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“When he’s on,” one critic wrote, he “seems immense, summoning the entire history of jazz, capable of blowing a hole through a wall.” on.wsj.com/4e1XOUS

Sonny Rollins, Acclaimed as a Virtuoso Jazz Improviser, Dies at 95
“When he’s on,” one critic wrote, he “seems immense, summoning the entire history of jazz, capable of blowing a hole through a wall.”
on.wsj.com
11:37 PM · May 25, 2026

Sonny Rollins, Acclaimed as a Virtuoso Jazz Improviser, Dies at 95

‘When he’s on,’ one critic wrote, he ‘seems immense, summoning the entire history of jazz, capable of blowing a hole through a wall.’


Sonny Rollins performing in Perugia, Italy in 2012. BARBARA ZANON/REDFERNS/GETTY IMAGES

By Jon Mooallem
May 25, 2026 at 11:08 pm ET

“I was filled with question marks,” the tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins told the New Yorker in 1961.

He was explaining why, about two years earlier, at age 29 and seemingly at the height of his creative powers, he had vanished from the jazz world, embarking on an almost monastic hiatus of intense introspection and even more intense practicing. Later in life, Rollins would further explain the choice by telling interviewers that he had no longer felt confident in his playing; that he had wanted “a certain peace inside of myself. And I want that peace at the risk of giving up everything…. I have to be sure that I’m making myself right inside in every way”; and that, starting to feel outshined by newer, buzzier saxophonists like John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman, Rollins—suddenly a traditionalist, by comparison—had told himself, “You better get your s—together, because these cats have something to say.”

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