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ASTAR in the pages of Jazz Journal and DownBeat and increasingly a commercial success, Sonny Rollins made a perverse decision to put his career on hold from 1959 to 1961, giving up performing and recording in favour of cooking and cleaning for his wife Lucille, looking after their pets and – most famously – spending up to 16 hours a day alone, playing his saxophone on New York’s Williamsburg Bridge. “I’d get there early, practise, go back home to refresh myself, use the bathroom, get a cognac and then return to the bridge to practise more,” he explains in Aidan Levy’s blow-by-blow biography Saxophone Colossus. “The problem was that I really wasn’t good enough for myself.”
Born in Harlem in 1930, Rollins took his youthful dedication to Charlie Parker to its logical extreme by getting hooked on heroin. After a couple of spells in prison, he cleaned up his act in the mid-1950s and emerged as a master improviser. As Thelonious Monk put it: “Cats have to work out what they play; Sonny just plays that shit out the top of his head.”