Legendary jazz saxophonist Sonny Rollins has died at the age of 95.
The renowned musician, known as the “saxophone colossus” due to his improvisational skill, had a prolific career spanning more than 50 years.
He died on Monday at his home in Woodstock, New York, where he had been largely housebound over the past couple of years due to various physical problems, his spokesperson Terri Hinte said.
A statement from his publicist described him as “one of the most honoured and influential figures in American music of the 20th century and beyond”.
Rollins began his career as a teen phenomenon, and was one of the last living greats of the bebop era, working with artists like Charlie Parker, Miles Davis and John Coltrane.
He won a Grammy award in 2002 for best jazz instrumental album with his work This is What I Do, and again in 2006 for best jazz instrumental solo for Why Was I Born?
Rock fans could also hear him on the Rolling Stones’ 1981 album “Tattoo You,” which features a sax solo from Rollins on the ballad “Waiting on a Friend,” devised after watching Mick Jagger dance.
Despite his enduring success, Rollins was never quite satisfied with his art and occasionally took lengthy hiatuses from playing.
At the peak of his popularity, Rollins went into seclusion, spending two years practising alone on a solitary niche above the East River on a Williamsburg Bridge walkway.
“The thing that I am most proud of in my career is the fact that I was able to see beyond being popular and all that stuff and do what my inner self told me to do,” Rollins told AP in 2007.
Rollins got his first major break when he was invited to join Thelonious Monk’s band in his late teens, and was introduced to the recording world before he finished high school.
But his rising star almost faded when he became hooked on heroin at the age of 19, which led to two short stints in jail in 1950 and 1953.
Rollins then found himself living on the streets in Chicago. In 1954, he checked himself into a hospital in Lexington to undergo drug treatment, which he said gave him a spiritual awakening.
“I began to have a deeper philosophy of what life was about. From that point on is when my consciousness awoke,” Rollins would later say.
After being discharged, he returned to Chicago and signed on as a member of the Max Roach-Clifford Brown quintet, and in 1956, he recorded the solo album Saxophone Colossus, which remains one of his most influential works.
In the following two years, Rollins took a different approach, switching to a pianoless trio on three more landmark albums: Way Out West, A Night at the Village Vanguard and Freedom Suite.
He then took a hiatus and returned to the scene in 1961, where he embraced a different sound – a move that divided his fans.
In the mid-60s, Rollins toured heavily in Europe, switching back and forth between more traditional and avant-garde approaches, and he contributed original music to the soundtrack of the 1966 British movie Alfie.
It was during a trip to Japan when Rollins discovered Zen Buddhism, prompting another lengthy sabbatical that would last into the early 1970s.
In the 1990s and 2000s, Rollins released a string of critically acclaimed albums, and he continued to tour into his 80s.
Grammy-winning song Why Was I Born was from the album Without a Song: The 9/11 Concert, a live recording from a performance in Boston just four days after the September 11 attacks.
Rollins had been evacuated from his apartment a few blocks away from the World Trade Center and had done the concert at the urging of his wife and manager, Lucille.
The album was released after her death in 2004.
In 2011, Rollins became the eighth jazz musician to be recognised with Kennedy Center Honors in a ceremony alongside actress Meryl Streep.
Rollins was later forced into retirement by pulmonary fibrosis, a thickening and damaging of the lungs, and he played his last concert in 2012 before stopping altogether in 2014.
He is survived by his nephew Clifton Anderson and nieces Vallyn Anderson and Gabrielle DeGroat.
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