He recorded with the innnovative pianist and composer Thelonious Monk and shared the stage with his idol, Charlie Parker. Later that year, he recorded with the virtuoso bebop pianist Bud Powell. He made his recording debut in 1949 with vocalist Babs Gonzales. Old friends and legendary musicians Miles Davis and Sonny Rollins reunited at The Newport Jazz Festival in 1957.īy age 18, Rollins had gained such a reputation that he was joining his heroes on the bandstand and in the recording studio. Rollins and other young musicians from his Sugar Hill neighborhood formed a band of their own, which included the gifted alto player Jackie McLean. The teenage Sonny Rollins and his friends eagerly followed the new music and idolized its players, particularly the high-flying Parker, known as “Bird” to his friends and admirers.
A new generation of musicians broke with the dance-oriented big band music of the pre-war era to experiment in small groups with a new style of jazz, featuring advanced harmonies drawn from modern symphonic music, and a loose but hard-driving rhythm that provided the perfect setting for the imaginative flights of virtuoso soloists like trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie and alto saxophonist Charlie Parker. In the years following World War II, Harlem was the scene of the musical revolution known as bebop. In the 1970s, after Rollins returned from a sabbatical from jazz, inspired by Jordan, he emerged with a looser, more extroverted kind of performance. Louis Jordan’s style of “jump blues” provided a transition from the swing music of the 1940s to the rock and roll of the 1950s. Saxophonist, bandleader, vocalist, songwriter and all-around entertainer, Louis Jordan was a popular star in the 1940s, and a hero to the young Sonny Rollins. He switched to tenor sax when he fell under the spell of Coleman Hawkins, a highly sophisticated improviser who first established the tenor saxophone as a lead instrument in American jazz. The example of the pioneering rhythm-and-blues star Louis Jordan inspired the young Sonny Rollins to take up the alto saxophone. Music was also an important part of life in the Rollins home Sonny’s brother and sister studied violin and piano. Harlem in the 1930s and ‘40s was home to the latest developments in jazz, and jazz musicians were admired members of the community. Rollins grew up in Harlem where he received his first alto saxophone at the age of 7 or 8. She took a strong role in raising Sonny, as he was known from an early age, along with his older brother and sister, while their father served in the United States Navy. His politically active grandmother had been a follower of the Jamaican Pan-Africanist Marcus Garvey, who promoted solidarity among all peoples of African descent. He grew up in Harlem at a time when this crowded district at the northern tip of Manhattan was the vital center of African American culture.
Theodore Walter Rollins was born in New York City to a family that had immigrated from the Virgin Islands.
0 kommentar(er)
