On Sonny’s Side of the Street : Saxman Sonny Rollins has performed with everyone from Coltrane to Marsalis, but he says he has ‘a lot of music yet to play’

NEW YORK — Throughout his prolific, if somewhat erratic 40-year career in the jazz business, tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins has been regarded by fellow musicians, critics and fans alike as a mercurial improviser of unmatched invention.

New Yorker magazine jazz critic Whitney Balliet has called him “possibly the most incisive and influential jazz instrumentalist since Charlie Parker.”

“He’s the baddest . . . in the world!” exclaims trumpeter Freddie Hubbard, who played in Rollins’ group in the late ‘50s.

Rollins, who turned 60 last week has earned the accolades. He has recorded over 50 LPs, many of which are back in print on compact disc, written classics like “Oleo,” “St. Thomas” and “Airegin,” and has worked, in person and in the recording studio, with the giants of jazz. Among his cohorts: drummers Max Roach, Philly Joe Jones, Elvin Jones and Tony Williams, trumpeters Miles Davis, Clifford Brown and Fats Navarro, pianists Bud Powell, Herbie Hancock and Thelonious Monk and fellow saxophonists John Coltrane, Coleman Hawkins and Branford Marsalis, who appears on his most recent release, “Falling in Love with Jazz” (Milestone). Rollins brings his band--pianist Mark Soskin, drummer Al Foster, guitarist Jerome Harris, bassist Bob Cranshaw and trombonist Clifton Anderson--to the Strand in Redondo Beach Saturday.

Yet Rollins is relatively unmoved by the above circum vitae . “Have I had a wonderful career? Well, I hope so,” he laughs quietly, sitting on a couch in his small downtown Manhattan studio apartment on the 39th floor of a highrise, with windows that look north toward midtown and the Empire State Building.

“But I’ve been described as having the most up-and-down career of anyone in jazz,” he says, referring to his two two-year sabbaticals from performances--from 1959-61 and 1969-71--and his problems with drugs early in his life. “So I don’t sit around and think I’m so great.”

Well, others do, and for good reason. Rollins’ performances, delivered with a raucous yet human tone and an animated stage presence, are scintillating. He plays with passion, yet readily displays a refreshing sense of humor. He works with a rhythmic certainty of the best drummers, so that he always puts his phrases where, and when, he wants them. He’s blessed with a warehouse of a memory that recalls the lines to hundreds of archaic pop tunes and can make those tunes’ melodies fit right into a driving, probing improvisation. He possesses a quicksilver technique capable of playing lines that careen like a race car running the streets of Monte Carlo. And he can develop an almost gut-bucket bluesiness that permeates the heart of his solos, making them cook whether the tempo’s a simmer or a rolling boil.

Rollins has an original jazz voice, rooted in the bebop mode, but a voice that has evolved over time, incorporating other styles and other forms as they fit that voice.

But praise isn’t something Rollins is very comfortable with. “Don’t compliment me too much, man,” he told this reporter in an another interview. He’s likely to take such approval, consider it for a moment, and then point out his shortcomings. It’s a philosophy the Manhattan native who made his first recording date in 1949 has employed most of his life.

“I’m always trying to get the best out of myself all the time,” he says. “There’s always a goal I’m trying to reach. It’s not like I’ve learned and I can sit back and wait for inspiration. I have to be demanding because everybody--myself, the musicians in my band, the audiences, they always want you to be tip-top.”

This self-imposed demand requires considerable effort. “It’s hard, because I’m serious about what I’m doing--keeping fresh, keeping my own thing, not doing what others are doing,” he says with a stern gaze that’s remarkably similar to pictures taken of him in the ‘50s. “I’m not complacent.”

Rollins doesn’t look 60. His coffee-with-a dash-of-cream-colored complexion has the resilience and suppleness of a much younger man, his eyes blaze with life, and he’s kept his figure toned and firm, the result of a life change he undertook in 1955. At that time, he kicked hard drugs--”I finally got that monkey off my back,” he says with a soft sigh--and began a devotion to yoga, exercise and a health-conscious diet.

Only tinges of white along the edges of his well-trimmed beard and his hairline indicate the passage of time. “Do I dye it?” he laughs, repeating a reporter’s query. “Remember Ronald Reagan never answered that question,” and he laughs again, not answering the question.

But, he says, he sometimes feels the wear and tear of 40 years spent in the jazz business.

“The aches and pains have increased as I get older, and I don’t have as much breath as I used to,” says Rollins. “That’s a drag. I used to never have to think about breath . Now it’s that and other things.”

Like regular trips to his dentist, which is the reason the saxophonist has remained in Manhattan for a few days after a weekend concert in Toledo, Ohio, instead of traveling with Lucille, his wife of 33 years, to their home in Germantown, N.Y., about 2 1/2 hours north of Manhattan.

Or maintaining his position as one of the leaders of the mainstream jazz realm, a vigil that keeps Rollins--who these days incorporates an eclectic assortment of funk, soul and contemporary pop pieces into his usual repertoire of great pop standards, jazz classics and originals--ever on the alert.

“As I’ve gotten older, I’m trying to protect my image, what I have built up over the years so I’m trying to make everything--in performance and on record--come out perfect,” he says, his face revealing an expression that’s part melancholic, part contemplative. “I don’t want my reputation to go down. I want to keep up a level which is better than what I’ve done, at least better.”

In his desire to stay fit for the battle, the saxophonist practices as much as six hours a day in his secluded, one-room studio that he has in Germantown, where the Rollinses live on 10 acres of wooded land. He works within an organized regimen.

