation, then a relatively new educational trend.98 New York’s public schools dur- ing World War II were staffed by many highly qualified teachers who, according to education historian Diane Ravitch, “in better times might have become college professors,” and Stitt’s head music teacher, Esther Ostroff, was a skilled Juilliard- trained pianist.99 She conducted a glee club choral ensemble whose members included Lowell Lewis, a close friend of Sonny’s who was to become a promising jazz trumpeter.100 But the school offered no instrumental instruction, and there was no orga- nized student band.101 Its music appreciation classes were mainly geared toward familiarizing pupils with songs such as Gilbert and Sullivan operetta arias and popular melodies from previous generations, along the lines of “Poor Butterfly.”102 There were also occasional live perfor- mances, such as a recital of spirituals by operatic tenor John Eckles, who was another teacher on staff, and his wife, Blanche, both of whom had sung with the Hall Johnson Choir.103 During Rollins’s final term students at the school painted a mural depicting “the outstanding contributions of many [cultural] groups to the folk music of our country.”104 At the very least, Stitt pupils were exposed to a variety of musical idioms and to accomplished classical performers. But needless to say, the Harlem community remained a far superior repository of musical knowledge and expertise. Within a few blocks of the Rollinses lived the nationally recognized band leaders Duke Ellington and Jimmie Lunceford, as well as Count Basie, Erskine Hawkins, and Andy Kirk, all three of whom resided a short distance uptown at 555 Edgecombe Avenue, whose occupants also included Lena Horne and the arranger Don Becoming Sonny Rollins 503

Redman.105 Also close by were another well-known arranger, Sy Oliver, singer Jimmy Rushing, trombonist Tyree Glenn, pianists Mary Lou Wil- liams and Willie “The Lion” Smith, bassist John Kirby, and drummers Sidney Catlett, Jimmy Crawford, and Denzil Best.106 One of Valborg Rol- lins’s friends knew Best, who had only recently taken up the drums after starting out as a trumpeter, and Sonny, in his early teens, tried to seek the musician’s advice: “I used to go by and ring his bell. One time, I knew the guy was there, so I just kept ringing and ringing. Finally, he opened it. He was half-sleepy. So I asked him some questions about playing with Coleman Hawkins. He was just . . . ‘Get this kid out of here.’”107

“Hawk Had a Way about Him” As it happened, by 1942 Coleman Hawkins (1904–69) himself, an epochal jazz tenor saxophone virtuoso, was residing on West 153rd Street at St. Nicholas Avenue, about five minutes’ walk from the Rollinses’.108 After spending most of the 1920s and early 1930s with Fletcher Henderson’s Orchestra, followed by five years in Europe, Hawkins had returned to New York in 1939, sealing his reputation that fall with an acclaimed recording of “Body and Soul.”109 During the early 1940s, Rollins recalls, Hawkins’s disc could be heard on jukeboxes all over Harlem; Sonny first encountered the dazzling two-chorus improvisation at around ten years old while standing on 135th Street outside the Big Apple Bar, where it was spinning on one of the coin-operated machines.110 One of his saxophone- playing neighbors owned a notated transcription of the solo (perhaps the one that Down Beat magazine published in the fall of 1940), and Rollins himself tried playing some of it.111 He was struck by the simple fact that Hawkins “was improvising. That, in itself, was significant, that it wasn’t somebody singing. It wasn’t more obvious, accessible music. This was really difficult, highly artistic music; improvisational music, at its highest level, played on a saxophone.”112 By the time Hawkins settled on 153rd Street, two years later, he was at the peak of his fame.113 Inspired by Hawkins, Rollins started using a tenor reed on his alto saxophone.114 The larger instrument’s allure only grew when he visited a family friend named Herbert Vanterpool, a St. Thomas native who kept an eye- catching shiny tenor in a velvet-lined case.115 Sonny “pestered” his mother for a while, and eventually, around 1942 or 1943, she took him to buy his own tenor saxophone at Manny’s Music on 48th Street (the midtown blocks known as “music row,” then lined with musical instrument dealers, repair shops, and sheet music vendors, as well as teaching studios).116 Rollins later recalled that proprietor Manny Gold- rich “was a big believer in me” who subsequently “used to try to get me into the more commercial aspect of music—not playing, but just to get me known [and] greater acceptance.”117 504 Givan

Before long, at around the age of fourteen, Rollins plucked up the nerve to ask Hawkins for an autograph, and he eventually began regu- larly stopping by his hero’s apartment to ask for playing tips; occasion- ally they practiced together.118 The older musician’s records were an equally important source of knowledge and inspiration—Rollins dis- tinctly remembers “Sweet Lorraine,” “I Don’t Stand a Ghost of a Chance,” and a disc pairing “Stuffy” with “It’s the Talk of the Town.”119 One disc that stood out for him was a tour de force 1943 rendition of Gershwin’s “The Man I Love.”120 “In that solo, he was not only playing the changes,” Rollins observed. “He was also playing the passing chords . . . and still, he was getting the jazz intensity moving.”121 Along with his powerful tone, Hawkins’s deep knowledge of harmony especially impressed his young acolyte.122 The swing saxophonist used various sorts of chro- maticism, including tritone chord substitutions, that were fairly uncom- mon in jazz improvisation before the mid-1940s. 123 “He was a diagonal player, up- and- down more than linear, with a huge sound and a sort of operatic grandeur,” Rollins said.124 “You had to know theory in order to play like that. . . . That was a challenge, and as a young aspiring musi- cian, I thought, ‘I’d better learn this.’”125 Hawkins’s technical facility and harmonic mastery seemed to Rollins to be marks of intellectual sophistication and gravitas.126 More than just a musical role model, the older player’s “dignified demeanor” projected a conception of jazz as a serious art, as well as a compelling form of entertainment.127 In effect, musicians such as Hawkins decoupled the etiquettes of cultivated black masculinity from the Eurocentric artistic traditions generally favored by more conservative neighborhood paragons of gentility such as Du Bois.128 “He was always very well dressed,” Rollins noted.129 “Hawk had a way about him that everyone respected. His deportment was always gracious, and he took care of business.”130

“You’re Disturbing My Neighbors” By his early teens, Sonny was devoting hours each day to his saxophone. “He could be heard practicing his horn above the street sounds and the boys’ screams as they played stickball in the street below his window,” remembered Faith Ringgold (née Jones), a girl his age who lived a few doors down the block, at 363 Edgecombe Avenue. According to Ring- gold (b. 1930), who grew up to become a successful visual artist, Rollins displayed a “strong sense of purpose” from early on, persevering while “people would laugh at him when he played ‘off notes.’ . . . My mother would say, ‘Sonny, please, you’re disturbing my neighbors,’ when [he] would bring over his horn on weekends.”131 At his own mother’s sugges- tion, Rollins began practicing in a closet to avoid bothering other tenants, some of whom, as it turned out, were warmly supportive.132 “I would Becoming Sonny Rollins 505 play in the closet so the sound didn’t get all up and down the building,” he recalled. “I never thought about it as practice. I just loved to play and I would get in the closet and blow for hours—nine, ten hours and I would get lost in my reverie, in the sound. I really didn’t practice any one thing, I’d just play songs and blow in a stream- of- consciousness way. Our neighbor, Mr. Mason, he would always encourage me. When I’d see him, he’d yell, Yeah, Sonny, that’s it, and Yeah, Sonny, go.”133 It is Rollins’s exceptional practice ethic, more than anything else, that distinguishes him from the countless other individuals who grew up in the same time and place with similar musical experiences and opportunities: “I don’t look at it as work,” he reflected.134 His method of self- education—which foreshadowed the famous extended live unaccompanied cadenzas of his later career—perfectly exemplifies the close connection between musical autodidacticism, improvisation, and individuality. Motivated principally by inner determination and with at most only intermittent instructional guidance, Rollins mastered the saxophone through an exploratory pro- cess of trial and error. Informed by his daily immersion in music as a listener, this mode of spontaneous creativity involved a total integration of instrumental technique with auditory conceptualization and sonic realization. For Rollins, playing, practicing, and learning were all insepa- rable, and all always improvisatory. As time passed he increasingly began hearing jazz performed live—lis- tening to music became a public communal pursuit, as well as a domestic one centering on records and the radio at home. Before he was old enough to be admitted to nightclubs, Rollins frequented the Apollo Theater on 125th Street, a storied venue that he later called “my university.”135 Open to audiences of all ages and presenting four or five stage shows, along with cartoons and feature films, each Saturday afternoon, the Apollo was where many of New York City’s young jazz enthusiasts of the day first saw their idols in person.136 There, Sonny heard big bands led by Ellington, Basie, Lunceford, Erskine Hawkins, and Fletcher Hender- son and saw singers such as Billie Holiday, Billy Eckstine, and Sarah Vaughan. 137 Eventually, while still underage, he began making his way to New York’s midtown clubs on 52nd Street, where he finally had a chance to hear Coleman Hawkins perform.138 It was at the Apollo, though, that he witnessed, firsthand, signs that the trends in jazz toward increasing musical complexity and artistic seriousness, exemplified by Hawkins and younger bebop musicians, were attracting shrinking audiences. Acts that played relatively accessible entertainment- oriented music, such as Lionel Hampton, Tiny Bradshaw, and Dinah Washington, packed the theater, whereas artists such as Coleman Hawkins and Charlie Parker drew far sparser crowds.139 Jazz musicians and listeners were becoming a subculture. “We had a small group of guys that really dug jazz,” Rollins remembered. “As 506 Givan opposed to a lot of the guys we were growing up with who liked rhythm and blues.”140 With World War II drawing to a close and the swing era fading into history, American society was changing, and a new generation was starting, more than ever, to treat the music as an earnest endeavor, somewhat independent of and at times counterposed against mainstream popular and commercial trends.141 In their midteens, Rollins’s close circle of friends included several individuals destined to become significant postwar jazz artists. Some, like pianists Walter Bishop Jr. (1927–98) and Kenny Drew (1928–93), lived a short way downtown, but several lived in his immediate neighborhood, such as drummer Art Taylor (1929–95) and alto saxophonist Jackie McLean (1931–2006).142 The fall of 1945 saw Rollins and his junior high school classmate Low- ell Lewis enroll at Benjamin Franklin High School, a boys’ public school that had recently opened a new building overlooking the FDR Drive at 116th Street, in an area of East Harlem populated mainly by Italian immi- grants.143 With a student body approximately half Italian American and a third African American, the school was known for its progressive edu- cational philosophy (though its reputation for intercultural tolerance was marred, a few weeks after Rollins and Lewis arrived, by an outbreak of violence by white pupils against their black schoolmates).144 Several other students were serious jazz players—Rollins remembers tenor saxophon- ist Percy France, drummer Sonny Payne, and trumpeter Andrew “Red” De Stefano; Jackie McLean also attended briefly. There were occasional opportunities to hear popular music and jazz performed—Frank Sinatra and Nat “King” Cole both gave concerts during a period of reconciliation following the racial disturbances.145 But the official curriculum, typically for its time, focused on Western classical music and devoted no attention to jazz. (African American spirituals were the only form of black music then widely recognized as legitimate in US educational institutions.)146 Rollins played in the school band, directed by violinist Silas Birnbaum, and he enjoyed singing classes. (One song in the students’ repertoire was Vincent Youmans’s “Without a Song,” which appeared regularly on Rol- lins’s set lists decades later.)147 Studies with the chair of the school’s music department, Bessie Carroll Redmond, suited him less well. A classical pianist in her early sixties with two degrees from Columbia University’s Teachers College, Redmond taught a well-received music appreciation class and had recently coauthored an anthology of symphonic themes, from Haydn through Shostakovich, with a preface by Deems Taylor.148 Rollins felt that Redmond, who was a longtime member of the segrega- tionist Daughters of the American Revolution, “didn’t like me and was always on my case. She kind of traumatized me about musical skills like writing and harmony.”149 In her counterpoint course, he remem- bered, “we were learning about things like parallel fifths, which really made music mysterious when it shouldn’t have been.”150 (His friend Lowell apparently found her more supportive.)151 A music curriculum Becoming Sonny Rollins

The Rollins family’s apartment building at 377 Edgecombe Avenue, in 2016

Givan

(Sylvia Schwartz Fonds, Ontario Jewish Archives)

Walter “Foots” Thomas, Bessie Carroll Redmond, Rollins’s saxophone teacher Chair of Music at Benjamin on West 48th Street Franklin High School

Sonny Rollins’s high school graduation portrait, 1947 Becoming Sonny Rollins 507 privileging one particular epistemological system can easily shake the self- confidence of students who, however musically accomplished or ambitious, apprehend music in other ways; for his entire career, Rollins would feel ambivalent about standardized music theory.152 Years after- ward, he still recalled feeling “insecure” due to his lack of traditional Westernized training: “It sort of put a mental block in my head. . . . And it might have had some kind of a psychological effect on my thinking about formalized teaching of the music.”153 And yet, he is almost cer- tainly Redmond’s most distinguished student. Rollins’s most important musical education continued outside school. By the mid-1940s, with big bands’ popularity waning, large numbers of professional jazz players were seeing their income from gigs decline, and many were leaving the music business. (Tapley Lewis, who had since married Sonny’s paternal aunt, Gwendolyn [1922–91], took a job with the US Postal Service.)154 Some began offering paid instrumental lessons, and since jazz performance conservatories barely existed—Berklee, the first, was founded in 1945—they worked independently.155 As the Cab Calloway Orchestra neared the end of the road, several of its members rented studios at 117 West 48th Street; trumpeter Doc Cheatham (1905–97) and saxophonist Andy Brown (1900–1960) shared a two-room space, and another office was occupied by drummer Cozy Cole (1909–81) and saxo- phonist Walter “Foots” Thomas (1907–81).156 Rollins took several lessons with Thomas, as well as a few with another saxophonist, Joe Napoleon (1906–72), a white former member of the Tommy Dorsey and Paul White- man Orchestras who taught in the same building.157 Thomas, who had studied with Andrew Jacobson, an ex-member of John Philip Sousa’s band, was a dedicated teacher who offered a correspondence course in improvisation; his other adolescent students at the time included Jackie McLean and, fleetingly, Ornette Coleman (1930–2015).158 He was the only jazz musician of note whom Rollins paid for lessons, but his tutelage did not focus on jazz playing. (“I never had a real jazz lesson,” Sonny later remarked.)159 Fingering technique and tone production were his main pedagogical emphasis.160 “The most perfect attack is put your tongue on the reed, and as you blow, take it off,” Thomas explained. “Once you attack, let the tongue be all the way down in the mouth and in front of your mouth, touching your lip, and the teeth in front. That way it’s relaxed.”161 As a mature artist, Rollins would become widely admired for his mastery of staccato tongued saxophone articulation.162 Well into his career, in the early 1960s, Sonny handwrote, for his own use, a detailed overview of Thomas’s principles of saxophone embouchure: 1. Loosening of the “back jaw muscles.” . . . 2. Advocating of the “unchange embouchure.” . . . 3. In regard to both #1 and #2 the fact of more air necessary for low and for high notes was presented with 508 Givan

the admonition that more air should not change the embouchure or tighten the back jaw muscles. . . . 4. After establishing the sound of the tone in ear, an almost audible hum while simulating playing into the horn should be practiced—for notes around C 523.23 [i.e., an octave above concert middle C]. . . . A) Also to mentally adapt a positive attitude concerning production of these notes and to know that they will be hit when we go for them!! . . . 5. Imagine the notes as emanating from the bell of the horn and never, regardless of note, as from the note holes on the bore.163 Foots Thomas evidently was a highly rigorous instructor whose influ- ence on Rollins’s instrumental technique was deep and lasting. Meticu- lous and exacting, his teaching method encompassed both physical and psychological aspects of saxophone playing. Meanwhile, during their high school years Rollins and his friends were gathering at one another’s homes to hear recordings, sometimes slowing down 78 rpm discs while they tried to copy licks.164 Sonny even learned a few recorded solos in their entirety.165 By this time he was lis- tening very widely, above all to tenor saxophonists, and found himself drawn especially to “guys who had big sounds”—an attribute he thought highly advantageous in the days when some venues still lacked amplifi- cation.166 After Hawkins, his main influence on tenor was Lester Young (1909–59), beginning with the latter’s 1943 quartet recordings on the Keynote label.167 Young’s five-chorus up-tempo blues solo on “Afternoon of a Basie- Ite” made a lasting impression: “What he’s saying is deep as the ocean. There was a beginning and an end. He was storytelling all the way through.”168 Other tenor players Rollins followed closely during this period were Ben Webster (1909–73), who had often been appearing on 52nd Street since leaving the Duke Ellington Orchestra in 1943, and Don Byas (1912–72), a fleet-fingered saxophonist whom Sonny for a time regarded as “the most modern jazz player I had ever heard.”169

