Bridging Sonny Rollins

“I just happened to be on Delancey Street one day and I looked up and saw these steps going up to the Williamsburg Bridge [which connects Manhattan and Brooklyn]. So I walked up the steps and here was this big empty space and nobody there. So I walked across the bridge and I said to myself, "Wow! 

I can come up here and practice. There's nobody here!" Very few people were walking across the bridge, even when I began going out there regularly. A few people used to go across as if for exercise, but not many.

It was a beautiful, perfect place. I had the view of the river and all the boats going back and forth and I was able to be on a part of the walkway where I wasn't visible to the subway trains and traffic which were crossing. I felt like it was God-sent. So I said, "Wow! This is it!" So I went. I could blow as loud as I wanted. It was exactly what I wanted.

I brought a few musicians up there just to show them the spot. [Soprano saxophonist] Steve Lacy came up there. I think Jackie [McLean]. Nobody went up there a lot, but it became my studio.”

- Sonny Rollins

“We do practice on a bridge. … We don't have any particular material that we're rehearsing, just whatever comes to mind. We're just trying to find out about ourselves musically. We practice fingering, intonation, scales, intervals, everything. I've never seen anyone as in love with the tenor saxophone as Sonny is. He's the best player of that instrument I've ever seen.”

- Steve Lacy

After a two year absence from the Jazz scene, The Bridge wasSonny Rollins’ first album when he joined RCA Records in 1961. 

The format of the quartet on this album involves a guitar with bass and drums and it served to transition Sonny away from the hard bop he was so closely associated with throughout the 1950s and move him toward a looser and lighter atmosphere in which he was the featured soloist with accompaniment.

Even more shocking at the time was Sonny's choice of guitarists, Jim Hall, who was usually associated with fewer notes, open spaces and quietude. 

But all of this - the two year hiatus, the group’s framework, the choice of Hall as the guitarist - was thoughtfully designed to help bring Sonny to his next level of development in his “world of improvisation.”

Here’s more about this period in the career of Sonny Rollins from Eric Nisenson’s Open Sky: Sonny Rollins and His World of Interpretation [2000]. 

“In late 1961, after two years of intense work, Sonny decided it was time to return to the scene. He felt that he was playing with more confidence. In addition, he felt more certain of his direction, with respect to both his technical mastery of his horn, and his musical direction as a player and composer.

Alfred Lion's fear that Sonny would be "forgotten" if he stayed away too long turned out to be unfounded. If anything, Sonny's withdrawal from the scene had added to his renown and increased the public's interest in him. There had been published a story about his practicing on the bridge, and by now it had become a jazz legend. His return excited people.

Sonny had had plenty of time to think about what kind of group he wanted. He put together a quartet, instead of the trios he had been playing with for most of the late 1950s. The bassist was Bob Cranshaw, who had played in one of Sonny's trios a few years earlier. Cranshaw would become a favorite Rollins sideman for decades, playing in various groups with him right up until the present.

Cranshaw, who was two years younger than Sonny, was born in Evan-ston, Illinois, and first gained notice playing in the Chicago jazz scene. He came to New York in 1960, where he joined a band called MJT+3 until he hooked up with Sonny and through him gained notice as one of the better young bassists on the scene.

The drummer for Sonny's new group was either H. T. Saunders or Ben Riley (as usual, Sonny had a hard time finding the right drummer).

As the fourth member of the quartet, Sonny decided to use a guitar player—a great one: Jim Hall.

Many in the jazz world were surprised that Sonny had chosen Hall; some even questioned his choice because Jim Hall was white. Sonny described his reasons:

Number one, because I wanted a more airy sound. I wanted a little more freedom. A piano can be constricting. That's why I wanted a guitar, because I felt that a guitar was not as constricting as a piano.

I had met Jim a couple of times before, when I was on the West Coast and he was with Chico Hamilton. Then I saw him in New York with Jimmy Giuftre. I admired him and he was no slouch musician, you know, I thought he was a good, good musician. I love Jim Hall.

Hall had been born in the same year as Sonny, 1930, in Buffalo, New York. He moved to Los Angeles early on and became associated with the West Coast jazz scene. He first gained fame for playing in Chico Hamilton's chamber jazz quintet and a little later joined another chamber jazz group, the wonderful Jimmy Giuffre Three (which for a while consisted of Giuffre's reeds, Bob Brookmeyer on trombone, and Hall—no rhythm section). His resume made Hall a surprising choice for playing with Sonny, at least at first glance. But this view was merely an attempt by writers, and some fans, to put musicians and music into pat categories.