“I have my own book of things, sort of “Sonny’s Rudiments,” scales, fingering skills, all of these things that I have written out that I work on constantly,” he says. “Like some fingerings that would be more difficult in one key than another. When I’m able to master those things, I’ll feel more confident, be a little bit happier with myself.

“Then I do some sight-reading. I’m working with a book of scales and patterns by (fellow saxophonist) Yusef Lateef that’s excellent and I’m also playing excerpts from arias by Wagner. I do this to get into some other things that people are thinking about.

“Then there’s free blowing, because that’s what I’m doing when I’m on the (band)stand.”

When in Manhattan, Rollins rarely leaves the apartment--”It’s really a place Lucille and I keep to go to and from the airport,” he says--to hear other musicians.

“My mind is so full of my own music, it’s difficult to listen to others,” he notes. “It’s really a time factor. I don’t have time to get into what someone else is doing. Maybe part of it is like, ‘Don’t look back, something may be gaining on you,’ that Satchel Paige saying. It’s also a matter of cluttering up my mind, putting in new stuff, not that it’s not already cluttered,” he laughs.

Rollins has a hunch that if he did get out more often, he’d benefit. “I’m a good audience, and when I go out and listen, I really enjoy the music, so it’s probably something I’d get something out of for my own work,” he says.

These days, the saxophonist leaves his upstate home on an average of five days a month, working mostly concerts, with an occasional nightclub engagement tossed in. It’s a schedule that suits him. “My life is pretty relaxing,” he says, smiling. “As compared to someone who works very hard, like Dizzy Gillespie, who works a lot of small clubs, five-to-six nights a week,” he says. “He thrives on that, but I can’t handle that anymore. It’s really too much. I put too much energy into what I’m playing. Still, I do tours, like in Japan, where I’ll play, say, 14 concerts in three weeks. That’s hard.”

In his first years in the jazz business, Rollins would play two-to-four week engagements in nightclubs, both as a leader and as a sideman. He says the best thing about such situations was the closeness the musicians would achieve. “Clubs were great musically,” he says. “The band would get so tight. It’s difficult to get that old closeness when you play concerts and one-nighters.”

Walter Theodore Rollins (the name has been reversed in record books because Rollins himself changed it on several documents) grew up in Harlem, the second son, in addition to a daughter, of Walter William and Valborg Rollins, from St. Croix and St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands, respectively.

“I was born on 137th Street, lived on 135th, 136th, then moved uptown Edgecombe Avenue and 153rd on Sugar Hill, where the well-to-do blacks like Duke Ellington lived,” he says. His father was a Chief Petty Officer in the Navy--”It was the highest grade a black could hold in the Navy at the time,” he says--and usually away at sea.

After piano studies at 11, Rollins played alto saxophone, then switched to tenor in high school. Early listening experiences at an uncle’s house marked the youngster with a lifelong interest in jazz and blues.

“I used to stay with my uncle, Reuben Victoria, in the daytime, and he was going with a woman named Lizzie, who was into music,” he recalls. “She was really something and had all these old blues records by Lonnie Johnson, Arthur Cruddup--Big Boy Cruddup, that was my man-- Big Joe Williams, real old time blues.” Rollins soon fell under the influence of saxophonists Coleman Hawkins, Ben Webster, Don Byas and Charlie Parker; later, he would often play with Hawkins, Parker and Webster, and recorded with the former two.

The fast lane was Rollins’ lane from the dawn of his professional life. At 17, he was leading a band composed of such future jazz stars as pianist Kenny Drew, altoist Jackie McLean and drummer Art Taylor opposite Thelonious Monk at the Club Baron, at 133rd St. and Lenox in Harlem. In January, 1949, at 18, he made his recording debut with singer Babs Gonzales, and later that year, recorded with both Monk and Bud Powell. That same year, he began an association with trumpeter Miles Davis that lasted on and off through the ‘50s.

Remembering his work with Davis led to some free associating. “I worked with Miles all over the East Coast, and on some gigs, (John Coltrane) and I were in the band,” he says. “It wasn’t a regular band, but we did do some gigs. Kenny Clarke and Doc West might have been the drummers. Doc was on the “Cool Blues” and “This is Always” sessions with Bird (Charlie Parker, recording on Dial records). That great one with (singer) Earl Coleman. In fact, I just started playing that song, “This is Always.” It came to my mind in this funky club I was playing in in Houston a couple of months ago. It came to me all of a sudden, and now I’ve worked it into my repertoire. In fact, I played it last night in Toledo.” To finish his recollection, he sings the melody to “Cool Blues,” a classic from the pen of Parker.

By the mid-to-late ‘50s, Rollins and Coltrane were the preeminent saxophonists of jazz. But in 1959, Rollins felt he needed time out of the public eye to study, practice and compose, and for two years he remained in seclusion and did not perform. However, his practice sessions on the Williamsburg bridge, which connects Manhattan and Brooklyn, became the stuff of legend. Later, in 1968, he spent five months in an ashram near Bombay, meditating and getting his life in order.

“When I came back to New York, I was really together, in a nice frame of mind, but that didn’t last too long,” he says. “So I left music again, until 1971.”

Of the numerous albums Rollins has made as a leader, there are, not surprisingly, few that please his ear. “I like some of the tracks on some records,” he says, “but not whole records. I always feel something could have been done better.”

Self-critic or no, Rollins acknowledges he has a “lot of music yet to play,” and says he hopes people will take his oeuvre into account when they come to hear him.

“I’d like people to remember that I’m a guy who’s played with Lester Young, Ben Webster, Coleman Hawkins and John Coltrane, actually played with them, not just for two minutes, but a lot of times,” he says. “That means something. It means a lot to me. Ten to 15 years ago, people might have seen me and said, “Oh, who’s that guy?” and split. Now, maybe they’ll stay because they know my history.”