“To Be Like Bird” In 1946 Rollins bought Byas’s new disc of “How High the Moon” and discovered on its B- side a recording by another musician—with an unfa- miliar name.170 “I was following Don Byas,” he remembered, “and there happens to be this record on the other side by this guy named Char- lie Parker [1920–55], an alto player.”171 The tune was “Ko-Ko,” a now- famous “Cherokee” contrafact, also featuring trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie (1917–93), that had been recorded the previous fall (on the same day as the Byas track).172 At first Rollins felt he “didn’t really understand” Parker’s record, with its blistering alto saxophone solo, but he found it “interesting” enough to pique his curiosity, and after he played it for some high school friends it began to grow on him: “I got attracted to it Becoming Sonny Rollins 509 eventually—I didn’t immediately say ‘that’s it.’ After a while I realized the value in what [Parker] was doing, which, in a way, was an extension of Coleman Hawkins. It wasn’t that different, really, to somebody that really understood what was happening musically, technically.”173 The similarities Rollins perceived between “Ko-Ko” and Hawkins’s playing suggest a conception of Parker’s music, which soon became known as bebop, as less of a revolutionary artistic movement, as some have por- trayed it, and more of, “in a narrow musical sense, a logical and seam- less continuation of swing,” in the words of musicologist Scott DeVeaux, whose work Rollins has read.174 “There is no separation getting into bebop,” Rollins maintains. “There is not such a big difference.”175 This is by no means to say that Parker’s musical innovations were insubstantial. The alto saxophonist’s sheer mental and physical speed was, in itself, something that Rollins set out to emulate: “We got a kick out of being able to do it. The music was fun!”176 Sonny took especially close note of Parker’s occasional tenor saxophone performances, par- ticularly some records that he made on the tenor not long afterward, in 1947.177 (Another Parker disc, recorded on alto later that same year, that he greatly admired was the B- flat blues “Another Hair Do.”)178 Ulti- mately, though, Rollins believed Parker’s greatest achievement as a solo- ist was his use of long-range melodic strategies, then a rare phenomenon in jazz improvisation. The “music wasn’t ‘bang—bang—bang—bang,’” Rollins observed. “Charlie Parker did: ‘bang . . . [draws a long arc in the air] . . . bang.’ He connected things which were sort of segmented in the [other] styles of music. He connected everything.”179 Insofar as this sort of structural continuity mirrors the organicist formal coherence tradi- tionally associated with European classical works, it affirms modernist conceptions of bebop. Parker’s persona—serious in his bearing, erudite in his conversation, statuesque while performing—in itself framed his music as “intellectually advanced” and deserving of respect.180 He “had a profound effect on [Rollins’s] life, musically as well as personally.”181 Sonny and his aspiring musician friends would seek him out, on and off the bandstand: “He came off his sets down on 52nd Street, and actually he was really good to us, you know, he treated us like sons.”182 Sadly, Parker’s heroin addiction to some extent validated narcotic use among Rollins and many of his circle: “We all knew Bird [Parker] used drugs, and it made me feel that it can’t be that bad if Bird is doing it. I wanted to be like Bird in every way I could.”183 For some, the con- sequences were tragic: Andy Kirk Jr. gave up music in his early twen- ties and died in his thirties; trumpeter Lowell Lewis was permanently institutionalized after suffering a psychological breakdown.184 Yet for Rollins bebop remained a positive political force because of its sociopo- litical identification as a modernist art form.185 He and his friends felt it “reflected our alienation from the mainstream,” and they valued it for 510 Givan being “the first musical movement to completely turn away from the minstrel image of most black entertainment.”186 They considered it “a music of freedom, of breaking with the past.”187

“Monk Was a Magician” At about fourteen Rollins played his first professional gig with a small band at a dance hall on Jerome Avenue, a short walk across the Macombs Dam Bridge from his home.188 During his early teens he also started attending informal jam sessions that brought him face- to- face with older, more experienced players; at one session he met Dexter Gordon (1923– 90), the leading tenor saxophonist of the early bebop era.189 Before turn- ing sixteen Sonny had organized his own group, sometimes known as the Counts of Bebop, comprising neighborhood friends such as Lowell Lewis, Kenny Drew or Walter Bishop Jr., and Andy Kirk Jr.190 They were often joined by either Connie Henry or Art Phipps on bass, and by 1947 they were also playing with Art Taylor and, a little later, Jackie McLean.191 Rollins’s musicianship clearly began to progress by leaps and bounds during this period. He recollects that “everybody wanted to be a musi- cian, but I had a little more talent than a lot of the other guys,” and at times his friends were even taken somewhat aback by his rapidly increas- ing prowess.192 Rollins was always the group’s leader, Taylor recalled, and according to McLean, “Sonny influenced everybody uptown, play- ing every instrument.”193 At first, most of their engagements were for dances and functions, where the conditions could be less than ideal.194 “They could get ugly,” Rollins remembered. “You had to be vigilant because fights could break out and you would have to protect yourself and your horn.”195 For dances they would sometimes play calypso tunes, a practice that Rollins resumed to great acclaim a decade later.196 Their first nightclub performance was at Bowman’s (which later reopened as Branker’s), on St. Nicholas Place at 155th Street.197 Rollins also recalls visiting Montreal in 1946, and he has a vague memory of playing at the city’s Alberta Lounge at the time.198 It was during the following year, 1947, that Rollins, as a high school senior, was introduced to the pianist and composer Thelonious Monk (1917–82), who was to be a vital mentor at this formative stage of the saxophonist’s career, as well as a key professional colleague on and off over the next decade.199 Monk, who had been the house pianist at Min- ton’s Playhouse at the time of the now- legendary early 1940s jam ses- sions involving several future bebop innovators, was not yet well known; within a year he would gain greater recognition through publicity sur- rounding his first record releases on the Blue Note label.200 Rollins had first become aware of him from the records he made with Coleman Hawkins in late 1944, in particular “Flyin’ Hawk” and “Drifting on a Reed,” and had found the pianist’s playing intriguing.201 Becoming Sonny Rollins 511

But in 1947 Monk’s professional career had temporarily lost steam, and his membership in the musicians’ union had lapsed.202 He was regularly hosting rehearsals in his apartment at 243 West 63rd Street, and at some point Sonny’s friend Lowell Lewis began taking part in these informal musical gatherings.203 Another tenor saxophonist had already been play- ing with them, and one day Lowell returned from a practice session and told his high school friend, “Sonny, I’m gonna get you into Thelonious Monk’s band, we’re going to get this other guy out.”204 Rollins was soon joining a coterie of musicians that included, at various times, trumpet- ers Idrees Sulieman and Kenny Dorham, as well as tenor saxophonist Coleman Hoppin. (It is not clear whether Hoppin was the player Lewis mentioned; another possible candidate is tenor saxophonist Billy Smith, who played on Monk’s debut Blue Note recording session that Octo- ber.)205 Jackie McLean was sometimes there.206 Another individual often in attendance was the pianist Earl “Bud” Powell (1924–66), who within two years would hire Rollins for a recording session.207 Monk, nearing his thirtieth birthday, was living with his mother, and the visiting musicians played in his tiny bedroom, lit by a red light bulb, where his piano stood along with two chairs and a studio couch.208 “His mother was in one room [and] we were all cramped in one room, about five musicians, trying to read the music,” Sonny remembered.209 The pia- nist’s original compositions were far from simple, and Rollins later felt that he may not have fully grasped all their intricacies at the time.210 “Monk was a magician,” he marveled. “The musicians would look at his music and say, ‘Oh no, this is impossible, how can I make that jump from here to there, it can’t be done, hey man what is this?’”211 Habitually taciturn, Monk gave few directions. “If he liked you, here was the music, and that was that,” Rollins found. “But eventually we would end up playing this unorthodox and hitherto unplayed material.”212 Sonny came away having learned a great deal about “the geometry of musical time and space” and with growing self-assurance. 213 Thelonious was impressed, too. “Monk would say, ‘Yeah, man, Sonny is bad. Cats have to work out what they play; Sonny just plays that shit out the top of his head.’”214 The precocious saxophonist was still barely seventeen years old. Membership in the American Federation of Musicians (AFM) was essential for New York’s professional musicians during the mid-twentieth century, and the city’s Local 802 had over thirty thousand members at the time Rollins joined in December 1947, upon completing high school (he graduated at the end of the fall term).215 With just a few brief lapses, he would continue paying dues for his entire career, describing himself as “a big union man and proud of it.”216 His activities during 1948 are only sparsely documented; published contemporary information is scant, and for almost that entire year the AFM imposed a recording ban stemming from a long- running dispute with the radio broadcasting industry.217 But he clearly was already intent on making music his profession: his 512 Givan neighbor Faith Ringgold remembered that on the day he received his diploma from Benjamin Franklin High School, “Sonny was talking about his last day at school and how he was going to pursue his music career full time. . . . [H]e knew right away.”218

“We Began Getting Hired” In 1956 Nat Hentoff reported in Down Beat magazine that after gradu- ating Rollins gigged around New York City and New Jersey, and the saxophonist also remembers playing some engagements in Springfield, Massachusetts.219 He may have spent some time in upstate New York, too; the saxophonist J. R. Monterose saw him play in Albany around this time, and Jackie McLean heard that Sonny remained upstate for several months, possibly even staying with Monterose.220 In 1972 Rollins additionally recalled that after graduating he declined an offer to join the Woody Herman Orchestra in Chicago.221 The first reliable indication of his whereabouts that I have found is a November 1948 newspaper announcement that “Sonny Rawlings,” along with bassist Art Phipps and pianist Kenny Drew, were playing at Bowman’s, on Sugar Hill, accom- panying vocalist Carl Van Moon, and that this was the three instrumen- talists’ first New York City date after some recent out- of- town jobs.222 Rollins was picking up gigs of all kinds around Harlem: he played a few times with Milton Larkin, a blues- oriented trumpeter, vocalist, and former big-band leader from Houston who had recently settled in New York following his military discharge; and with Jimmie “Baby Face” Lewis, an up- and- coming rhythm- and- blues singer- guitarist who was then regularly appearing locally.223 Under his own name, Sonny was still often playing for dances and functions at venues such as the Audubon Ballroom and Hotel Theresa.224 During this period he frequently led a trio featuring Drew and either a drummer or bassist—the latter was often Percy Heath (1923–2005), who arrived in New York from Philadelphia in 1949.225 Sometime early that year, after a jam session at Minton’s Playhouse, Rollins was invited to bring the trio to play a Sunday afternoon gig in the Bronx.226 There, at the 845 Club, on Prospect Avenue in the Morrisania neighborhood, they performed intermission sets for an organized jam session headlined by trumpeter Miles Davis (1926–91).227 Davis, at twenty- two, had recently left Charlie Parker’s Quintet and just begun making the series of nonet recordings later released as the Birth of the Cool. Rollins’s playing caught his ear, and though it would be another two years until Davis began regu- larly hiring Sonny as a sideman, they appeared on the same bill again at least twice within the next couple of months, including a performance at the Audubon Ballroom, possibly in January, where Rollins first met and played with John Coltrane.228 Becoming Sonny Rollins 513

By this time Rollins had also been contacted by the musician who became his first high- profile regular employer.229 Babs Gonzales (1919– 80), who was renting a room down the block from Coleman Hawkins on West 153rd Street, had been making a name for himself as a comedic bebop singer leading a group called Three Bips and a Bop.230 “Once they heard in the neighborhood that, oh—there’s these young guys that can play, Sonny and Lowell Lewis and Jackie and Kenny Drew, then we began getting hired by the big-time people,” Rollins remembered. “Babs Gonzales would get a whole bunch of musicians and load us up in the car—one car or two cars—and do a lot of jobs in the area around Phila- delphia and Boston and places like that.”231 Gonzales’s itinerary was far from busy overall, but in New York his band was intermittently working at relatively prominent venues such as the Clique Club on Broadway.232 Under the singer’s leadership, Rollins was now playing alongside some of the most highly esteemed bebop instrumentalists, including, at various times, trumpeter Fats Navarro (1923–50), drummer Roy Haynes (b. 1925), and tenor saxophonist Wardell Gray (1921–55).233 An invitation to join Navarro’s own band further boosted Sonny’s confidence, although that collaboration never came to pass because the trumpeter’s health soon began to fail, and he died a year later.234

“The Best of the Up- and- Coming Bop Men” His ascent was meteoric. Within the space of just a few months, several of jazz’s most illustrious figures recognized without hesitation that, at the age of eighteen, Rollins had earned a place in their company and began hiring him for live engagements and record dates; his first two studio sessions occurred under Gonzales’s leadership in January and April 1949.235 By May word of his prowess had crossed the Atlantic—Miles Davis, visiting Europe to perform at Paris’s jazz festival, told the British journalist Steve Race that Sonny was “the best of the up-and- coming bop men.”236 If Rollins had hitherto been known as simply the best young jazz player in his neighborhood, there could no longer be any doubt that among jazz musicians his neighborhood was the best anywhere.237 Naturally, his musical education was far from over, and especially during the months after joining Gonzales’s group he continued to ben- efit from the wisdom of his fellow players. Some simply gave him pass- ing advice: pianist Johnny Acea (1917–63) suggested he exchange his American- made saxophone for a Selmer horn.238 Others, such as the pre- mier modern jazz trombonist, J. J. Johnson (1924–2001), became valuable mentors. A seasoned musician in his midtwenties, Johnson had worked with Benny Carter’s and Count Basie’s big bands, performed alongside leading beboppers such as Parker, Gillespie, and Powell, and recently participated in one of Miles Davis’s Birth of the Cool studio sessions.239 He 514 Givan played on Rollins’s recording dates under Gonzales’s name; the young saxophonist struck him as “a very outgoing fun person . . . [who] had his own way of playing, his own style of playing that really caught our fancy.”240 Johnson soon “took [Sonny] under his wing,” helping him improve his music-reading skills and hiring him for two separate days in the recording studio in May 1949, for which Rollins contributed two original blues heads, “Hi- Lo” and “Goof Square,” as well as a minor- key midtempo bebop theme titled “Audobahn [sic].”241 Rollins’s earliest recorded compositions and improvisations, which warrant an extensive study of their own and thus will not be dealt with here, are inarguably the work of an assured musician who was deeply versed in Charlie Parker’s melodic language, with all its chromatic intricacies and rhyth- mic complexities, and capable of executing terse, incisive solos, even at lightning speeds. A recording session of still greater historic import took place three months later under the leadership of Bud Powell, one of the era’s most influential jazz pianists and composers. For much of 1948 through early 1949 Powell had been confined to a psychiatric institution with permis- sion to return home to visit his mother for several hours each Sunday.242 During one of his weekly furloughs the family’s apartment, on St. Nicho- las Avenue just south of 140th Street, received a visit from Jackie McLean, who was a friend of Powell’s younger brother, Richie.243 By the time Bud was discharged from the hospital in April 1949, McLean was regularly spending time at the Powells’ home, with Rollins sometimes accompa- nying him.244 Sonny saw Bud as “a real genius” and an “intense person” who “was only into music. Outside of that, his life was kind of up in the air.”245 Before long Rollins was appearing alongside the pianist on the bandstand in the company of other preeminent beboppers: on August 2 they shared the stage with Parker and Davis at the Three Deuces on 52nd Street for a performance, organized by critic Leonard Feather, that also featured clarinetist Buddy DeFranco (1923–2014), pianist John Lewis (1920–2001), bassist Tommy Potter (1918–88), and drummer Max Roach (1924–2007).246 Without doubt, Sonny had arrived. When Powell signed to make his first discs for Blue Note Records he first hired Fats Navarro for the August 9 studio date and then vacillated between asking either Sonny or Jackie to join the session.247 After giving both saxophonists some time to learn the music that he planned to record, he decided on Rollins, who had quickly mastered all the charts, while McLean still struggled with the ferociously difficult theme “Wail.”248 Rollins’s authoritative solos on that tune and three others—the classic, definitive versions of “Bouncin’ with Bud” and “Dance of the Infidels” plus a rendition of Monk’s “52nd St. Theme”—display a fluent melodic acuity, rhythmic agility, and at times declarative tongued articulation that already con- stituted a unique creative voice.249 Becoming Sonny Rollins 515

