In the history of jazz, there has never been anyone quite like Sonny Rollins. A living legend who was already on the scene in the late 1940s as jazz was being reinvented through bebop, and at the peak of his career before even turning thirty with his 1957 album Saxophone Colossus, Rollins continued with iron discipline for over fifty years to innovate, experiment, and “invent” sounds never heard before, alternating performance with theoretical and existential reflections. Of all this life, of all this music, the Notebooks—hitherto unpublished—preserve the mental labor behind it: the reflections, doubts, impressions, poems, and improvisations. Compiled fitfully and seemingly without order between 1957 and 2010, the journals gathered here nevertheless yield a portrait of remarkable overall coherence, in which Rollins’s instrumental practice is repeatedly unpacked and analyzed alongside broader musings on musical theory. Rollins’s style is direct and candid, at times obscure—the product of a volcanic mind ranging from Hindu philosophy and esotericism to American politics, environmentalism, and human anatomy. Yet its beating heart is always the music itself, both ancient and contemporary, including that of figures like Thelonious Monk or the “master” Miles Davis. The Notebooks of Sonny Rollins are not only an invaluable handbook for musicians, but key access to the workshop of a twentieth-century artistic pioneer—a figure who remains in some ways mysterious and elusive even after releasing over 60 albums, having left an indelible mark on the history of jazz and music as a whole. The artistic, political, and human testament of one of the greatest saxophonists of all time.
Translated by Marco Bertoli
With Claudio Fasoli, Veniero Rizzardi e Luciano Linzi
