But this month, he has recordings on his mind, since the Prestige label – which most faithfully caught his sound in the 1950s – is celebrating its own 60th birthday by reissuing some of its landmark material. Since the 1970s, when he began to broaden his popular appeal, his records have rarely mirrored the power and imagination of his live shows. Rollins's devotion to the immediacy of performance has always made him indifferent to recording. Ironically, he practises so that he can be spontaneous – able to play instantly anything he thinks or feels in the moment. He is not a frustrated classical musician, but says he has always respected the discipline, rigour and endless practice such music requires. He and his friend and admirer John Coltrane, another saxophone giant whose vision was focused on something far beyond the next gig, used to discuss eastern philosophy and exchange books on the subject.ĭuring his childhood, Rollins's siblings were taught classical music "while I was out playing ball". On the lengthy sabbaticals he took from playing, he devoted himself to solitary practice, studied Zen meditation in Japan, and even withdrew to a monastery in India. Such thinking fits with the more unlikely diversions in Rollins's career. This has it." His plan is to have his rhythm section play with a Native American beat, while he improvises over the top. I hate the word 'spiritual' because it's been so overused, but I've always wanted something beyond the secular in music. I'm interested in the social context of it, too, in Native American culture. It's giving me more ability to express myself, and I'm trying to get my band to feel it. It's not a loose, swinging beat Native American music is solid, not so expansive. It's different to what we know from jazz. "If you've ever heard any Native American music, there's a repetitive sort of a beat to it, but paradoxically it's very freeing. "Let me tell you what I do want to do," Rollins says, warming to his theme. He continues: "Of course, I still want to use everything I've learned, everything I copied from other people, whose shoulders I stood on."Those people include the biggest names in the history of jazz: Thelonious Monk, Rollins's neighbour when he was growing up in Harlem the young Miles Davis, who thought Rollins's improv skills came close to Charlie Parker's and Coleman Hawkins, pioneer of the tenor saxophone. His thoughts unfold as a series of feints and weaves, as full of parentheses and afterthoughts as one of his own improvisations, delivered in a calloused, gravelly tone that echoes the low-end sound of his sax. But if I look back on my career, I've been centred on a narrow – I don't mean that pejoratively – way of playing, a narrow field: bebop and hard bop, all that kind of stuff." Rollins's conversation never takes a straight route. I've been working on music all my life, I'm always working on it. I wouldn't say they're completely different. Well, that's the wrong way to put it, perhaps. But, says Rollins: "I have some new ideas now. The crowds who sell out his concerts months before they happen would doubtless be happy for him to keep doing what he's doing, playing his signature themes – Don't Stop the Carnival, St Thomas – until he drops. He still practises every day at his farmhouse in Germantown, upstate New York, does yoga and watches his diet, but the Rollins I spoke to was also taking stock, thinking it was time for some changes. The biggest star of this year's London Jazz festival, which opens on Friday, Rollins tends to save his loquacity for his saxophone but he recently found time, after a run of American and European concerts, to talk.
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