Rollins was expanding his repertoire, too. Also during 1949, probably in early fall, bassist Al King offered him a ride from Montreal, where they had just finished a gig, to Chicago.250 There he had an opportunity to play with the drummer Ike Day, a legendary musician who made few recordings.251 “It was Ike who got me interested in playing songs that were a bit before my time,” Sonny later recalled. “The [Jimmie] Lunceford things, the older jazz arrangements. He used to berate me for not knowing them, so I had to bone-up.” 252 Rollins would in time become renowned for his encyclopedic knowledge of songs and themes from diverse genres and eras.253 Even before meeting Day, he was often deftly weaving into his solos quotations of melodies such as Raymond Scott’s “In an Eighteenth- Century Drawing Room” or the 1929 hit song “Tiptoe Through the Tulips.”254 If in 1949 such references expressed wry, whimsical ingenuity, decades later they would be tinged with nostal- gia—allusions to Edward MacDowell’s “To a Wild Rose” or Denzil Best’s “Wee” evoked the domestic music making and neighborhood escapades of Rollins’s early days.255

“Apprenticeship, Ordeals, Initiation . . .” The Sonny Rollins of the late 1940s was not yet the fully fledged hard bopper of 1951, let alone the commanding virtuoso of 1956, the bold avant- garde experimentalist of 1963, or the magisterial titanic impro- viser of more recent decades. Yet even as a teenager he was a singular artist whose playing augured his future accomplishments. His May 1949 solo on the blues “Hi- Lo” opens with a signature melodic figure that he retained in his improvisational vocabulary for years, reusing it on midfifties recordings such as “Tenor Madness,” “Funky Hotel Blues,” “Sonnymoon for Two,” and “Wheatleigh Hall.”256 Through the century’s close and beyond, through challenges as daunting as a ten-month jail term he endured in 1950, immediately after the period surveyed here, Rollins would establish a monumental legacy, influencing many genera- tions of musicians.257 “When we approach jazz,” Ralph Ellison wrote in 1959, we ought to “speak not of courses of study, of grades and degrees, but of appren- ticeship, ordeals, initiation, ceremonies, of rebirth. For after the jazzman has learned the fundamentals of his instrument and the traditional tech- niques of jazz . . . he must then ‘find himself,’ must be reborn, must find, as it were, his soul.”258 From long days of solitary practice and experimentation, from countless hours spent in rehearsals or after-hours jam sessions, and from many nights on the bandstand with his peers in public, all the while honing time-honored techniques and imagin- ing new possibilities, Rollins achieved a mastery that transcended his conscious awareness to a rare degree.259 “When I play,” he explained, 516 Givan

“what I try to do is reach my subconscious level.”260 “Sonny,” his long- time producer Orrin Keepnews once commented, “is the most intuitive musician I’ve ever met as well as the most intellectual.”261 If Rollins’s vast reservoir of musical knowledge certainly was partly grounded in his public education, professional instruction, and the various commercial media at hand, at the end of the day his most vital cultural resource was always his community—the musical residents of Harlem who cultivated and refined the expressive philosophies and practices that first inspired him as a young child and who encouraged and supported his nascent musicality by endowing him with the wisdom of their own experience and granting him opportunities to gain vital experience of his own. In finding himself as an artist, Sonny Rollins found friends, neighbors, and even—quite literally—family members. He found a world. “Everything I have learned,” he declared well over a half century later, “I owe to the neighborhood where I was born.”262

NOTES

I am extremely grateful to Terri Hinte, Lewis Porter, and especially Sonny Rollins. Thanks are also due to the staffs of the Institute of Jazz Studies at the John Cotton Dana Library of Rutgers University—Newark, the Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives at New York University, and the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. 1. Robert Baron, “‘I Saw Mrs. Saray, Sitting on a Bombalerry’: Ralph Ellison Collects Children’s Folklore,” Children’s Folklore Review 32 (2010): 33–34. 2. The Mayor’s Commission on Conditions in Harlem, The Negro in Harlem: A Report on Social and Economic Conditions Responsible for the Outbreak of March 19, 1935 (New York, 1935), 68–69. On the state of Depression- era Harlem public schools, see Cheryl Lynn Greenberg, “Or Does It Explode?”: Black Harlem in the Great Depression (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 189–90; and Richard L. Hughes, “Harlem’s Schools in the Great Depression: The Promise of the Agenda for Education in a Democracy in an Educational Dystopia,” Education in a Democracy 4 (2012): 5–20. 3. David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue (1981; New York: Penguin, 1997), 34. See also Jervis Anderson, This Was Harlem: 1900–1950 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1981), 106; and Jonathan Gill, Harlem: The Four- Hundred- Year History from Dutch Village to Capital of Black America (New York: Grove Press, 2011), 208. 4. The WPA Guide to New York City: The Federal Writers’ Project Guide to 1930s New York (New York: Random House, 1939), 262–63. 5. The Mayor’s Commission, The Negro in Harlem, 69; Billie Holiday with William Dufty, Lady Sings the Blues (New York: Doubleday, 1956), 33; Anderson, This Was Harlem, 240. See also Burton W. Peretti, Nightclub City: Politics and Amusement in Manhattan (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 162. 6. Greenberg, “Or Does It Explode?,” 226; Gilbert Osofsky, Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto: Negro New York, 1890–1930, 2nd ed. (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), xvii, 129; Irma Watkins- Owens, Blood Relations: Caribbean Immigrants and the Harlem Community, 1900–1930 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 1. 7. Sonny Rollins, telephone interview with the author, June 2, 2016. See also Benjamin Weiner, “The Joys of Sax,” Columbia Daily Spectator, April 21, 1994, 9; and Marc Myers, “Sonny Rollins Takes a Ride Uptown: On the Eve of His 80th Birthday, the Jazz Legend Becoming Sonny Rollins 517

Revisits His Childhood with a Tour of His Old Harlem Neighborhood,” Wall Street Journal, September 3, 2010, 24, http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB1000142405274870388230457546 5650752095186 (accessed December 30, 2018). 8. Rollins’s full name has often been given erroneously as Theodore Walter Rollins, but he himself has verified that Walter Theodore is correct. See Larry Appelbaum, interview with Sonny Rollins for the Smithsonian Jazz Oral History Program, February 28, 2011, 1, https://amhistory.si.edu/jazz/Rollins- Sonny/Rollins_Sonny_Interview_Transcription .pdf (accessed December 30, 2018). 9. Isaac Dookhan, A History of the Virgin Islands of the United States (Kingston: Canoe Press, 1994), 278. Information about Rollins’s family appears in George W. Goodman, “Sonny Rollins at Sixty- Eight,” Atlantic, July 1999, 83; and in Eric Nisenson, Open Sky: Sonny Rollins and His World of Improvisation (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 16. 10. Charles Blancq, Sonny Rollins: The Journey of a Jazzman (Boston: Twayne, 1983), 1; Alex Dutilh, interview with Sonny Rollins for France Musique Radio, December 2013, https:// soundcloud.com/france- musique/sonny- rollins- itw- brute- open (accessed June 19, 2015); Greenberg, “Or Does It Explode?,” 29–30. 11. Weiner, “The Joys of Sax,” 9; Nisenson, Open Sky, 19; Ira Gitler, “Sonny Rollins Down Beat Interview @ IAJE—Complete Text,” January 12, 2006, 7, http://www.downbeat.com/ default.asp?sect=magazine#sonny (accessed April 2, 2006). Jordan’s band opened at the Elks Rendezvous on August 4, 1938. See John Chilton, Let the Good Times Roll: The Story of Louis Jordan and His Music (London: Quartet Books, 1992), 61–63. 12. Francis Davis, “An Improviser Prepares,” in In the Moment: Jazz in the 1980s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 121; Gary Giddins et al., “The Greatest Living Jazz Musician,” Village Voice, January 2, 1996, 24; Martin Williams, “Sonny Rollins: Maturity and Form in the Bop Idiom,” in These Jazzmen of Our Time, ed. Raymond Horricks (London: Victor Gollancz, 1959), 197; David H. Rosenthal, Hard Bop: Jazz and Black Music 1955–1965 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 35; Larry Kart, Jazz in Search of Itself (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 116. Books on Rollins include Blancq, Sonny Rol- lins; Nisenson, Open Sky; Peter Niklas Wilson, Sonny Rollins: The Definitive Musical Guide (Berkeley: Berkeley Hills Books, 2001); Richard Palmer, Sonny Rollins: The Cutting Edge (New York: Continuum, 2004); Bob Blumenthal, Saxophone Colossus: A Portrait of Sonny Rollins (New York: Abrams, 2010); and Hugh Wyatt, Sonny Rollins: Meditating on a Riff (New York: Kamama Books, 2018). For a thorough discography, see “Sonny Rollins Discography,” http://www.jazzdisco.org/sonny-rollins/discography/ (accessed December 30, 2018). 13. “A heroic figure,” from Tom Reney, interview with Gary Giddins, New England Public Radio broadcast, August 17, 2010, https://soundcloud.com/newenglandpublicra- dio/gary- giddins- interview- with- tom- reney- about- sonny- rollins- jazz- a- la- mode (accessed December 30, 2018); “descen[t] from Mount Olympus,” from Nate Chinen, “Down from the Mountain to Warm Up and Shine,” New York Times, August 29, 2006, E5. 14. Barry Kernfeld, “Sonny Rollins,” in The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, 2nd ed., ed. Barry Kernfeld (New York: Macmillan, 2002), 3: 446. 15. Bill Milkowski, “Happy Newk Year,” Jazz Times, January/February 2012, 22. 16. “Kennedy Center Honors for Sonny Rollins,” December 29, 2011, https://www .youtube.com/watch?v=hyVvPsKmhiQ (accessed December 30, 2018). 17. Gregg Bendian, interview with Sonny Rollins, June 7, 2016, Oral History of American Music archive, Irving S. Gilmore Library, Yale University. 18. “Transnational,” from Rashida K. Braggs, Jazz Diasporas: Race, Music, and Migration in Post–World War II Paris (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016), 7; “lingua franca,” from Goffredo Plastino and Philip V. Bohlman, introduction to Jazz Worlds / World Jazz, ed. Philip V. Bohlman and Goffredo Plastino (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 1; “global musical culture,” from Nicholas Gebhardt, Nichole Rustin- Paschal, and Tony Whyton, preface to The Routledge Companion to Jazz Studies (New York: Routledge, 2019), xxvii. 518 Givan

19. Greg Urban, Metaculture: How Culture Moves through the World (Minneapolis: Univer- sity of Minnesota Press, 2001), 45; Travis A. Jackson, “Community, Commodity, Palimpsest: Locating Jazz in the World,” in Bohlman and Plastino, Jazz Worlds / World Jazz, 389. 20. For various sociological perspectives on the distributed, networked aspects of the creative arts, see Howard S. Becker, Art Worlds, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of Califor- nia Press, 2008), 1–39 and passim; Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor- Network Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 63–86; and Benjamin Piekut, “Actor- Networks in Music History: Clarifications and Critiques,” Twentieth- Century Music 11, no. 2 (2014): 191–215. 21. Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World, 2nd ed. (New York: Vintage, 2007), 74, 79, 86; Aafke E. Komter, Social Solidarity and the Gift (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 189–212; Lawrence Lessig, Remix: Making Art and Com- merce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy (New York: Penguin, 2008), 143–48; Michael J. Sandel, What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), 98–104, 120–22. 22. On “gift economy,” see Eric Drott, “Fraudulence and the Gift Economy of Music,” Journal of Music Theory 54, no. 1 (2010): 66–67. 23. On the jazz learning environment before the mid- twentieth century, see Wilmot Alfred Fraser, “Jazzology: A Study of the Tradition in Which Jazz Musicians Learn to Improvise” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1983); and Paul F. Berliner, Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 21–55. 24. Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Seg- regated America (New York: Liveright, 2017), xii; Beryl Satter, Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban America (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2009); Jeffrey D. Gonda, Unjust Deeds: The Restrictive Covenant Cases and the Making of the Civil Rights Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015). 25. “Whites Would Bar Andy Kirk from Jamaica Home,” Norfolk Journal and Guide, Feb- ruary 28, 1942, B17; “Whites Invoke Covenant to Bar Andy Kirk from Home,” New York Amsterdam News, May 9, 1942, 1, 19; “Andy Kirk Loses Right to Live in Exclusive Section,” Pittsburgh Courier, May 9, 1942, 3. 26. Geoffrey Himes, “Brought Up on Bop: Sonny Rollins,” Washington Post, March 5, 1993, 12. For historical perspectives on bebop’s political meanings, see Eric Lott, “Double V, Double-Time: Bebop’s Politics of Style,” in Jazz among the Discourses, ed. Krin Gabbard (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 243–55; Eric Porter, “‘Dizzy Atmosphere’: The Challenge of Bebop,” in What Is This Thing Called Jazz? African American Musicians as Artists, Critics, and Activists (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 54–100; and Jesse Stewart, “No Boundary Line to Art: ‘Bebop’ as Afro-Modernist Discourse,” American Music 29, no. 3 (2011): 332–52. 27. Claude McKay, Harlem: Negro Metropolis (New York: Dutton, 1940), 23. 28. Ben Sidran, “Sonny Rollins,” in Talking Jazz: An Oral History, 2nd ed. (New York: Da Capo Press, 1995), 171–72. 29. “Emancipation 150: Pianist Roy Eaton on Why Black Audiences for Classical Music Are Small,” http://www.thegreenespace.org/story/291648- emancipation- 150- pianist - roy- eaton- why- black- audiences- classical- music- are- small/ (accessed December 30, 2018). See also David Gonzalez, “In Sugar Hill, a Street Nurtured Black Talent When the World Wouldn’t,” New York Times, January 23, 2010, A15–A16. 30. “Juste pour la rigolade” (François Postif, “Un ténor soufflant: Sonny Rollins,” Jazz Hot, April 1959, 28); Appelbaum, interview with Sonny Rollins, 2. In various government documents Rollins’s paternal grandfather’s name is sometimes spelled as “Stedmann,” “Steadman,” or “Steadmann.” The 1911 St. Croix census lists his occupation as a carpenter. 31. Hollie I. West, “Rollins: Return of a Recluse,” Washington Post, July 29, 1973, L3; Sidran, “Sonny Rollins,” 179; Jason Crane, “The Jazz Session #403: Sonny Rollins,” Septem- ber 10, 2012, http://thejazzsession.com/2012/09/10/the- jazz- session- 403- sonny- rollins/ (accessed July 3, 2015). Becoming Sonny Rollins 519