Sonny's choice of Hall made a lot of musical sense. Hall's trademark is his rounded, luminous tone, which makes his playing instantly recognizable. At its best, his playing is lean, subtle, sinuously lyrical, full of nuance and quiet charm, almost always inventive, and emotionally profound. If this sounds as if his playing was a great contrast to Sonny's bravura tenor, it was. Many jazz groups have included this kind of contrast; think of Miles Davis's reticent sparseness and angular lyricism, and John Coltrane's wailing outpour of notes. Miles understood the power of such a pairing, having offered a similar contrast to Bird when he was in Parker's quintet during the 1940s.

Hall had admired Sonny for a long time and jumped at the chance to play with the tenorman:

I first met Sonny at a jam session with Clifford Brown and Richie Powell. They helped carry in my equipment from the taxicab. I loved the [Brown-Roach] group. I knew Sonny a bit. I didn't understand what a great player he was, although I remember liking his playing a lot. Actually, I always preferred his playing to that of John Coltrane. I thought it had more components to it. And as much as I admire John Coltrane, there was always something slightly one-dimensional about his playing. And I especially loved Sonny's sense of humor.

Hall was surprised to learn that Sonny wanted to hire him:

I had been working with Jimmy Giuffre when John Lewis called me while I was in California and told me to come to New York, that there were a lot of things for me to do there. So I sublet [pianist] Dick Katz's apartment in the Village. One day I got a handwritten note in my mailbox saying, "Dear Jim, I want to talk to you about music," and it was signed by Sonny Rollins. That was typical Sonny Rollins.

So eventually we made an appointment. When Sonny came over to my apartment, he was carrying a little plastic bag, which he put down on the table. So we sat down facing each other and he started talking to me. And he was offering me a job with his quartet. And then the bag started to kind of wiggle. So I said, "Sonny, what's in the bag?" He said, "We'll talk about that later."

I thought about it later—this guy had offered me probably the most important job of my life, and he is so incredibly dignified and gifted, and his bag is wiggling away. After he offered me the job, he opened the bag and smiled; there was a lizard or chameleon in it. "Look at this!" he said. "Isn't it great?"

After he had joined the group, Jim Hall's respect for Sonny as a musician grew even deeper. He found playing with Sonny a challenge:

I was discovering every night just how great a player he is and then I had to play a solo after his. So it was kind of frightening. It really got my attention. I was practicing a lot back then. Boy, I was practicing a lot. I was also working on a John Coltrane type of thing, on the guitar, the kind of arpeggiated things that Coltrane would do.

We did rehearse a lot, but as I recall, the rehearsal had more to do with getting sensitized to one another than anything else, because he's liable to do anything on the bandstand. It had nothing to do with what we rehearsed, although we did have a few things that we were supposed to do together.

Boy, there were always lots of surprises on the bandstand, which was part of the charm of it. For example, we would be in the middle of a tune, romping along, and then suddenly he would be playing and somehow brought us to completely stop, just by the strength of his playing. He was such a strong player that he could stop us like stopping a freight train, just by playing something. Then he would play alone for a while and then he would bring us back in, maybe at a different tempo. So that was a big influence on me, all that stuff.

I played at the Apollo with Sonny and it was great fun. We in the rhythm section would start off playing onstage and then Sonny would come stalking out from the wings and everybody would go crazy. We would milk that a little bit. And the audience would get on me, which was flattering, and Sonny would be standing in front of me sometimes, saying, "Don't let them get you." But that audience would get on everybody.

Sonny hired Jim Hall for reasons beyond his musical ability:

I wanted to have an integrated band. I definitely wanted to make a statement by having an integrated band. I took a lot of flack for it, a lot of flack. There was one well-known black writer who gave me a lot of grief for hiring Jim. For a long time I couldn't understand it. But then I looked back and said, "These guys feel that since I did The Freedom Suite I would feel the way that they did about this stuff. Before that I wrote "Airegin." And I played "The House I Live In" and the Negro National Anthem at the end of it. This was very race-conscious stuff! So I guess the militant end of the black community-jazz community felt betrayed by me. I couldn't understand this. You know, Miles's first band was made up almost completely with white guys! Miles was always hiring white guys—Bill Evans, Lee Konitz, Gil Evans. So at first I was really befuddled about why they would come down on me. I figured they thought I was even more of a black nationalist than these other guys, like Miles. But you cannot say that it is all right to be a racist as long as it's against white people.

Despite the flack that Sonny received, this quartet was a superb unit. The contrast between Hall's lyrical guitar and Sonny's speechlike phrasing gave the group a sound all of its own. Hall was able to keep pace with Sonny even at the fastest of tempos (although he does not like playing very fast), and he was sensitive enough to stay constantly tuned to Sonny's wavelength no matter what new corner Sonny turned. Sonny was experimenting with chugging tempos, or at times playing completely out of tempo as a group and then at the right moment once again playing with the original tempo. Doing this virtually required his sidemen to have ESP in order to anticipate his every spontaneous move. This type of playing indicates the direction of Sonny's music—toward a freer conception, in terms of both the group and his own playing.

