The universe has developed a sudden and tragic shortage of pure, unadulterated swing. Sonny Rollins, the titan of the tenor saxophone, the man who made the instrument sound like a conversation between God and a very streetwise devil, has shuffled off this mortal coil at the age of 95. Britain, a nation that has always prided itself on knowing a bit of class when it hears it, is officially in mourning, though frankly we’ve been in a state of quiet desperation ever since the Beatles split up.
Let us not mince words. Rollins was not merely a jazz musician. He was a force of nature, a hurricane of improvisation that could reduce a chord progression to rubble and then rebuild it into a cathedral of sound. He was the man who, after a brief retirement in the 1950s, spent two years practising alone on the Williamsburg Bridge in New York, blowing his horn into the East River, presumably to warn the fish that something magnificent was coming. That something was the album 'The Bridge', a masterpiece that still sounds like it was beamed down from a more intelligent planet.
Now, imagine the reaction in the hallowed halls of the British jazz establishment. Ronnie Scott’s, that Soho temple of smoky reverence, will have its lights dimmed a little lower. Jazz FM will run a marathon of his work, punctuated by the sort of breathless, reverential commentary usually reserved for the death of royalty. And the BBC, never one to miss a bandwagon, will undoubtedly assemble a panel of experts to explain, with furrowed brows and uncomfortable ties, precisely why Sonny Rollins mattered. We could tell them, for free: he mattered because he made the air itself swing.
His influence on British music is incalculable. Every time a bored teenager picks up a saxophone in a damp rehearsal room in Camden, hoping to emulate the cool detachment of their heroes, they are channelling Rollins. Every time a jazz-funk band in a provincial pub hits a groove that makes the landlord momentarily forget the sticky carpet, Rollins is there. He was the ghost in the machine of British jazz, the standard by which all saxophonists were judged and found wanting.
Let us not forget his sheer bloody charisma. The man had a beard that could have its own gravitational field. He could stand motionless on stage for a full minute, staring at the audience as if daring them to breach the social contract, and then unleash a solo that would melt the fillings from your teeth. He was a giant, a colossus, a walking rebuttal to the idea that art should be polite.
So raise a glass of something cheap and fiery, or perhaps a very dry martini (the man loved a bit of sophistication). Sonny Rollins has left the building. But his music, that glorious, sprawling, impossible sound, will remain, echoing through the corridors of time, a reminder that once, not so long ago, a man with a brass horn could change the world. Goodbye, Sonny. You were the bridge. We were just lucky enough to cross it.