32. Nisenson, Open Sky, 16–17; Christopher Lydon, “Sonny Rollins in Conversation,” Radio Open Source, April 7, 2007, http://radioopensource.org/sonny- rollins- in- conversation/ (accessed July 3, 2015); Ted Gioia, “St. Thomas,” in The Jazz Standards: A Guide to the Rep- ertoire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 357–58; Michael Eldridge, “Helan Går Dey,” Working for the Yankee Dollar, https://yankeedollar.wordpress.com/2011/02/12/ helan- gar-dey/ (accessed July 3, 2015). 33. Bret Primack, “Sonny Rollins: Transcending the Standard,” Jazz Times, January 1994, 33; Mildred Adams, “New York Rediscovers Summer Nights,” New York Times, July 28, 1935, SM13, SM16; “New York City Center: About Us,” https://www.nycitycenter.org/ About/ (accessed December 30, 2018). 34. Sonny Rollins, “The Power of Music,” Crescendo, April 1965, 22; Chip Stern, “Sonny Rollins: The Cross and the Rose,” in The Jazz Musician, ed. Mark Rowland and Tony Scher- man (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), 218; Fred Jung, “A Fireside Chat with Sonny Rol- lins,” Jazz Weekly, October 1998, http://www.jazzweekly.com/interviews/SROLLINS.htm (accessed July 3, 2015); Joshua Redman, “Newk’s Time,” Jazz Times, June 2005, 48; Academy of Achievement, “Sonny Rollins Interview,” June 2, 2006, http://www.achievement.org/ achiever/sonny- rollins/#interview (accessed August 6, 2018); Appelbaum, interview with Sonny Rollins, 13. 35. Weiner, “The Joys of Sax,” 9; Whitney Balliett, “Sabbatical,” New Yorker, November 18, 1961, 42. 36. Founded in 1936, the High School of Music and Art was the original incarnation of today’s La Guardia High School of Music and Art and Performing Arts. See Benjamin M. Steigman, Accent on Talent: New York’s High School of Music and Art (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1964), 31. 37. “Fisk Professor, Medical Student Wed at St. Luke’s,” New York Amsterdam News, September 15, 1951, 19; Gerri Major, “Town Topics,” New York Amsterdam News, October 6, 1951, 10; Valdemar Rollins, interview in the television documentary Sonny Rollins: Mor- gen speel ik beter, dir. Hans Hylkema and Olaf van Paassen, NPO 2 Television, October 23, 2014, https://www.ntr.nl/NTR- Documentaires/137/detail/Het- Uur- van- de- Wolf/ VPWON_1221913 (accessed July 3, 2015); Blancq, Sonny Rollins, 2; Arthur Taylor, Notes and Tones: Musician-to- Musician Interviews, 2nd ed. (New York: Da Capo Press, 1993), 166. 38. Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church 1880–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 186–88, 204. 39. Sonny Rollins Podcast, “Interview: Sonny’s Sister Gloria,” March 6, 2008, https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CDf-tyD0mg (accessed July 3, 2015). See also Goodman, “Sonny Rollins at Sixty- Eight,” 83. 40. Jung, “A Fireside Chat”; Stuart Nicholson, “In Conversation with Sonny Rollins,” Jazz.com, November 13, 2009, http://www.jazz.com/features- and- interviews/2009/11/13/ in- conversation- with- sonny- rollins (accessed June 23, 2015); Sonny Rollins: Saxophone Colossus, dir. Robert Mugge (Winstar WHE 73025, 1998) at 28:20; “Sonny Rollins in Swe- den (1959),” Jazz Icons: Series 3 Bonus Disc (Reelin’ in the Years Productions, 2008), at 17:25 and 18:23; Sonny Rollins / Don Cherry Quartet, “52nd Street Theme,” The Complete 1963 Copenhagen Concert (Jazz Lips 767), rec. January 15, 1963, at 0:00; Sonny Rollins, “Theme from Pathétique Symphony,” Sonny Rollins Plays (Period PLP 1204), rec. November 4, 1957. 41. Blancq, Sonny Rollins, 2; “Church Leader, Scholar Dies,” New York Amsterdam News, March 28, 1942, 22. 42. Beverly Smith, “Harlem: The Negro City,” New York Herald Tribune, February 11, 1930, 8; Albert H. Frank and Nola Reed Knouse, “Hymnody of the Moravian Church,” in The Music of the Moravian Church in America, ed. Nola Reed Knouse (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2008), 44–87. 43. Ted Panken, “It’s Sonny Rollins’s Birthday: Two Interviews from 2000,” Today Is the Question, September 7, 2011, https://tedpanken.wordpress.com/2011/09/07/its- sonny - rollins- 81st- birthday- two- interviews- from- 2000/ (accessed December 30, 2018). 520 Givan

44. Rollins, telephone interview; Goodman, “Sonny Rollins at Sixty- Eight,” 88; Bob Young and Al Stankus, Jazz Cooks: Portraits and Recipes of the Greats (New York: Stewart, Tabori, and Chang, 1992), 44. On the history of Mother Horn’s church, see “The Pentecostal Faith Church, Inc.,” http://pfc-inc.org/history.html (accessed July 3, 2015). Rollins’s mother’s maiden name was Solomon (her father was Paul Solomon), but by the time he was born his maternal grandmother, Miriam, had remarried, first to Adolph(us) Victoria and then to Valentine Hansen. 45. Rollins, telephone interview. For a contemporary account, see “Mother Horn’s Church,” Library of Congress, 1938, http://www.loc.gov/item/wpalh001473/ (accessed December 30, 2018). 46. “It was one of these real,” from Panken, “It’s Sonny Rollins’s Birthday”; “sort of jazz- gospel,” from Rollins, telephone interview. 47. Panken, “It’s Sonny Rollins’s Birthday.” 48. Appelbaum, interview with Sonny Rollins, 14. 49. Russell Sanjek and David Sanjek, Pennies from Heaven: The American Popular Music Business in the Twentieth Century (New York: Da Capo Press, 1996), 159–83; Sonny Rollins Podcast, “Interview: Sonny’s Sister Gloria.” 50. Sonny Rollins Podcast, “Radio and the Movies,” https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=veo1S5wsddA (accessed December 30, 2018). 51. A. B. Spellman, “Meet the Artist—New Mexico Jazz Festival, 2007,” https://www .youtube.com/watch?v=MceyPVOdsHw (accessed December 30, 2018). 52. David W. Stowe, Swing Changes: Big Band Jazz in New Deal America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 107; Sonny Rollins Podcast, “Thelonious and Theodore,” http://www.sonnyrollins.com (accessed June 3, 2007). 53. Appelbaum, interview with Sonny Rollins, 13. On Cooper and Bryant, see Jack Schiffman, Harlem Heyday (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1984), 25, 112; and Ted Fox, Showtime at the Apollo (1983; Rhinebeck, NY: Mill Road Enterprises, 2003), 78–80. 54. W. T. Ed Kirkeby, Ain’t Misbehavin’: The Story of Fats Waller (London: Peter Davies, 1966), 5, 15; Maurice Waller and Anthony Calabrese, Fats Waller (New York: Schirmer, 1977), 18–19; David Dye, “Sonny Rollins: Elder Statesman of Jazz,” National Public Radio, July 26, 2007, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=12259390 (accessed December 30, 2018). 55. Ben Ratliff, The Jazz Ear: Conversations over Music (New York: Times Books, 2008), 34. 56. Steve Braunginn and Jane Reynolds, “Sonny Rollins,” Jazz Improv, September 2007, 25. 57. Rollins, telephone interview; Chuck Berg, “Sonny Rollins: The Way Newk Feels,” Down Beat, April 7, 1977, 13; Scott Spencer, “The Titan of Jazz,” Rolling Stone, December 13, 1990, 153; Zan Stewart, “On Sonny’s Side of the Street,” Los Angeles Times, September 16, 1990, N61. 58. Bob Belden, “Jazz Artist of the Year,” Down Beat, August 1997, 18. 59. “C’est bien lui qui m’a fait tourner vers le jazz. Vous ne pouvez pas savoir comme je l’admirais!” (Postif, “Un ténor soufflant,” 28). 60. Crispin Cioe, “Sonny Rollins: I’m Still Reaching,” High Fidelity 33 (May 1983): 77; Nate Guidry, “Sax Takes Rollins ‘to a Different Place,’” Pittsburgh Post- Gazette, June 10, 2001, http://old.post- gazette.com/ae/20010610rollinsmag5.asp (accessed December 30, 2018); Louis Jordan, “Knock Me a Kiss,” mx. 93786 (Decca 8593), rec. November 15, 1941; “I’m Gonna Move to the Outskirts of Town,” mx. 93824 (Decca 8593), rec. November 22, 1941; “It’s a Low Down Dirty Shame,” mx. 71133 (Decca 8638), rec. July 21, 1942; “Five Guys Named Moe,” mx. 71132 (Decca 8653), rec. July 21, 1942. 61. David Ake, “Jazz Historiography and the Problem of Louis Jordan,” in Jazz Cultures (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 42–61. 62. Gitler, “Sonny Rollins Down Beat Interview.” 63. Sonny Rollins, out- take interviews for the film A Great Day in Harlem, dir. Jean Bach (HVE 3035, 2005). Becoming Sonny Rollins 521

64. Nat Hentoff, “Sonny Rollins,” Down Beat, November 28, 1956, 15; Bill Coss, “The Return of Sonny Rollins,” Down Beat, January 4, 1962, 13. 65. Ralph Ellison, “The Charlie Christian Story,” in Living with Music: Ralph Ellison’s Jazz Writings, ed. Robert G. O’Meally (New York: Modern Library, 2001), 40; “middle class,” from Davis, “An Improviser Prepares,” 123; Terry Gross, All I Did Was Ask: Conversations with Writers, Actors, Musicians, and Artists (New York: Hyperion, 2004), 215. 66. Rollins, telephone interview. 67. “Biography,” in Best of Sonny Rollins (Milwaukee: Hal Leonard, 2008), 2. See also Academy of Achievement, “Sonny Rollins Interview.” 68. Taylor, Notes and Tones, 166. 69. “Self taught,” from Rollins, out-take interviews; Josef Woodard, “This Is What I Do!,” Jazz Hot, December 2003, 20; Appelbaum, interview with Sonny Rollins, 8. 70. “Display Ad,” New York Amsterdam News, October 14, 1939, 7. 71. Appelbaum, interview with Sonny Rollins, 8. 72. “Mr. Bastien,” and “one of these saxophone players,” from Bendian, interview with Sonny Rollins; David T. Bastien, email communication, July 19, 2018. A double embouchure involves holding the saxophone’s mouthpiece between both lips rather than between the lower lip and the front teeth, as is more customary. 73. Nisenson, Open Sky, 20; Rollins, telephone interview. 74. Rollins, telephone interview. Vereecken, a member of John Philip Sousa’s band, published three different saxophone instruction books between 1917 and 1926. See Walter F. Hoehn Jr., “‘Mr. Saxophonist,’ Benjamin Vereecken: Performer, Pedagogue, Composer” (DMA diss., University of Memphis, 2014), 107. 75. For a list of some widespread received “assumptions about jazz practice,” see Tony Whyton, Beyond a Love Supreme: John Coltrane and the Legacy of an Album (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 13. 76. Himes, “Brought Up on Bop,” 12. 77. Jed Rasula, “The Media of Memory: The Seductive Menace of Records in Jazz His- tory,” in Gabbard, Jazz among the Discourses, 134–62; Travis A. Jackson, Blowin’ the Blues Away: Performance and Meaning on the New York Jazz Scene (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 6–11. 78. Eric Benson, “Sonny Rollins on His Favorite Soundtracks,” Inverted Garden, Janu- ary 18, 2011, http://invertedgarden.com/inverted- garden/2011/02/exclusive- sonny - rollins- on- his- favorite- soundtracks.html (accessed January 21, 2011). See also Marc Myers, “Interview: Sonny Rollins (Part 1),” Jazz Wax, October 6, 2009, http://www.jazzwax .com/2009/10/interview- sonny- rollins- part- 1.html (accessed December 30, 2018). 79. Chilton, Let the Good Times Roll, 63. 80. Since Rollins recalls that he was nine years old when he moved from West 135th Street to Sugar Hill, the family must have relocated sometime between April 7, 1940, when the US Census documents them living on 135th Street, and September 7 of that year, when he celebrated his tenth birthday. Ratliff, The Jazz Ear, 24; Billy Heller, “Sonny Rollins,” New York Post, August 27, 2006, https://nypost.com/2006/08/27/sonny-rollins/ (accessed December 30, 2018). 81. Josh Jackson, interview with Sonny Rollins, “The Checkout,” WBGO Radio, May 3, 2011, http://www.wbgo.org/checkoutjazz/the- primitive- sonny- rollins (accessed July 21, 2015). See also “Sugar Hill: All Harlem Looks Up to ‘Folks on the Hill,’” Ebony 11, no. 1 (November 1946): 5–11. 82. “Drs. Kenneth and Mamie Clark—555,” While We Are Still Here, http://www .whilewearestillhere.org/drs.- kenneth- and- mamie- clark.html (accessed December 30, 2018); Gonzalez, “In Sugar Hill,” A16; Karen F. Taborn, Walking Harlem: The Ultimate Guide to the Cultural Capital of Black America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2018), 142. 83. Bob Jones and Jenni Vinson Trejo, interview with Sonny Rollins, 1440 KEYS Radio, Corpus Christi, Texas, http://jvteditorials.com/sonnyrollins.htm (accessed July 12, 2006); 1940 US Census. 522 Givan

84. Myers, “Sonny Rollins”; Kathryn Shattuck, “Come On In: It’s the Big Chill of ’36: Show Celebrates Giant Depression- Era Pools That Cool New York,” New York Times, August 14, 2006, E1, E7. 85. Rollins, telephone interview. See also Miles Davis with Quincy Troupe, Miles: The Autobiography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989), 145. 86. Jackson, interview with Sonny Rollins; Paola Genone, “Sonny Rollins: ‘Tout ce que j’ai appris, je le dois à Harlem,’” L’Express, July 4, 2005, http://www.lexpress.fr/culture/ musique/sonny- rollins- tout- ce- que- j- ai- appris- je- le- dois- a- harlem_535794.html (accessed December 30, 2018). 87. Richard Scheinin, “So Much to Love about Sonny Rollins: Legendary Saxophonist Headlines S.F. Jazz Fest,” San Jose Mercury News, October 12, 2006, AE4. 88. Gonzalez, “In Sugar Hill,” A16; Anderson, This Was Harlem, 343. 89. Biographer David Levering Lewis writes that Du Bois exhibited “a willfully arrogant, private, standing apart . . . from the great majority of the people of the race he believed it his destiny to uplift” (W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868–1919 [New York: Henry Holt, 1993], 149). 90. Scheinin, “So Much to Love,” AE4. 91. Stern, “Sonny Rollins,” 217. 92. Anderson, This Was Harlem, 72, 341. 93. “Bowman’s Melody Room,” New York Age, Saturday, September 24, 1949, 20; “Negro Restaurants,” New York Age, August 8, 1942, 6. 94. “‘Lucky’ Ordered to Pay His Debt,” New York Amsterdam News, January 25, 1947, 5; Ashley Southall, “Mourning the Loss of Another Beacon of Old Harlem,” New York Times, April 4, 2018, A22. 95. Malcolm X (as told to Alex Haley), The Autobiography of Malcolm X (New York: Grove Press, 1964), 112; Gary Giddins, Celebrating Bird: The Triumph of Charlie Parker (New York: Beech Tree Books, 1987), 54; Rollins, telephone interview; “Let Me Off Uptown: First Stop—Al’s Luncheonette,” New York Age, October 1, 1949, 24. 96. Rollins, telephone interview. See also Davis and Troupe, Miles, 145. 97. Academy of Achievement, “Sonny Rollins Interview.” 98. James A. Keene, A History of Music Education in the United States (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1982), 227–63. 99. Diane Ravitch, The Great School Wars: A History of the New York City Public Schools, 2nd ed. (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 239; “Esther Ostroff Gives Recital at Scarsdale,” Scarsdale Inquirer, June 23, 1933, 2. 100. “School Notes: Students Present Cantata,” New York Age, May 12, 1945, 5; “Stitt Hi Finishes a Year’s Work,” New York Amsterdam News, June 26, 1948, 16. 101. Information from Lewis Porter, based on his own interview with Sonny Rollins in March 2015. 102. Ibid. 103. Untitled anonymous news item, New York Amsterdam News, November 25, 1944, 4; “Music Notes,” New York Amsterdam News, November 11, 1939, 20. 104. “Students Paint Mural on Music for Exhibit,” New York Amsterdam News, June 2, 1945, 9. 105. Rollins, telephone interview; Stern, “Sonny Rollins,” 217; Brian Priestley, “Sonny Rollins: Dancing in the Light,” Wire, June 1988, 35; Gonzalez, “In Sugar Hill,” A16. 106. Rollins, telephone interview; Stern, “Sonny Rollins,” 217; Ratliff, The Jazz Ear, 37; Blancq, Sonny Rollins, 4; Appelbaum, interview with Sonny Rollins, 25; Christian Broeck- ing, Sonny Rollins: Improvisation und Protest; Interviews (Berlin: Broecking Verlag, 2010), 16. 107. Burt Korall, Drummin’ Men: The Heartbeat of Jazz: The Bebop Years (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 25; Ratliff, The Jazz Ear, 37. 108. Hawkins lived at the Kinghaven Apartments at 445 West 153rd Street (John Chilton, The Song of the Hawk: The Life and Recordings of Coleman Hawkins [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990], 195). See also Eric K. Washington, “The Kinghaven: A Faded Gem of Becoming Sonny Rollins 523