Sonny's withdrawal from the scene and the mystique that had arisen concerning his lonely jaunts on the Williamsburg Bridge gave rise to a great deal of interest when he finally returned. Sonny now found himself in demand by several record labels. The best offer was from RCA Victor. For the first time, Sonny was signed to a major label rather than an independent. He was given an advance of approximately $90,000, which even today is extraordinary for a jazzman. It was not just the large advance that made the deal with RCA so attractive: a major company could both back more costly projects and market albums far more successfully than an independent jazz label such as Blue Note or Riverside. But there were aspects of the deal that made Sonny uncomfortable:

After they signed me, RCA didn't know what to do with me. Part of the reason they signed me was because of the bridge and the romantic legend, and that was about it. It was a tremendous thing for these guys in the business: "We can really use this and use this guy. Wow, he's going to make some money for us!"

Much to his credit, Sonny did not deviate from his musical agenda, despite RCAfc commercial concerns; in fact, he now entered the most avant-garde period of his entire career. Much of the music Sonny recorded for RCA was hardly the stuff of radio play and mass consumption.

In January 1962, Sonny made his first album since Sonny Rollins and the Contemporary Leaders in 1958. Titled, naturally, The Bridge, it was the most traditional of all his RCA albums, a straight-ahead date with his new group. Although many consider it a great album, it does not compare to what he was playing in live performance with this group, according to those who heard him play then.

The Bridge clearly exhibits the fruits of Sonny's work during his years of withdrawal. He sounds far more confident and certain of his direction than on his previous album, Contemporary Leaders, and his tonal shadings are far more developed. As Loren Schoenberg wrote in the notes for The Complete Sonny Rollins RCA Victor Recordings: "With the slightest variance of pitch and timbre, he can make a 180° turn on a dime."

Sonny's rhythmic conception had advanced, too, during his time "on the bridge." His new rhythmic mastery is most obvious on the album's two up-tempo pieces, both of which he composed: "The Bridge" and "John S." This last tune is not named after the New York Times jazz critic of that time, John S. Wilson, as many have thought. "I used that title because a guy came to me and wanted me to give him lessons. I told him that he should ask Coltrane instead because his approach to playing was much more conventional than mine. So I was thinking about him and me and this was my private code—'John S./ John and Sonny."

In comparing these fast-tempo pieces with similar ones from the 1956 Tour de Force, such as "B. Quick" or "B. Swift," Sonny's rhythmic advances are quite apparent. On the earlier pieces, his ideas are fragmented and thin. Sonny was simply trying to play ridiculously fast, not even attempting the kind of cohesive musical statement he was able to create at medium or slow tempos. His mastery on The Bridge was due to the musical sprung rhythm that he had been working toward for a long time and apparently achieved during his absence from the scene. On The Bridge's fast pieces, Sonny does not seem to be holding on for dear life; he is in full command, improvising with the same sense of logic, design, and melodic inventiveness as at less sizzling tempos. From here on, Sonny's playing at up-tempos brings to mind a man standing on a surfboard, riding a huge, fast-rushing wave. Despite the watery onslaught, he remains standing and triumphant, conquering the forces of nature.

The most emotionally profound piece on The Bridge is Sonny's version of the Billie Holiday classic "God Bless the Child." Sonny had known Holiday, who died in 1959, the same year as his withdrawal from the scene, and he never forgot her:

I was thinking about her the other night, 'cause I was in a cab with her one time, and when the cab stopped short, she almost fell out of her seat. This was not too long before she died. I tried to know her because I was really in love with her, just as a person. I was more of a fan than anything. She gave me her book [her autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues] and she autographed it. I befriended her and she let me accompany her home. It was wonderful to know that Billie Holiday could trust me.

Sonny takes "God Bless the Child" at a mournfully slow tempo; this is some of the most impassioned playing of his career. Perhaps he was recalling the ironic smile on Billie's face when she sang this particular song. Those who believe that Sonny's music is not as emotionally valid and heartfelt as that of anyone in jazz should listen to this track. It is, quite simply, a devastating performance.

The Bridge completely validates Sonny's choice of Jim Hall. Hall's solos seem to glow with warmth, and with a pianist's sense of logic and melodic economy. His ability to select just the right note, made him a perfect complement to Sonny's more garrulous style. This was undoubtedly one of Sonny's greatest groups, comparable in its way to such great jazz combos of the 1960s as the Coltrane quartet and Miles Davis's Hancock-Williams-Carter-Shorter quintet.”