American Routes Shortcuts: Remembering Sonny Rollins

Published June 26, 2026 at 4:00 AM CDT

The late tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins was one of the premier players in jazz. Rollins has been a favorite of both fans and critics, traversing bebop and cool with a strong melodic sound. The calypso rhythm that Sonny Rollins captured on one of his best-known tunes, “St. Thomas,” comes from family life. Sonny’s parents were natives of the Virgin Islands. Sonny was born Walter Theodore Rollins in 1930 and grew up in Harlem. His brother and sister were classically trained musicians, but Sonny turned to jazz early, and by his twenties, he was playing tenor sax with top jazzmen like Bud Powell, Miles Davis, and Thelonious Monk. By the late 1950s, Sonny Rollins had a long list of recordings to his name. Many are still classics today, including Saxophone Colossus, Tenor Madness, and Freedom Suite. Sonny Rollins’s music ranges from social statements to sweet remakes of popular songs. He absorbed it all in his youth: the sounds of his neighborhood, the radio and movies, and the music in his household.

Sonny Rollins: My mother had a lot of these Caribbean records, so I heard a lot of Caribbean records at home, and my mother would take me to some of these Caribbean dances, so I heard it there. But generally in the neighborhood, I heard more mainland jazz, you know, people like Fats Waller and so forth.

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Nick Spitzer: Is there a connection between those early days and your love of those kinds of stage performers in the popular, I guess, jazz of the day?

SR: Yeah, I think so, Nick, because when I listened to Fats Waller on the radio, it gave me such a feeling of beatitude, almost.

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SR: Then, of course, when I heard Louis Jordan and that great band he had, the Timpani Five, and he was playing saxophone, and I loved the saxophone. So it was all sort of laid out for me, really, at an early age.

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SR: I was born in Harlem proper, which was sort of the lowlands, and then we moved up on the hill which was sort of a upscale area, and all of the top people in the Black community lived up there: W. E. B. Du Bois, Thurgood Marshall, I used to see him, a lot of great jazz musicians; Duke Ellington lived nearby, and Coleman Hawkins, my idol on tenor saxophone, he lived right around the corner.

Nick Spitzer: What a neighborhood!

SR: It was fantastic, yeah it was fantastic.

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SR: Plus, I liked the way Coleman Hawkins always carried himself in a very respectable, dignified manner. And that appealed to me a lot, because I was sort of a socially conscious guy by dint of my grandmother who was a big Garvey and Paul Robeson follower. As a kid, we would march up and down Lenox Avenue with our rallies for Paul Robeson and so on. So, you know, as teenagers, we would watch all these guys, and as I look back, it was a great, great place to grow up.

NS: You mentioned Paul Robeson being in the neighborhood. If we fast forward up to the recordings right after 9/11, “Without a Song,” [music] you are, in a sense, digging back to that, but bringing it up to a current moment. A very emotional moment in American life.

SR: Right. That’s a reference of Paul Robeson, right. He did that song. [music] That song stayed with me, and all those songs stay with me. I mean, you know, all the movies that I went to and the radio, radio and movies, which was the media in those days. I’m a guy that can bring out old songs, which I do often, much to the consternation of my musicians.

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