Harlem’s Sugar Hill,” Examiner.com, April 27, 2013, http://www.examiner.com/article/ the- kinghaven- a- faded- gem- of- harlem- s- sugar- hill (accessed January 25, 2015). 109. Coleman Hawkins, “Body and Soul,” mx. BS 042936 (Bluebird B- 10253), rec. October 11, 1939. 110. Dan Buskirk, “Q&A with Sonny Rollins, Living Legend of Jazz,” http://www .phawker.com/2009/09/25/qa- with- sonny- rollins- living- legend- of- jazz/ (accessed December 30, 2018); Stanley Crouch, “The Colossus: Sonny Rollins on the Bandstand,” New Yorker, May 9, 2005, 66; Sonny Rollins, “On Coleman Hawkins,” Down Beat, July 2004, 15; Sanjek and Sanjek, Pennies from Heaven, 133; Marc Myers, “Transformed Body and Soul: On a Harlem Street a Future Sax Great Was Transfixed by Coleman Hawkins’s 1939 Hit,” Wall Street Journal, May 9, 2014, C13, http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240527023 04831304579543780119788504 (accessed December 30, 2018). 111. Appelbaum, interview with Sonny Rollins, 20; Hoyt Jones, “The First Part of Hawk’s Masterpiece,” Down Beat, September 15, 1940, 16; Jones, “The Final Portion of Hawk’s Masterpiece,” Down Beat, October 1, 1940, 16. 112. Roy Hurst, “A Salute to Sonny Rollins on His 75th Birthday,” News and Notes, National Public Radio, September 21, 2005, http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/ transcript.php?storyId=4857252 (accessed December 30, 2018). 113. Scott DeVeaux, The Birth of Bebop: A Social and Musical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 37. 114. Coss, “The Return of Sonny Rollins,” 13; Jean- Louis Noames, “Le Dru Rollins,” Jazz Magazine, January 1966, 23. 115. Bill Beuttler, “Saxophone Colossus,” billbeuttler.com, 1993, http://www.billbeuttler .com/saxophone_colossus_10276.htm (accessed December 30, 2018); Nisenson, Open Sky, 20; Berg, “Sonny Rollins,” 13; Howard Reich, “Storytelling by Sax: After 4 Decades Fans Still Flock to Sonny Rollins’ Riveting Tenor Horn,” Chicago Tribune, March 29, 1992, http:// articles.chicagotribune.com/1992- 03- 29/entertainment/9201290071_1_sonny- rollins- jazz - life- coleman-hawkins (accessed December 30, 2018). Herbert Vanterpool’s daughter Sylvia (1935–2011) grew up to become a professional R&B singer and in the 1970s, with her husband, Joe Robinson, founded the first major hip-hop record label, Sugar Hill Records. Rollins was also inspired by Sylvia’s brother Herbert “Jimmy” Vanterpool Jr., who played the saxophone as well. Rollins, telephone interview; G. Fitz Bartley, “Sonny Rollins in Jamaica,” Daily Gleaner, October 18, 1969, 7; Dan Charnas, The Big Payback: The History of the Business of Hip- Hop (New York: New American Library, 2010), 33. 116. “Pestered,” from Dom Cerulli, “Theodore Walter Rollins: Sonny Believes He Can Accomplish Much More Than He Has to Date,” Down Beat, July 10, 1958, 16; Postif, “Un ténor soufflant,” 29. 117. Gary Giddins, “Sonny Rollins Talks to Gary Giddins,” City University of New York lecture series, April 14, 2008, http://www1.cuny.edu/mu/podcasts/2008/04/14/ sonny- rollins- talks- with- gary- giddins/ (accessed December 30, 2018). 118. Gil Zimmerman, “Person to Person,” Philadelphia Tribune, November 29, 1958, 6; Ratliff, The Jazz Ear, 37; Valdemar Rollins, interview in the television documentary Sonny Rollins: Morgen speel ik beter; Davis, “An Improviser Prepares,” 131. 119. Cioe, “Sonny Rollins,” 78; Rollins, “On Coleman Hawkins,” 15; Coleman Hawkins, “Sweet Lorraine,” mx. T 19006 (Signature 90001), rec. December 23, 1943; Cozy Cole, “I Don’t Stand a Ghost of a Chance,” mx. S- 3277 (Continental C- 6000), rec. November 14, 1944; Hawkins, “Stuffy,” mx. CAP 576-T- 6- A (Capitol 205), rec. February 23, 1945; Hawkins, “It’s the Talk of the Town,” mx. CAP 596-3A (Capitol 205), rec. March 9, 1945. 120. Coleman Hawkins, “The Man I Love,” mx. 19005 (Signature 90001), rec. December 23, 1943. 121. Ratliff, The Jazz Ear, 36; Robert Friedman, interview with Sonny Rollins, Virgin Islands Daily News, December 26, 2011, http://virginislandsdailynews.com/news/1.1249492 (accessed July 14, 2015). 122. Hentoff, “Sonny Rollins,” 15; Belden, “Jazz Artist,” 20. 524 Givan

123. DeVeaux, The Birth of Bebop, 92–110. 124. Rollins, “On Coleman Hawkins,” 15. 125. Bret Primack, “Sonny Rollins Remembers Ben Webster, Pres, and Hawk,” 2008, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDF8xC6Ats8 (accessed December 30, 2018). 126. Rollins, “The Power of Music,” 22. 127. Belden, “Jazz Artist,” 22. 128. Ratliff, The Jazz Ear, 36; Nathan Irvin Huggins, Harlem Renaissance, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 10–11. 129. Stern, “Sonny Rollins,” 219. 130. Guidry, “Sax Takes Rollins.” 131. Faith Ringgold, We Flew over the Bridge: The Memoirs of Faith Ringgold (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 25, 31. See also Michele Wallace, Invisibility Blues, 2nd ed. (London: Verso, 2008), 15. 132. Gonzalez, “In Sugar Hill,” A16. 133. Joe Giardullo, “Sonny Rollins: Our Man in Jazz,” Coda, July/August 1995, 8. The neighbor in question was probably Reginald L. Mason, who lived with his family at 401 Edgecombe Avenue (1940 US Census; 1946 Manhattan telephone directory). 134. Appelbaum, interview with Sonny Rollins, 30. For an empirical perspective on the role of practice in the development of musical performance expertise, see John A. Sloboda, “The Acquisition of Musical Performance Expertise: Deconstructing the ‘Talent’ Account of Individual Differences in Musical Expressivity,” in The Road to Excellence: The Acquisition of Expert Performance in the Arts and Sciences, Sports and Games, ed. K. Anders Ericsson (1996; New York: Psychology Press, 2014), 111–14. 135. “Sonny Rollins Lifetime Achievement Award from the Jazz Foundation of America,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4FWCsyxU_k (accessed December 30, 2018). 136. Braunginn and Reynolds, “Sonny Rollins,” 20; Sidran, “Sonny Rollins,” 177; Kwasi Ampene, “One on One: Max Roach in Conversation with Kofi Ghanaba,” American Music Research Center Journal 20 (2011): 13. 137. Bob Blumenthal, “The Bridge: Sonny Rollins Is a Tenor for All Times,” Rolling Stone, July 12, 1979, 58; Crouch, “The Colossus,” 66; Crane, “The Jazz Session #403.” 138. Rollins, “On Coleman Hawkins,” 15; Primack, “Sonny Rollins,” 35. 139. Reich, “Storytelling by Sax”; Giardullo, “Sonny Rollins,” 8–9. 140. Weiner, “The Joys of Sax,” 9. See also Gene Kalbacher, “The Sonny Rollins Interview,” Down Beat, July 1988, 17; and Spencer, “The Titan of Jazz,” 153. 141. LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), Blues People: Negro Music in White America (New York: Morrow, 1963), 181; DeVeaux, The Birth of Bebop, 20–31; Guthrie P. Ramsey Jr., The Amazing Bud Powell: Black Genius, Jazz History, and the Challenge of Bebop (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 34–38. 142. Spencer, “The Titan of Jazz,” 153; Gitler, “Sonny Rollins Down Beat Interview”; Sonny Rollins, “Jackie McLean,” Jazz Times, March 2007, http://jazztimes.com/articles/25491 - jackie- mclean (accessed December 30, 2018). Bishop lived at 133 West 113th Street, Drew lived at 300 West 141st Street, Taylor lived at 672 St. Nicholas Avenue, and McLean lived at 961 St. Nicholas Avenue (Local 802: American Federation of Musicians Directory and Instru- mentation [Newark, NJ: International Press, 1950]). 143. Maroon and Orange: Benjamin Franklin High School Class of January 1948, 14, 16; Michael C. Johanek and John L. Puckett, Leonard Covello and the Making of Benjamin Franklin High School: Education as if Citizenship Mattered (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2007), 199. 144. Johanek and Puckett, Leonard Covello, 203; Gerald Meyer, “When Frank Sinatra Came to Italian Harlem: The 1945 ‘Race Riot’ at Benjamin Franklin High School,” in Are Italians White? How Race Is Made in America, ed. Jennifer Guglielmo and Salvatore Salerno (New York: Routledge, 2003), 161–76; Wyatt, Sonny Rollins, 52–56; Marc Myers, Why Jazz Happened (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), 140–42; Nisenson, Open Sky, 24. Becoming Sonny Rollins 525

145. Hentoff, “Sonny Rollins,” 15; information from Lewis Porter based on his own interview with Rollins; William Brower, interview with Jackie McLean for the Smithson- ian Jazz Oral History Program, July 20–21, 2001, 19, http://amhistory.si.edu/jazz/Mclean - Jackie/McLean_Jackie_Interview_Transcription.pdf (accessed December 30, 2018); Derek Ansell, Sugar Free Saxophone: The Life and Music of Jackie McLean (London: Northway, 2012), 9; Myers, Why Jazz Happened, 142. 146. B. Marian Brooks and Harry A. Brown, Music Education in the Elementary School (New York: American Book Company, 1946), 319–20. 147. Information from Lewis Porter based on his own interview with Rollins; Joseph Antonucci, “A Visit to Franklin’s Choral Club; Or, An Excursion to the Abode of Musico- maniacs,” in Maroon and Orange: Benjamin Franklin High School Class of June 1949, 42–43. 148. Edna R. Cox, “People Worth Knowing,” Utica Observer Dispatch, August 11, 1957, 6B; Edyth Elizabeth Wagner, “Raymond Burrows and His Contributions to Music Educa- tion” (DMA diss., University of Southern California, 1968), 212–17; Raymond Burrows and Bessie Carroll Redmond, Symphony Themes (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1942); 1940 U.S. Census Population Schedule. After her retirement, Redmond published a second anthology with Burrows (Raymond Burrows and Bessie Carroll Redmond, Concerto Themes [New York: Simon and Schuster, 1951]). 149. Cox, “People Worth Knowing,” 6B; David M. Yaffe, “When the Spirit Comes: An Interview with Sonny Rollins,” Village Voice, January 2, 1996, 29. 150. Yaffe, “When the Spirit Comes,” 29. 151. Panken, “It’s Sonny Rollins’s Birthday”; Appelbaum, interview with Sonny Rollins, 7. 152. Bruno Nettl, Heartland Excursions: Ethnomusicological Reflections on Schools of Music (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 82–111; Yaffe, “When the Spirit Comes,” 29; Juan Rodriguez, “The Improvisational Virtuoso,” Montreal Gazette, June 27, 2010, A14. 153. “Insecure,” from Sidran, “Sonny Rollins,” 172; “it sort of put a mental block,” from Tim Graham, “Sonny Rollins: Life of a Sax Colossus,” Goldmine 23, no. 26 (1997): 18. 154. Rollins, telephone interview. Gwendolyn Rollins Lewis was the half sister of Sonny’s father, Walter. (Stedman Rollins was their father; her mother was Romalia Duvergie, and his was Grace Ann Claxton.) 155. Allen Scott, Jazz Educated, Man (Washington, DC: American International Publishers, 1973), 38. 156. Adolphus “Doc” Cheatham, I Guess I’ll Get the Papers and Go Home, ed. Alyn Shipton (London: Cassell, 1996), 51, 56; Lowell D. Holmes and John W. Thomson, “Walter ‘Foots’ Thomas,” in Jazz Greats: Getting Better with Age (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1986), 56, 60; “Display Ad: Andy Brown and Adolphus (Doc) Cheatham,” Metronome, August 1945, 34; “Display Ad: Walter ‘Foots’ Thomas,” Metronome, January 1945, 36. 157. Rollins, telephone interview; “Display Ad: Joe Napoleon,” Metronome, January 1945, 36; “Joseph Napoli, Noted Musician,” Ridgewood Times (Queens, NY), July 27, 1972, 10. Some years later, Napoleon gave Rollins a mimeographed typescript of “Saxophone Fingerings for Extremely High (False) Tones Above the Normal Range of the Saxophone,” inscribed “To a great guy.” Sonny Rollins Papers, New York Public Library, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, box 4, folder 1. 158. Lowell D. Holmes and John W. Thomson, “Adolphus ‘Doc’ Cheatham,” in Jazz Greats, 51; Brower, interview with Jackie McLean; Nat Hentoff, The Jazz Life (1961; New York: Da Capo Press, 1975), 236. 159. “Je n’ai jamais eu de vraie leçon de jazz” (Woodard, “This Is What I Do!,” 20). 160. Rollins, telephone interview. Rollins told me that later on, probably in the late 1950s, he took some clarinet lessons with another member of the Calloway Orchestra, Eddie Barefield. See also John McDonough, “Sonny’s Side of the Street,” Down Beat, December 1992, 25; Appelbaum, interview with Sonny Rollins, 27; and Woodard, “This Is What I Do!,” 20. 526 Givan

161. Milt Hinton, interview with Walter “Foots” Thomas for the Jazz Oral History Project, January 5, 1981, Institute of Jazz Studies, Rutgers University, Newark, NJ. 162. Ronald Atkins, “Nos. 127–128: Sonny Rollins,” in Modern Jazz: The Essential Records, ed. Max Harrison, Alun Morgan, Ronald Atkins, Michael James, and Jack Cooke (London: Aquarius, 1975), 82. See also the comments of saxophonists Ron Blake, Jeff Coffin, Joel Frahm, and Branford Marsalis in Redman, “Newk’s Time,” 51, 53. 163. Sonny Rollins Papers, box 4, folder 2. 164. Rollins, telephone interview. 165. Ralph J. Gleason, Conversations in Jazz (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016), 167; Spencer, “The Titan of Jazz,” 153–56; Sidran, “Sonny Rollins,” 173; Braunginn and Reyn- olds, “Sonny Rollins,” 20; Panken, “It’s Sonny Rollins’s Birthday”; Andy Hamilton, Lee Konitz: Conversations on the Improviser’s Art (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), 95. 166. Sidran, “Sonny Rollins,” 173. 167. Alan Reder and John Baxter, Listen to This! Leading Musicians Recommend Their Favorite Recordings (New York: Hyperion, 1999), 347; “Sonny Rollins on Pres,” https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=EFVqmUtitR8 (accessed December 30, 2018). 168. Ratliff, The Jazz Ear, 42; Lester Young, “Afternoon of a Basie- Ite,” mx. HL3- 2 (Keynote 604), rec. December 28, 1943. 169. Nisenson, Open Sky, 26; Rollins, “The Power of Music,” 23; Beuttler, “Saxophone Colossus.” See also Sonny Rollins with Ed Enright, “The Tenors of My Time,” Down Beat, July 1999, 24–28. 170. Don Byas, “How High the Moon,” mx. S5846 (Savoy 597), rec. November 26, 1945; Blumenthal, “The Bridge,” 59. Rollins probably bought the disc pairing “How High the Moon” with “Ko- Ko” shortly after it was released in the late spring of 1946. See Barry Ulanov, George T. Simon, and Leonard Feather, “Charlie Parker’s Ri Bop Boys (1946),” in The Charlie Parker Companion, ed. Carl Woideck (New York: Schirmer, 1998), 241–42. 171. Panken, “It’s Sonny Rollins’s Birthday.” 172. Charlie Parker, “Ko- Ko,” mx. S5853- 2 (Savoy 597), rec. November 26, 1945. 173. “Didn’t really understand,” from Hentoff, “Sonny Rollins,” 15; “interesting,” from Nicholson, “In Conversation”; “I got attracted,” from Giddins, “Sonny Rollins Talks.” 174. DeVeaux, The Birth of Bebop, 8. See also Jones, Blues People, 193; Ross Russell, “Bebop,” in The Art of Jazz: Essays in the Nature and Development of Jazz, ed. Martin Williams (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), 187–214; Bernard Gendron, Between Montmartre and the Mudd Club: Popular Music and the Avant-Garde (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 157; Belden, “Jazz Artist of the Year,” 22; Graham, “Sonny Rollins,” 18. 175. Christopher Dennison, “Primary Sources: An Examination of Ira Gitler’s Swing to Bop and Oral History’s Role in the Story of Bebop” (MA thesis, Rutgers University, 2015), 16. 176. Jim Macnie, “Lost and Found: Sonny Rollins Interview,” July 23, 2006, https:// lamentforastraightline.wordpress.com/2009/07/23/lost- found- sonny- rollins- interview/ (accessed December 30, 2018). 177. Hentoff, “Sonny Rollins,” 15; Brower, interview with Jackie McLean, 46; Steve Lehman, “Interview with Jackie McLean,” Do the Math, September 10, 2013, https:// ethaniverson.com/interviews/interview- with- jackie- mclean- by- steve- lehman/ (accessed December 30, 2018). 178. Victor L. Schermer, “Sonny Rollins: Hardy Perennial,” All About Jazz, November 28, 2006, http://www.allaboutjazz.com/sonny- rollins- hardy- perennial- sonny- rollins- by - victor-l- schermer.php (accessed December 30, 2018); Ratliff, The Jazz Ear, 40–41; Charlie Parker, “Another Hair Do,” mx. D830- 3 (Savoy 961), rec. December 21, 1947. 179. Jeffrey Brown, “Extended Interview: Sonny Rollins,” PBS Newshour, November 29, 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CXS4R8hyq8 (accessed December 30, 2018). 180. “Intellectually advanced,” from Himes, “Brought Up on Bop,” 12; iRockJazz, “Sonny Rollins: A Conversation with a Legend,” September 17, 2012, http://irockjazz .com/2012/09/same- but- different- a- conversation- with- sonny- rollins/ (accessed December Becoming Sonny Rollins 527

