THE NOTEBOOKS OF SONNY ROLLINS, edited by Sam V.H. Reese.
It is possible to imagine the jazz musician Sonny Rollins’s life as a novel, pitched between realism and surrealism in the manner of Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man.” The settings would include Harlem, where Rollins grew up poor in the 1930s and ’40s, and the decadence of clubland in New York City and Chicago at the century’s midpoint, when he was a musical prodigy. A chapter might linger on the recording of his landmark 1957 album “Saxophone Colossus.”
He began to practice alone, often at night, on the Williamsburg Bridge. A novelist might view this scene from avian heights, swooping down the East River, in and out of his grainy, Dopplered wail. As Rollins aged, accolades began to settle on his head and shoulders the way pigeons do on statues in the Piazza San Marco in Venice. Fame and honor were not enough to assuage his fears when he and his wife bought a house in upstate New York; a Black man and a white woman couldn’t live anywhere too isolated because interracial marriage still drew outrage.
The Williamsburg Bridge material might make up this novel’s crucial chapter. (I wish one of the two gifted drummers in my apartment building would practice there, too, instead of across the breezeway. New York musicians and their neighbors: a small book crying out to be written, with sympathy for both sides.) Rollins began practicing there in 1960, not long after he commenced a two-year sabbatical from performing and recording. No one knew where he had gone. During this time, he also began keeping the notebooks that the critic Sam V.H. Reese has now excerpted in a slim and handsome new book, “The Notebooks of Sonny Rollins.”
In his introduction, Reese writes that Rollins vanished because he wanted to work on his sound. That is true, up to a point. But Rollins in 1959 was also determined to change his life. He’d been a heroin addict, sometimes scoring with his friend and bandmate Miles Davis. He’d spent time in Rikers on a weapons charge. He was known for pawning other’s instruments. He discarded side musicians as often as some men change pocket handkerchiefs, and sometimes smacked them. He was “mad, bad and dangerous to know,” as was said of Lord Byron. People kept him at arm’s length. He’d fallen victim to the lures and snags of jazz club life.
What he needed, he later wrote, was “MRA = Moral Re-Armament.” Rollins was determined to strip his life down to essentials. These notebooks chronicle, in addition to his work on his sound, his decision to change his diet. He went in for a lot of fruit and juices and broiled chicken. He began working out. He tried to stop smoking. He got into yoga and Eastern modes of thought. He also dabbled in ESP and liked to refer to himself in the third person. He kept these journals off and on for the rest of his life.
Rollins, at the golden age of 93, is still very much with us. His archives are at the New York Public Library. These archives include, Reese writes, “a hefty six boxes” of his personal notebooks. Alas, Reese does not explain his editing process — how he winnowed six boxes of material down to a 152-page book that still contains a lot of filler and close-to-meaningless verbiage, stuff that was probably meant for Rollins’s consumption alone.
But let’s stick with the material that works. Rollins meditates on the nature of the saxophone (the “horn of horns”) and the nature of his own ambitions. “I want critics to knock me,” he writes, “so that I come back and make them look like fools.” He enjoyed the element of surprise. In another entry, he writes, “I like to play and let the crowd settle and then lull and then wake them up with something outrageous.” He stares at his psyche as if in front of a full-length mirror.
He fills the pages with lists — of books to read, of favorite songs, of possible titles for his own books. He deplores his impatience, and his lusting after women. He wants to be more punctual. He writes about jazz as “the embodiment of the American Ideal.”
He is casually aphoristic: “Look on procrastination as a good thing.” “Don’t worry about the race, worry about the pace.” “Many people who have succumbed to failure in one way or another have been just that close to success so as not to see it.” “You can’t live on money.”
Rollins was a true eccentric. His jottings include items like, “Check into a life-size skeleton frame — where one can be obtained.” He can sound like a Howard Hughes-level cleanliness nut. Here he is on moving about New York City:
Rule 1:
When riding in any vehicle of a motor-driven nature (cars, trains, buses etc.) it is advisable to arrange breathing so that an exhale will always coincide with the stopping of said vehicle. Hold out exhale!
Reason? — fumes.
He worried about what he ate in part because he liked to look good onstage (“As I look in mirror — too much fat ass,” he writes in one entry), but also because poor digestion hampered his playing and his mood. It had never occurred to me, until reading him, that air forcefully expelled at one end of the alimentary canal might mean material forcefully expelled at the other. “I could not bring air and attack thru my horn,” Rollins writes of one moment, “for fear of having an accidental elimination.”
As an editor, Reese writes sensitively about Rollins’s music but somehow never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity. His introduction does not mention Rollins’s drug use and other troubles. His endnotes are sparse. When Rollins laments that Muhammad Ali appeared in television commercials, for example, one might have noted that Rollins himself made a radio commercial for Listerine. Reese prints a few of Rollins’s stray comments about his teeth without noting that recurring dental problems were one of the central dramas of his playing life and came close to ending his career. (Details about his elaborate dental work make Aidan Levy’s excellent 2022 biography of Rollins painful to read.)
Reese does send us out on a high note. This book ends with some of Rollins’s most useful exhortations:
“Forgive everyone everything.”
“What other people think of you is none of your business.”
“No matter how you feel, get up, dress up and show up.”
THE NOTEBOOKS OF SONNY ROLLINS | Edited by Sam V.H. Reese | New York Review Books | 152 pp. | Paperback, $17.95