30, 2018); Gene Santoro, “The Edgy Optimist,” American Scholar, Winter 2007, 127; Kevin Whitehead, “When Sonny Gets Mad,” Down Beat, January 1995, 17; Belden, “Jazz Artist of the Year,” 22. 181. Joe Goldberg, Jazz Masters of the Fifties (New York: Macmillan, 1965), 90. 182. Sidran, “Sonny Rollins,” 174. 183. Leonard Feather and Conrad Silvert, “Jazz World Remembers Bird,” Down Beat, August 1980, 27. 184. On Andy Kirk Jr., see Brower, interview with Jackie McLean; and A. B. Spellman, Four Lives in the Bebop Business (New York: Limelight Editions, 1966), 188. On Lowell Lewis, see Brower, interview with Jackie McLean; and Will Friedwald, “Earl Coleman Oral His- tory,” Current Research in Jazz 1 (2009), https://www.crj-online.org/v1/CRJ- EarlColeman .php (accessed December 30, 2018). 185. Guthrie P. Ramsey Jr., Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip- Hop (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 106. 186. Nisenson, Open Sky, 28. See also Jones, Blues People, 181, 188, 193. 187. Himes, “Brought Up on Bop,” 12. 188. Sonny Rollins, “Any Questions,” Observer, October 17, 1993, D45; Myers, “Sonny Rollins”; Appelbaum, interview with Sonny Rollins, 18–19. 189. Maxine Gordon, Sophisticated Giant: The Life and Legacy of Dexter Gordon (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018), 87. 190. Gitler, “Sonny Rollins Down Beat Interview.” 191. Spellman, Four Lives, 193; Tony Scherman, “A Jazz Griot with a Sense of Civility,” New York Times, January 23, 1994, 28; Rollins, “Jackie McLean.” 192. “Everybody wanted,” from Chicago Jazz, “Sonny Rollins,” Chicago Jazz Maga- zine, August 27, 2008, http://www.chicagojazz.com/magazine/sonny-rollins- 147.html (accessed July 6, 2015); Sonny Rollins, “Miles in the 1940s and Early 1950s,” in Miles Davis: The Complete Illustrated History (Minneapolis: Voyageur Press, 2012), 52; Lehman, “Interview with Jackie McLean.” Academic research has largely validated an experiential rather than innate notion of “giftedness.” See K. Anders Ericsson, Kiruthiga Nandagopal, and Roy W. Roring, “Giftedness Viewed from the Expert- Performance Perspective,” Journal for the Education of the Gifted 28, no. 3–4 (2005): 287–311. 193. Warren Smith, interview with Art Taylor, New York Public Library, July 26, 1994, http://www.nypl.org/audiovideo/arthur- taylor- full- interview (accessed December 30, 2018); Spellman, Four Lives, 192. 194. Gitler, “Sonny Rollins Down Beat interview.” 195. Crouch, “The Colossus,” 66 196. Rollins, telephone interview. 197. Nisenson, Open Sky, 32; Smith, interview with Art Taylor; Appelbaum, interview with Sonny Rollins, 28. 198. Rollins, telephone interview. Rollins can date this visit to Montreal because he recalls that it occurred during the year that Jackie Robinson was playing for the Montreal Royals, the minor-league affiliate of the Brooklyn Dodgers, which Robinson joined the fol- lowing year as the first African American to play on a major baseball team. See also Patrick Sauer, “The Year of Jackie Robinson’s Mutual Love Affair with Montreal,” Smithsonian. com, online at http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/year- jackie- robinsons- mutual - love- affair- montreal- 180954878/?no- ist (accessed December 30, 2018). 199. Woodard, “This Is What I Do!,” 20. 200. Rob van der Bliek, “Blue Note,” in The Thelonious Monk Reader, ed. Rob van der Bliek (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 26–27; Nard Griffin, To Be or Not to Bop (New York: Leo B. Workman, 1948), 17; Orrin Keepnews, The View from Within (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 109–13. 201. Rollins, telephone interview; Panken, “It’s Sonny Rollins’s Birthday”; Buskirk, “Q&A”; Coleman Hawkins, “Flyin’ Hawk” and “Drifting on a Reed” (JDavis 8250), rec. October 19, 1944. 528 Givan

202. Robin D. G. Kelley, Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original (New York: Free Press, 2009), 117. See also Lorraine Gordon, Alive at the Village Vanguard: My Life In and Out of Jazz Time (Milwaukee: Hal Leonard, 2006), 61–70. 203. Schermer, “Sonny Rollins”; “Sonny Rollins de A à Z,” Jazz Magazine, May 2001, 45. 204. Buskirk, “Q&A”; Stern, “Sonny Rollins,” 220. 205. Panken, “It’s Sonny Rollins’s Birthday.” 206. Jackie McLean interview transcript, Jazz: A Film by Ken Burns, April 10, 1996, 20, http://www- tc.pbs.org/jazz/about/pdfs/McLean.pdf (accessed July 23, 2015). 207. Rollins, “The Power of Music,” 23. 208. “Creator of Be Bop Objects to Name and Changes in His Style,” Chicago Defender, March 27, 1948, 9. 209. Giddins, “Sonny Rollins Talks to Gary Giddins.” 210. “Sonny Rollins de A à Z,” 45. 211. Gary Giddins, “There’s No One Like Sonny Rollins,” in Riding on a Blue Note: Jazz and American Pop (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 121. 212. Stern, “Sonny Rollins,” 220–21. 213. “The geometry,” from Mark Jacobson, “Sonny Rollins, the Colossus,” Men’s Journal, September 2013, https://www.mensjournal.com/features/sony-rollins- the - colossus- 20130819/ (accessed December 30, 2018); Sidran, “Sonny Rollins,” 174. 214. Ishmael Reed, “Sonny Rollins: Three Takes,” in Mixing it Up: Taking on the Media Bullies and Other Reflections (New York: Da Capo Press, 2008), 68. 215. George Seltzer, Music Matters: The Performer and the American Federation of Musicians (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1989), 54; James P. Kraft, Stage to Studio: Musicians and the Sound Revolution, 1890–1950 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 176; Zimmerman, “Person to Person,” 6. See also Kelley, Thelonious Monk, 488; and Blancq, Sonny Rollins, v. Rollins appears in the January 1948 edition of the Benjamin Franklin High School year book; he presumably had fulfilled the school’s graduation requirements by the end of 1947 (Maroon and Orange: Benjamin Franklin High School Class of January 1948, 16). 216. “Saxophone Colossus Sonny Rollins on Why He Hasn’t Hit His Peak Yet,” Inter- national Musician, May 1, 2009, https://internationalmusician.org/saxophone-colossus - sonny- rollins- on- why- he- hasnt- hit- his- peak- yet/ (accessed December 30, 2018). 217. Kraft, Stage to Studio, 178–91. The 1948 recording ban was not uniformly observed— some small record labels continued to record. See Bob Porter, “Talking with Teddy,” in liner notes to Charlie Parker, The Complete Savoy Studio Sessions (Savoy 5500). 218. Gonzalez, “In Sugar Hill,” A16. 219. Hentoff, “Sonny Rollins,” 15; Rollins telephone interview. 220. Serge Truffaut, “J. R. Monterose: La face Zen du jazz,” Le Devoir (Montreal), Sep- tember 3, 1988, C3; Lehman, “Interview with Jackie McLean.” 221. Ed Hamilton, “‘Newk’: The Real Sonny Rollins,” Jazz Times, May 16, 2013, http:// jazztimes.com/community/articles/86789- newk- the- real- sonny- rollins (accessed July 24, 2015). 222. B.C., “The Night Watch,” New York Age, November 20, 1948, 15. 223. Postif, “Un ténor soufflant,” 28; Louis Marchiafava and Charles Stephenson, “Inter- view with Milton Larkin,” Houston Oral History Project, Houston Metropolitan Research Center, January 5, 1988, http://digital.houstonlibrary.net/oral- history/milton- larkin.php (accessed December 30, 2018). Although Rollins, in his 1959 interview with Postif, identifies Lewis as “Cryin’ Jimmie Lewis,” he must have been referring to “Baby Face” Lewis, who performed at the 845 Club during the same period as Rollins and also appeared on the same bill as Rollins, with Carl Van Moon, at Bowman’s in November 1948. See “Display Ad: Club 845,” New York Amsterdam News, July 31, 1948, 24; “Display Ad: Tondaleyo’s Melody Room at Bowman’s,” New York Amsterdam News, November 20, 1948, 30; and George Palmer, “Tavern Topics,” New York Amsterdam News, October 16, 1948, 26. Becoming Sonny Rollins 529

224. Two days after Christmas 1948, Rollins was a featured instrumentalist with a band headed by bassist John Stoney that played a holiday show sponsored by the Helvetian social club at Harlem’s Audubon Ballroom—the performance included tap dancing and a male vocal quartet. See Carol Jean Lewis, “Teen Age,” New York Age, December 18, 1948, 12; Lewis, “Teen Age,” New York Age, January 8, 1949, 16; and the 1949 AFM Local 802 directory. On April 19, 1949, Rollins led a sextet that entertained guests at the Top Hats social club’s post- Easter celebration in the Skyline Ballroom at Harlem’s upscale Hotel Theresa. See Carol Jean Lewis, “Teen Age,” New York Age, April 16, 1949, 4. 225. Eugene Holley, interview with Percy Heath for the Smithsonian Jazz Oral History Program, July 23, 2001, 22–22, https://amhistory.si.edu/archives/AC0808_Heath_Percy_ Transcript.pdf (accessed December 30, 2018). 226. John Watson, “Sonny Rollins: Archive Interview,” Jazz Camera, 1974, http://www .jazzcamera.co.uk/index.php?page=sonny- rollins—- archive- interview (accessed December 30, 2018); Eric Nemeyer, “Sonny Rollins,” Jazz Inside, January 2010, 43; Rollins, “Miles in the 1940s,” 52. 227. Berg, “Sonny Rollins,” 14. For more on the 845 Club, see Mark Naison and Bob Gumbs, Before the Fires: An Oral History of African American Life in the Bronx from the 1930s to the 1960s (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), x, 118, 164–65. 228. Steve Race, “The Price of Style,” Musical Express, July 1, 1949, 4; Ian Carr, Miles Davis: The Definitive Biography (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1998), 45, 53; Lewis Porter, Chris DeVito, Yasuhiro Fujioka, Wolf Schmaier, and David Wild, The John Coltrane Reference (New York: Routledge, 2008), 48; August Blume, “Interview with John Coltrane,” in Coltrane on Coltrane: The John Coltrane Interviews, ed. Chris DeVito (Chicago: A Cappella Books, 2010), 25. Rollins and Davis were both listed on the billing for a charity benefit concert at the Royal Roost in Manhattan on February 20, 1949. See Ken Vail, Miles’ Diary: The Life of Miles Davis 1947–1961 (London: Sanctuary Publishing, 1996), 25. 229. Gonzales recalled that he did not begin playing with Rollins until shortly after signing a contract with Capitol Records, which was around the beginning of December 1948. See Babs Gonzales, I Paid My Dues: Good Times—No Bread (East Orange, NJ: Expubi- dence, 1967), 54; and “3 Bips and Bop Join Capital [sic] Plattery Works,” Pittsburgh Courier, December 4, 1948, 21. 230. Gonzales, I Paid My Dues, 48. Gonzales’s address is indicated as 458 West 153rd Street in the 1949 AFM Local 802 directory; the 1948 edition gives his address as 568 West 149th Street. 231. Spellman, “Meet the Artist.” 232. According to Gonzales, between 1948 and 1951 he was only booked for about thirty weeks in total. See Babs Gonzales, Movin’ on Down de Line (Newark, NJ: Expubidence, 1975), 12. Gonzales’s band appeared at the Clique Club around the time the venue opened, on December 9, 1948. See Gonzales, I Paid My Dues, 55; Billy Rowe, “Sarah Vaughan, B. Rich Open New B’Way Clique Club,” Pittsburgh Courier, December 11, 1948, 22; and “Bebop King Meets Swing King,” Atlanta Daily World, January 19, 1949, 3. I have not identified any specific live engagements when Rollins definitely appeared with Gonzales. 233. Spellman, “Meet the Artist”; Nisenson, Open Sky, 34; Ted Panken, “The Big Event,” Down Beat, December 2007, 47; Chicago Jazz, “Sonny Rollins.” 234. Leigh Kamman, interview with Sonny Rollins, April 23, 1984, https://www.you- tube.com/watch?v=u2OBqxJhWLY (accessed December 30, 2018). 235. Babs Gonzales, “Capitolizing,” mx. 3393- 3; and “Professor Bop,” mx. 3994-4 (both on Capitol CR 8812), both rec. January 20, 1949. Gonzales, “Real Crazy,” mx. 3776- 3; “Then You’ll Be Boppin’ Too,” mx. 3777-4; “When Lovers They Lose,” mx. 3778-1; “St. Louis Blues,” mx. 3779- 2 (all on Weird Lullaby, Blue Note 88464 2), all rec. April 27, 1949. 236. Race, “The Price of Style,” 4. 237. Percy Heath considered Rollins to be “the greatest saxophone player on Sugar Hill,” and Jackie McLean remembered that local gigs always “were given to Sonny first,” 530 Givan and “wherever he played he dominated.” See Wyatt, Sonny Rollins, 70; Brower, interview with Jackie McLean, 46; and Lehman, “Interview with Jackie McLean.” 238. Graham, “Sonny Rollins,” 19. 239. On Johnson’s activities during this period, see Joshua Berrett and Louis G. Bourgois III, The Musical World of J. J. Johnson (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2002), 51–83. 240. Lida Baker and David Baker, interview with J. J. Johnson for the Smithsonian Jazz Oral History Program, February 26 and 27, 1994, 72, http://amhistory.si.edu/jazz/ Johnson- JJ/Johnson_JJ_Transcript.pdf (accessed December 30, 2018). 241. “Jay Jay m’a littéralement pris sous son aile” (Postif, “Un ténor soufflant,” 29); Hentoff, “Sonny Rollins,” 15; Schermer, “Sonny Rollins”; J. J. Johnson, “Audobahn,” mx. S36- 130- 1; “Don’t Blame Me,” mx. S36-131; “Goof Square,” mx. 132-2; “Bee Jay,” mx. S36- 133- 3 (all on Mad Bebop, Savoy 2232), all rec. May 11, 1949; Johnson, “Elysee,” mx. JRC20B; “Hi- Lo,” mx. JRC22C; “Fox Hunt,” mx. JRC23D; “Opus V,” mx. JRC21C (all on Trombone by Three, Prestige 7023), all rec. May 26, 1949. 242. Peter Pullman, Wail: The Life of Bud Powell (New York: Peter Pullman, 2012), 84–111. 243. Gil Noble, “Jackie McLean Speaks His Mind,” WABC New York television broad- cast, July 28, 1983, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQ6bsNql6EI (accessed January 25, 2019). Richie Powell (1931–56) was himself an accomplished pianist who played with Rollins during the mid- 1950s in the Max Roach–Clifford Brown Quintet. 244. Ira Gitler, Jazz Masters of the ’40s (New York: Macmillan, 1966), 122–23; Ansell, Sugar Free Saxophone, 8–9; Rollins, “The Power of Music,” 23. 245. “A real genius,” from Gitler, “Sonny Rollins Down Beat Interview”; “intense per- son,” from Lydon, “Sonny Rollins in Conversation”; “was only into,” from Berg, “Sonny Rollins,” 14. 246. Ria, “On the Beat with RIA,” New York Age, August 6, 1949, 18. 247. Pullman, Wail, 112–13. 248. Ibid., 121–23. 249. Bud Powell, “Bouncing with Bud,” mx. BN360-2; “Wail,” mx. BN361-3; “Dance of the Infidels,” mx. BN362- 1; “52nd St. Theme,” mx. BN363- 1 (all on The Amazing Bud Powell, Volume 1, Blue Note 1503), all rec. August 9, 1949. 250. Dutilh, interview with Sonny Rollins; Nisenson, Open Sky, 40. I have not uncovered any reliable information precisely dating Rollins’s 1949 visit to Chicago, but he recalls driving there from Montreal; (1) I have found no record of his presence in New York from September through November 1949; and (2) Gonzales played in Montreal in the early fall of that year. See Gonzales, I Paid My Dues, 61; and Dolores Calvin, “Be- Bop Vocalist Is a Little Hazy on What Is Art,” Philadelphia Tribune, August 6, 1949, 8. Rollins was in New York by early December, when he played for a dance at the Lincoln Square Center. See David Johnson, “Teen Age,” New York Age, December 10, 1949, 12. 251. Ted Panken, “For the 86th Birthday Anniversary of Johnny Griffin, a 1990 Inter- view on WKCR,” Today Is the Question, April 24, 2014, https://tedpanken.wordpress. com/2014/04/24/for- the- 86th- birthday- anniversary- of- johnny- griffin- a- 1990- interview- on- wkcr/ (accessed December 30, 2018). 252. John B. Litweiler, “Sonny Rollins: Chicago, March 4, 1973,” Jazz and Blues 3, no. 4 (1973): 12. 253. Branford Marsalis wryly remarks, “People will say, ‘Well, how do you play like Sonny Rollins?’ I say, ‘Well, I think the first thing you have to do is you have to learn about ten thousand songs.’ As opposed to the fifty songs that are in the fakebook. . . . And then you use it as a vocabulary” (interview with Sonny Rollins, Jazz on 3, BBC Radio, May 5, 2012, https:// soundcloud.com/bbcjazzon3/branford-marsalis- interviews [accessed June 23, 2015]). 254. Rollins quotes “In an Eighteenth-Century Drawing Room” at 0:49 in his solo on “Then You’ll Be Boppin’ Too” with Babs Gonzales, and he references “Tiptoe Through the Tulips” at 0:42 in his solo on the master take (i.e., take 5) of “Bee Jay” with J. J. Johnson. Becoming Sonny Rollins 531

255. Rollins quotes “To a Wild Rose” at 5:17 on “Three Little Words,” Sonny Rollins on Impulse! (Impulse! AS-91), rec. July 8, 1965. See also Sonny Rollins, “To a Wild Rose,” There Will Never Be Another You (Impulse! IA- 9349), rec. June 17, 1965. Upon receiving the Edward MacDowell medal in 2010, Rollins said that “Edward MacDowell’s spirit engaged me many years when, as a child, I was inspired by his composition ‘To a Wild Rose’” (“Sonny Rollins Named 2010 Edward MacDowell Medalist,” Jazz Times, March 3, 2010, https://jazztimes. com/news/sonny- rollins- named- 2010- edward- macdowell- medalist/ [accessed December 30, 2018]). Rollins quotes “Wee” at 5:18 on a live rendition of “Don’t Stop the Carnival,” Tramps, NY, April 12, 1997 (late set), Wolfgangs, online at https://www.wolfgangs.com/ music/sonny- rollins/audio/20022197- 6578.html?tid=65412 (accessed December 30, 2018). He discusses “Wee” in Beuttler, “Saxophone Colossus.” 256. Rollins plays the figure in question at 1:27 on “Hi- Lo”; at 2:12 on “Tenor Madness,” Tenor Madness (Prestige 7047), rec. May 24, 1956; at 0:00 and 5:08 on “Funky Hotel Blues,” Blues for Tomorrow (Riverside 12- 243), rec. June 19, 1957; at 0:41 on “Sonnymoon for Two,” A Night at the Village Vanguard (Blue Note 1581), rec. November 3, 1957; and at 7:56 on “Wheatleigh Hall,” Dizzy Gillespie, Duets (Verve 8260), rec. December 11, 1957. In perhaps the first published press review of Rollins’s playing on disc, Michael Levin wrote that on “Hi- Lo,” “tenor man Rollins . . . solos to no great effect” (“J. J. Johnson’s Boppers,” Down Beat, September 9, 1949, 14). Rollins was recorded at least once or twice outside of com- mercial studios prior to 1950, though such recordings are either not widely accessible or may no longer exist. Carl Smith, an amateur collector, possesses a two- minute recording that is said to document Rollins playing the alto saxophone in Seymour’s Record Mart in Chicago, probably in 1949 (email communication, July 24, 2015). Rollins also told musi- cologist Lewis Porter that well before 1949 he made an amateur recording in a recording booth at a store on 42nd Street (information from Porter, based on his own interview with Rollins). 257. See, for example, the testimonials from musicians such as Wayne Shorter, Pat Metheny, Joe Lovano, Jim Hall, Don Byron, and David S. Ware in Redman, “Newk’s Time,” 48–55, 130. For more on Rollins’s experience in jail, see Nisenson, Open Sky, 40, 49; Gross, All I Had to Do, 216–17; Academy of Achievement, “Sonny Rollins Interview”; and Michael Jackson, “Don’t Stop the Carnival,” Jazzwise, September 2005, 28. 258. Ralph Ellison, “The Golden Age, Time Past,” in Living with Music: Ralph Ellison’s Jazz Writings, ed. Robert G. O’Meally (New York: Modern Library, 2001), 60. 259. For a classic statement in defense of practical intelligence, see Gilbert Ryle, “Know- ing How and Knowing That,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 46 (1945–46): 1–16. 260. Arun Rath, “Sonny Rollins: ‘You Can’t Think and Play at the Same Time,’” All Things Considered, National Public Radio, May 3, 2014, http://www.npr.org/templates/ transcript/transcript.php?storyId=309047616 (accessed December 30, 2018). Among Rol- lins’s practice materials of the early 1960s is a typewritten quotation from William James’s The Principles of Psychology (1890): “We must make automatic and habitual, as early as pos- sible, as many useful actions as we can . . . The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work.” Sonny Rollins Papers, box 3, folder 1. 261. Quoted in Davis, “An Improviser Prepares,” 127. 262. “Tout ce que j’ai appris, je le dois à ce quartier où je suis né” (Genone, “Sonny Rol- lins”). 532 Givan

Works Cited

Private Communications

Bastien, David T. Email communication, July 19, 2018. Rollins, Sonny. Telephone interview, June 2, 2016. Smith, Carl. Email communication, July 24, 2015.

Archival Sources

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Smith, Warren. Interview with Art Taylor. New York Public Library, July 26, 1994, http://www.nypl.org/audiovideo/arthur-taylor- full-interview (accessed December 30, 2018). Sonny Rollins Papers. The New York Public Library Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

Books and Articles

“3 Bips and Bop Join Capital [sic] Plattery Works.” Pittsburgh Courier, December 4, 1948, 21. Adams, Mildred. “New York Rediscovers Summer Nights.” New York Times, July 28, 1935, SM13, SM16. Ake, David. “Jazz Historiography and the Problem of Louis Jordan.” In Jazz Cultures, 42–61. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. Ampene, Kwasi. “One on One: Max Roach in Conversation with Kofi Ghanaba.” American Music Research Center Journal, no. 20 (2011): 1–26. Anderson, Jervis. This Was Harlem: 1900–1950. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1981. “Andy Kirk Loses Right to Live in Exclusive Section.” Pittsburgh Courier, May 9, 1942, 3. Ansell, Derek. Sugar Free Saxophone: The Life and Music of Jackie McLean. London: Northway, 2012. Antonucci, Joseph. “A Visit to Franklin’s Choral Club; Or, An Excursion to the Abode of Musicomaniacs.” In Maroon and Orange: Benjamin Franklin High School Class of June 1949, 42–43. Atkins, Ronald. “Nos. 127–128: Sonny Rollins.” In Modern Jazz: The Essential Records, ed. Max Harrison, Alun Morgan, Ronald Atkins, Michael James, and Jack Cooke, 81–83. London: Aquarius, 1975. Balliett, Whitney. “Sabbatical.” New Yorker, November 18, 1961, 41– 42. Baron, Robert. “‘I Saw Mrs. Saray, Sitting on a Bombalerry’: Ralph Ellison Collects Children’s Folklore.” Children’s Folklore Review, no. 32 (2010): 23–51. Bartley, G. Fitz. “Sonny Rollins in Jamaica.” Daily Gleaner, October 18, 1969, 7 B.C., “The Night Watch,” New York Age, November 20, 1948, 15. “Bebop King Meets Swing King.” Atlanta Daily World, January 19, 1949, 3. Becker, Howard S. Art Worlds, 2nd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008. Belden, Bob. “Jazz Artist of the Year.” Down Beat, August 1997, 18– 25. Benson, Eric. “Sonny Rollins on His Favorite Soundtracks.” Inverted Garden, January 18, 2011. http://invertedgarden.com/inverted- garden/2011/02/exclusive-sonny-rollins-on-his-favorite- soundtracks.html (accessed January 21, 2011). 534 Givan

Berg, Chuck. “Sonny Rollins: The Way Newk Feels.” Down Beat, April 7, 1977, 13–14, 38–39. Berliner, Paul F. Thinking in Jazz: The Infinite Art of Improvisation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Berrett, Joshua, and Louis G. Bourgois III. The Musical World of J. J. Johnson. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2002. Beuttler, Bill. “Saxophone Colossus.” billbeuttler.com, 1993. http://www.billbeuttler.com/saxophone_colossus_10276.htm (accessed December 30, 2018); “Biography.” In Best of Sonny Rollins, 2. Milwaukee: Hal Leonard, 2008. Blancq, Charles. Sonny Rollins: The Journey of a Jazzman. Boston: Twayne, 1983. Blume, August. “Interview with John Coltrane.” In Coltrane on Coltrane: The John Coltrane Interviews, ed. Chris DeVito, 9–30. Chicago: A Cappella Books, 2010. Blumenthal, Bob. “The Bridge: Sonny Rollins Is a Tenor for All Times.” Rolling Stone, July 12, 1979, 57–62. ______. Saxophone Colossus: A Portrait of Sonny Rollins. New York: Abrams, 2010. “Bowman’s Melody Room.” New York Age, September 24, 1949, 20. Braggs, Rashida K. Jazz Diasporas: Race, Music, and Migration in Post- World War II Paris. Oakland: University of California Press, 2016. Braunginn, Steve, and Jane Reynolds. “Sonny Rollins.” Jazz Improv, September 2007, 20–25. Broecking, Christian. Sonny Rollins: Improvisation und Protest: Interviews. Berlin: Broecking Verlag, 2010. Brooks, B. Marian, and Harry A. Brown. Music Education in the Elementary School. New York: American Book Company, 1946. Burrows, Raymond, and Bessie Carroll Redmond. Symphony Themes. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1942. ______. Concerto Themes. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1951. Buskirk, Dan. “Q&A with Sonny Rollins, Living Legend of Jazz.” http://www.phawker.com/2009/09/25/qa-with-sonny- rollins-living-legend-of-jazz/ (accessed December 30, 2018). Calvin, Dolores. “Be-Bop Vocalist Is a Little Hazy on What Is Art.” Philadelphia Tribune, August 6, 1949, 8. Carr, Ian. Miles Davis: The Definitive Biography. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1998. Cerulli, Dom. “Theodore Walter Rollins: Sonny Believes He Can Accomplish Much More Than He Has to Date.” Down Beat, July 10, 1958, 16–17. Charnas, Dan. The Big Payback: The History of the Business of Hip-Hop. New York: New American Library, 2010. Cheatham, Adolphus “Doc.” I Guess I’ll Get the Papers and Go Home, ed. Alyn Shipton. London: Cassell, 1996. Chicago Jazz. “Sonny Rollins.” Chicago Jazz Magazine, August 27, 2008. http://www.chicagojazz.com/magazine/sonny-rollins- 147.html (accessed July 6, 2015). Becoming Sonny Rollins 535

Chilton, John. The Song of the Hawk: The Life and Recordings of Coleman Hawkins. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990. ______. Let the Good Times Roll: The Story of Louis Jordan and His Music. London: Quartet Books, 1992. Chinen, Nate. “Down from the Mountain to Warm Up and Shine.” New York Times, August 29, 2006, E5. “Church Leader, Scholar Dies.” New York Amsterdam News, March 28, 1942, 22. Cioe, Crispin. “Sonny Rollins: I’m Still Reaching.” High Fidelity 33 (May 1983): 76–78, 90. Coss, Bill. “The Return of Sonny Rollins.” Down Beat, January 4, 1962, 13–14. Cox, Edna R. “People Worth Knowing.” Utica Observer Dispatch, August 11, 1957, 6B. Crane, Jason. “The Jazz Session #403: Sonny Rollins,” September 10, 2012. http://thejazzsession.com/2012/09/10/the-jazz-session- 403-sonny-rollins/ (accessed July 3, 2015). “Creator of ‘Be Bop’ Objects to Name and Changes in His Style.” Chicago Defender, March 27, 1948. Crouch, Stanley. “The Colossus: Sonny Rollins on the Bandstand.” New Yorker, May 9, 2005, 64–71. Davis, Francis. “An Improviser Prepares.” In In the Moment: Jazz in the 1980s, 117–32. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Davis, Miles, with Quincy Troupe. Miles: The Autobiography. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989. Dennison, Christopher. “Primary Sources: An Examination of Ira Gitler’s Swing to Bop and Oral History’s Role in the Story of Bebop.” MA thesis, Rutgers University, 2015. DeVeaux, Scott. The Birth of Bebop: A Social and Musical History. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. “Display Ad.” New York Amsterdam News, October 14, 1939, 7. “Display Ad: Andy Brown and Adolphus (Doc) Cheatham.” Metronome, August 1945, 34. “Display Ad: Club 845.” New York Amsterdam News, July 31, 1948, 24. “Display Ad: Joe Napoleon.” Metronome, January 1945, 36. “Display Ad: Tondaleyo’s Melody Room at Bowman’s.” New York Amsterdam News, November 20, 1948, 30. “Display Ad: Walter ‘Foots’ Thomas.” Metronome, January 1945, 36. Dookhan, Isaac. A History of the Virgin Islands of the United States. Kingston: Canoe Press, 1994. Drott, Eric. “Fraudulence and the Gift Economy of Music.” Journal of Music Theory 54, no. 1 (2010): 61–74. “Drs. Kenneth and Mamie Clark—555.” While We Are Still Here. http://www.whilewearestillhere.org/drs.-kenneth-and-mamie- clark.html (accessed December 30, 2018). Eldridge, Michael. “Helan Går Dey.” Working for the Yankee Dollar. https://yankeedollar.wordpress.com/2011/02/12/helan-gar- dey/ (accessed July 3, 2015). 536 Givan

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Reder, Alan, and John Baxter. Listen to This! Leading Musicians Recommend Their Favorite Recordings. New York: Hyperion, 1999. Redman, Joshua. “Newk’s Time.” Jazz Times, June 2005, 46–55, 130. Reed, Ishmael. “Sonny Rollins: Three Takes.” In Mixing it Up: Taking on the Media Bullies and Other Reflections, 63–88. New York: Da Capo Press, 2008. Reich, Howard. “Storytelling by Sax: After 4 Decades Fans Still Flock to Sonny Rollins’ Riveting Tenor Horn.” Chicago Tribune, March 29, 1992. http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1992-03- 29/entertainment/9201290071_1_sonny-rollins-jazz-life- coleman-hawkins (accessed December 30, 2018). Ria. “On the Beat with RIA.” New York Age, August 6, 1949, 18. Ringgold, Faith. We Flew over the Bridge: The Memoirs of Faith Ringgold. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005. Rodriguez, Juan. “The Improvisational Virtuoso.” Montreal Gazette, June 27, 2010, A14. Rollins, Sonny. “The Power of Music.” Crescendo, April 1965, 22–23, 31. ______. “Any Questions.” Observer, October 17, 1993, D45. ______. “On Coleman Hawkins.” Down Beat, July 2004, 15. ______. “Jackie McLean.” Jazz Times, March 2007. http://jazztimes.com/articles/25491-jackie-mclean (accessed December 30, 2018). ______. “Miles in the 1940s and Early 1950s.” In Miles Davis: The Complete Illustrated History, 52–54. Minneapolis: Voyageur Press, 2012. Rollins, Sonny, with Ed Enright. “The Tenors of My Time.” Down Beat, July 1999, 24–28. Rosenthal, David H. Hard Bop: Jazz and Black Music 1955–1965. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Rothstein, Richard. The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America. New York: Liveright, 2017. Rowe, Billy. “Sarah Vaughan, B. Rich Open New B’Way Clique Club.” Pittsburgh Courier, December 11, 1948, 22. Russell, Ross. “Bebop.” In The Art of Jazz: Essays in the Nature and Development of Jazz, ed. Martin Williams, 187–214. New York: Oxford University Press, 1959. Ryle, Gilbert. “Knowing How and Knowing That.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 46 (1945–46): 1–16. Sandel, Michael J. What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012. Sanjek, Russell, and David Sanjek. Pennies from Heaven: The American Popular Music Business in the Twentieth Century. New York: Da Capo Press, 1996. Santoro, Gene. “The Edgy Optimist.” American Scholar, Winter 2007, 125–29. Satter, Beryl. Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban America. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2009. 544 Givan

Sauer, Patrick. “The Year of Jackie Robinson’s Mutual Love Affair with Montreal.” Smithsonian.com. http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/year-jackie- robinsons-mutual-love-affair-montreal-180954878/?no-ist (accessed December 30, 2018). “Saxophone Colossus Sonny Rollins on Why He Hasn’t Hit His Peak Yet.” International Musician, May 1, 2009. https://internationalmusician.org/saxophone-colossus-sonny- rollins-on-why-he-hasnt-hit-his-peak-yet/ (accessed December 30, 2018). Scheinin, Richard. “So Much to Love about Sonny Rollins: Legendary Saxophonist Headlines S.F. Jazz Fest.” San Jose Mercury News, October 12, 2006, AE4. Scherman, Tony. “A Jazz Griot with a Sense of Civility.” New York Times, January 23, 1994, 28–29. Schermer, Victor L. “Sonny Rollins: Hardy Perennial.” All About Jazz, November 28, 2006. http://www.allaboutjazz.com/sonny- rollins-hardy-perennial-sonny-rollins-by-victor-l-schermer.php (accessed December 30, 2018). Schiffman, Jack. Harlem Heyday. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1984. “School Notes: Students Present Cantata.” New York Age, May 12, 1945, 5. Scott, Allen. Jazz Educated, Man. Washington, DC: American International Publishers, 1973. Seltzer, George. Music Matters: The Performer and the American Federation of Musicians. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1989. Shattuck, Kathryn. “Come On In: It’s the Big Chill of ’36: Show Celebrates Giant Depression-Era Pools That Cool New York.” New York Times, August 14, 2006, E1, E7. Sidran, Ben. “Sonny Rollins.” In Talking Jazz: An Oral History, 2nd ed., 171–82. New York: Da Capo Press, 1995. Sloboda, John A. “The Acquisition of Musical Performance Expertise: Deconstructing the ‘Talent’ Account of Individual Differences in Musical Expressivity.” In The Road to Excellence: The Acquisition of Expert Performance in the Arts and Sciences, Sports and Games, ed. K. Anders Ericsson, 107–26. New York: Psychology Press, 2014. Smith, Beverly. “Harlem: The Negro City.” New York Herald Tribune, February 11, 1930, 8. “Sonny Rollins de A à Z.” Jazz Magazine, May 2001, 44–45. “Sonny Rollins Discography.” http://www.jazzdisco.org/sonny- rollins/discography/ (accessed December 30, 2018). “Sonny Rollins Named 2010 Edward MacDowell Medalist.” Jazz Times, March 3, 2010. https://jazztimes.com/news/sonny- rollins-named-2010-edward-macdowell-medalist/ (accessed December 30, 2018). Southall, Ashley. “Mourning the Loss of Another Beacon of Old Harlem.” New York Times, April 4, 2018, A22. Becoming Sonny Rollins 545

Spellman, A. B. Four Lives in the Bebop Business. New York: Limelight Editions, 1966. Spencer, Scott. “The Titan of Jazz.” Rolling Stone, December 13, 1990, 146–56, 230. Steigman, Benjamin M. Accent on Talent: New York’s High School of Music and Art. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1964. Stern, Chip. “Sonny Rollins: The Cross and the Rose.” In The Jazz Musician, ed. Mark Rowland and Tony Scherman, 203–29. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994. Stewart, Jesse. “No Boundary Line to Art: ‘Bebop’ as Afro- Modernist Discourse.” American Music 29, no. 3 (2011): 332–52. Stewart, Zan. “On Sonny’s Side of the Street.” Los Angeles Times, September 16, 1990, N60–61, 71. “Stitt Hi Finishes a Year’s Work.” New York Amsterdam News, June 26, 1948, 16. Stowe, David W. Swing Changes: Big Band Jazz in New Deal America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994. “Students Paint Mural on Music for Exhibit.” New York Amsterdam News, June 2, 1945, 9. “Sugar Hill: All Harlem Looks Up to ‘Folks on the Hill.’” Ebony 11, no. 1 (November 1946): 5–11. Taborn, Karen F. Walking Harlem: The Ultimate Guide to the Cultural Capital of Black America. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2018. Taylor, Arthur. Notes and Tones: Musician-to-Musician Interviews, 2nd ed. New York: Da Capo Press, 1993. Truffaut, Serge. “J. R. Monterose: La Face Zen du Jazz.” Le Devoir (Montreal), September 3, 1988, C3. Ulanov, Barry, George T. Simon, and Leonard Feather. “Charlie Parker’s Ri Bop Boys (1946).” In The Charlie Parker Companion, ed. Carl Woideck, 241–42. New York: Schirmer, 1998. Untitled anonymous news item. New York Amsterdam News, November 25, 1944, 4. Urban, Greg. Metaculture: How Culture Moves through the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Vail, Ken. Miles’ Diary: The Life of Miles Davis 1947–1961. London: Sanctuary Publishing, 1996. van der Bliek, Rob. “Blue Note.” In The Thelonious Monk Reader, ed. Rob van der Bliek, 26–27. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Wagner, Edyth Elizabeth. “Raymond Burrows and His Contributions to Music Education.” DMA diss., University of Southern California, 1968. Wallace, Michele. Invisibility Blues, 2nd ed. London: Verso, 2008. Waller, Maurice, and Anthony Calabrese. Fats Waller. New York: Schirmer, 1977. Washington, Eric K. “The Kinghaven: A Faded Gem of Harlem’s Sugar Hill.” Examiner.com, April 27, 2013. 546 Givan

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Radio

Dutilh, Alex. Interview with Sonny Rollins for France Musique Radio, December 2013. https://soundcloud.com/france- musique/sonny-rollins-itw-brute-open (accessed June 19, 2015). Dye, David. “Sonny Rollins: Elder Statesman of Jazz.” National Public Radio, July 26, 2007. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1225 9390 (accessed December 30, 2018). Becoming Sonny Rollins 547

Hurst, Roy. “A Salute to Sonny Rollins on His 75th Birthday.” News and Notes, National Public Radio, September 21, 2005. http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?stor yId=4857252 (accessed December 30, 2018). Jackson, Josh. Interview with Sonny Rollins. “The Checkout.” WBGO Radio, May 3, 2011. http://www.wbgo.org/checkoutjazz/the-primitive-sonny- rollins (accessed July 21, 2015). Jones, Bob. and Jenni Vinson Trejo. Interview with Sonny Rollins, 1440 KEYS Radio, Corpus Christi, Texas. http://jvteditorials.com/sonnyrollins.htm (accessed July 12, 2006). Lydon, Christopher. “Sonny Rollins in Conversation.” Radio Open Source, April 7, 2007. http://radioopensource.org/sonny- rollins-in-conversation/ (accessed July 3, 2015). Marsalis, Branford. Interview with Sonny Rollins. Jazz on 3, BBC Radio, May 5, 2012. https://soundcloud.com/bbcjazzon3/branford-marsalis- interviews (accessed June 23, 2015). Rath, Arun. “Sonny Rollins: ‘You Can’t Think and Play at the Same Time.’” All Things Considered, National Public Radio, May 3, 2014. http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?stor yId=309047616 (accessed December 30, 2018). Reney, Tom. Interview with Gary Giddins. New England Public Radio, August 17, 2010. https://soundcloud.com/newenglandpublicradio/gary- giddins-interview-with-tom-reney-about-sonny-rollins-jazz-a- la-mode (accessed December 30, 2018).

Videography

Bach, Jean, dir. A Great Day in Harlem. HVE 3035, 2005. Brown, Jeffrey. “Extended Interview: Sonny Rollins.” PBS NewsHour, November 29, 2011. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CXS4R8hyq8 (accessed December 30, 2018). Hylkema, Hans, and Olaf van Paassen, dir. Sonny Rollins: Morgen Speel Ik Beter, NPO 2 Television, October 23, 2014. http://programma.ntr.nl/238/NTR/detail/aflevering/6000015 867/Het-Uur-van-de-Wolf:-Sonny-Rollins---Morgen-speel-ik- beter (accessed July 3, 2015). Kamman, Leigh. Interview with Sonny Rollins, April 23, 1984. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2OBqxJhWLY (accessed December 30, 2018). “Kennedy Center Honors for Sonny Rollins,” December 29, 2011. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hyVvPsKmhiQ (accessed December 30, 2018). 548 Givan

Mugge, Robert, dir. Sonny Rollins: Saxophone Colossus. Winstar WHE 73025, 1998. Noble, Gil. “Jackie McLean Speaks His Mind.” WABC New York television broadcast, July 28, 1983. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQ6bsNql6EI (accessed January 25, 2019). Primack, Bret. “Sonny Rollins Remembers Ben Webster, Pres, and Hawk,” 2008. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDF8xC6Ats8 (accessed December 30, 2018). “Sonny Rollins in Sweden (1959).” Jazz Icons: Series 3 Bonus Disc. Reelin’ in the Years Productions, 2008. “Sonny Rollins Lifetime Achievement Award from the Jazz Foundation of America.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4FWCsyxU_k (accessed December 30, 2018). “Sonny Rollins on Pres.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EFVqmUtitR8 (accessed December 30, 2018). Sonny Rollins Podcast. “Interview: Sonny’s Sister Gloria,” March 6, 2008. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CDf-tyD0mg (accessed July 3, 2015). ______. “Radio and the Movies.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=veo1S5wsddA (accessed December 30, 2018). ______. “Thelonious and Theodore.” http://www.sonnyrollins.com (accessed June 3, 2007). Spellman, A. B. “Meet the Artist—New Mexico Jazz Festival, 2007.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MceyPVOdsHw (accessed December 30, 2018).

Discography

Byas, Don. “How High the Moon.” Savoy 597. Mx. S5846. Rec. November 26, 1945. Cole, Cozy. “I Don’t Stand a Ghost of a Chance.” Continental C- 6000. Mx. S-3277. Rec. November 14, 1944. Gillespie, Dizzy. “Wheatleigh Hall.” Duets. Verve 8260. Rec. December 11, 1957. Gonzales, Babs. “Capitolizing.” Capitol CR 8812. Mx. 3393-3. Rec. January 20, 1949. ______. “Professor Bop.” Capitol CR 8812. Mx. 3994-4. Rec. January 20, 1949. ______. “Real Crazy.” Mx. 3776-3. Weird Lullaby. Blue Note 88464 2. Rec. April 27, 1949. ______. “Then You’ll Be Boppin’ Too.” Mx. 3777-4. Weird Lullaby. Blue Note 88464 2. Rec. April 27, 1949. ______. “When Lovers They Lose.” Mx. 3778-1. Weird Lullaby. Blue Note 88464 2. Rec. April 27, 1949. Becoming Sonny Rollins 549

______. “St. Louis Blues.” Mx. 3779-2. Weird Lullaby. Blue Note 88464 2. Rec. April 27, 1949. Hawkins, Coleman. “Body and Soul.” Bluebird B-10253. Mx. BS 042936. Rec. October 11, 1939. ______. “Sweet Lorraine.” Signature 90001. Mx. T 19006. Rec. December 23, 1943. ______. “The Man I Love.” Signature 90001mx. 19005. Rec. December 23, 1943. ______. “Flyin’ Hawk.” JDavis 8250. Rec. October 19, 1944. ______. “Drifting on a Reed.” JDavis 8250. Rec. October 19, 1944. ______. “Stuffy.” Capitol 205. Mx. CAP 576-T-6-A. Rec. February 23, 1945. ______. “It’s the Talk of the Town.” Capitol 205. Mx. CAP 596- 3A. Rec. March 9, 1945. Johnson, J. J. “Audobahn.” Mad Bebop. Savoy 2232. Mx. S36-130-1. Rec. May 11, 1949. ______. “Don’t Blame Me.” Mad Bebop. Savoy 2232. Mx. S36-131. Rec. May 11, 1949. ______. “Goof Square.” Mad Bebop. Savoy 2232. Mx. 132-2. Rec. May 11, 1949. ______. “Bee Jay.” Mad Bebop. Savoy 2232. Mx. S36-133-3. Rec. May 11, 1949. ______. “Elysee.” Trombone by Three. Prestige 7023. Mx. JRC20B. Rec. May 26, 1949. ______. “Hi-Lo.” Trombone by Three. Prestige 7023. Mx. JRC22C. Rec. May 26, 1949. ______. “Fox Hunt.” Trombone by Three. Prestige 7023. Mx. JRC23D. Rec. May 26, 1949. ______. “Opus V.” Trombone by Three. Prestige 7023. Mx. JRC21C. Rec. May 26, 1949. Jordan, Louis. “Knock Me a Kiss.” Decca 8593. Mx. 93786. Rec. November 15, 1941. ______. “I’m Gonna Move to the Outskirts of Town.” Decca 8593. Mx. 93824. Rec. November 22, 1941. ______. “It’s a Low Down Dirty Shame.” Decca 8638 Mx. 71133. Rec. July 21, 1942. ______. “Five Guys Named Moe.” Decca 8653. Mx. 71132. Rec. July 21, 1942. Parker, Charlie. “Ko-Ko.” Savoy 597. Mx. S5853-2. Rec. November 26, 1945. ______. “Another Hair Do.” Savoy 961. Mx. D830-3. Rec. December 21, 1947. Powell, Bud. “Bouncing with Bud.” mx. BN360-2. The Amazing Bud Powell, Volume 1 (Blue Note 1503). Rec. August 9, 1949. ______. “Wail.” The Amazing Bud Powell, Volume 1. Blue Note 1503. Mx. BN361-3. Rec. August 9, 1949. ______. “Dance of the Infidels.” The Amazing Bud Powell, Volume 1. Blue Note 1503. Mx. BN362-1. Rec. August 9, 1949. 550 Givan

______. “52nd St. Theme.” The Amazing Bud Powell, Volume 1. Blue Note 1503. Mx. BN363-1. Rec. August 9, 1949. Rollins, Sonny. “Tenor Madness.” Tenor Madness. Prestige 7047. Rec. May 24, 1956. ______. “Funky Hotel Blues.” Blues for Tomorrow. Riverside 12- 243. Rec. June 19, 1957. ______. “Sonnymoon for Two.” A Night at the Village Vanguard. Blue Note 1581. Rec. November 3, 1957. ______. “Theme from Pathétique Symphony.” Sonny Rollins Plays. Period PLP 1204. Rec. November 4, 1957. ______. “Three Little Words.” Sonny Rollins on Impulse! Impulse! AS-91. Rec. July 8, 1965. ______. “To a Wild Rose.” There Will Never Be Another You. Impulse! IA-9349. Rec. June 17, 1965. ______. “Don’t Stop the Carnival.” Tramps, NY (late set). Wolfgangs. Rec. April 12, 1997. https://www.wolfgangs.com/music/sonny- rollins/audio/20022197-6578.html?tid=65412 (accessed December 30, 2018). Rollins, Sonny, and Don Cherry. “52nd Street Theme.” The Complete 1963 Copenhagen Concert. Jazz Lips 767. Rec. January 15, 1963. Young, Lester. “Afternoon of a Basie-Ite.” Keynote 604. Mx. HL3-2. Rec. December 28, 1943.