In the history and world of jazz, there is a singular group of adventurers, innovators, pioneers, and mavericks. Aidan Levy's mammoth biography of jazz icon Sonny Rollins (born September 7, 1930) captures the many images and versions of one such musician, known for his bold explorations of sound, tone, and musical expression. The panoramic biography Saxophone Colossus: The Life and Music of Sonny Rollins is beautifully written and never commonplace. Its author elevates the towering status of “Newk,” the one-time nickname for the saxophonist, with detailed research to those of legends such as Louis Armstrong, Coleman Hawkins, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, and Bud Powell.

Born in Harlem in 1930, Walter Theodore Rollins embodied all the traditional cultural traits of his West Indian parents. Always an achiever, the young boy kept his eyes and ears open to the soul and rhythms of the historic community—The Cotton Club, The Renaissance Ballrooms, and the Elks Rendezvous. At age eight, he got his first sax, a used alto, then started practicing routinely. “When I got my saxophone... I went in the bedroom, shut the door, and I started playing, and I was playing, playing, playing,” Sonny said, setting the standard of high-quality woodshedding (practicing). “My mother had to call me. ‘Time to eat!’ I just get into that zone and it’s a spiritual thing. And that’s what has carried me through my life.”

After enrolling at Benjamin Franklin High School in 1944, the fledgling horn player frowned at the lackluster musical program. Enduring the racism and racial tension at the school was also a challenge. However, Rollins graduated, stating: “Most of the guys didn’t finish it, but I felt I had to finish it.” According to Levy, Rollins said two jazz institutions, Smalls Paradise and the Savoy Ballroom, provided creative fuel for his constant practicing.

Levy, the author of Dirty Blvd: The Life and Music of Lou Reed, poured over dense archival materials and interviewed more than 200 subjects, including Rollins, to get the culture and flavor of Harlem and the jazz scene. As a fine teller of anecdotes and tales, he was fascinated with the musical influences that held the young musician spellbound, his taste molded by befriending neighborhood jazz upstarts like saxophonist Jackie McLean, drummer Art Taylor, trumpeter Lowell Lewis, and pianists Kenny Drew and Walter Bishop.

Along with the complex architecture of the music with its themes and improvisation, Levy does not neglect the evolution of Rollins as a master artist and as a spiritual adventurer in search of perfection in the mind and soul. He had played with Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk. In December 1951, under contract with Prestige Records, Rollins played his first session as a leader with Sonny Rollins Quartet. However, drugs were rampant in that twilight world of bars and nightclubs. Not only did the youth fall victim to narcotics, but he was charged with the possession of a firearm and sentenced to Rikers Island. In 1954, he returned to Rikers on a parole violation. During that “lock-’em-up-and-forget-about-’em” policy of the old era, he composed the jazz classics “Doxy,” “Airegin,” and “Oleo.”

The following year saw him spending four months at a federal rehab center, where he finally kicked his crippling heroin habit. Determined to normalize his life, he worked at anything he could get, including as a janitor. Prolific among the avant-garde jazz performers, he recorded ten stellar albums, with four as a sideman featuring Thelonious Monk and Max Roach. In the late 1950s, he turned his attention to the civil rights movement, Little Rock, Dr. King’s Montgomery jailing, and the infamous Emmett Till murder. “I thought that this world could change and get more peaceful, with everybody loving each other and all this hope. But then I learned, and I lived a little longer.” The composition of his commitment took form in an album that included a 19-minute piece, “The Freedom Suite,” which gained him notice.

One of the book’s assets is the format provided by Levy, who splits the biography into two sections: Part One covers Rollins’s early years, family background, and musical influences and accomplishments. Part Two focuses on Rollins’s 1960 exit from the jazz scene to do solo woodshedding on New York City’s Williamsburg Bridge; and the section also examines the long years of fame and later achievements. Alone, the saxophonist practiced for hours, building a sonar vocabulary of breathing techniques, tone, phrasing, articulation, intervals, chords, and an efficient embouchure. After touring in Europe in 1959 and 1960, and returning to the U.S., Rollins lamented: “I felt that my name was bigger than my talent at that time,” Sonny said, despite the hard-won critical acclaim he’d finally gotten. “The problem was that I really wasn’t good enough for myself… I was filled with question marks.”

Once the ever-morphing horn man brought his self-improvement project to a close, he rejected the label of being a jazz celebrity. He knew what it took to live the jazz life and play the music. Like John Coltrane, he had embarked on a journey to nourish his spiritual soul, and he traveled to India to become a student of the mystic life, embracing the tenets of Rosicrucianism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. He placed his art and spiritual well-being ahead of the cruel lusts of capitalism, absorbing the sacred commandment of making himself real by telling the truth. In fact, they said he must be true inside, true to himself, before he could know the truth outside us.

In Rollins’s career, the average musician cannot live on record sales or royalties alone, and much of his income came from live performances. If he cannot play, then he can become a poor man again. His wife, Lucille, persuaded him not to play clubs anymore. However, Rollins’s more than thirty recorded albums keep him afloat, classics such as The Bridge, Saxophone Colossus, The Freedom Suite, Sonny Rollins Plus 4, Sonny Meets Hawk!, East Broadway Run Down, Tenor Madness, In Stockholm, Rollins Plays for Bird, A Night at the Village Vanguard, Sonny Rollins’ Next Album, and Without a Song: The 9/11 Concert.

Saxophone Colossus took Levy seven years to write and in more than 700 pages, he has, without a doubt, name-dropped all the jazz pioneers—past and present. Rollins has played with many of them in some capacity, over more than sixty years of recording and concerts. Although Levy has described the Rollins sound as “the grainy, pugilistic voice,” his peers and fans have fallen in love with the New Yorker’s full-throated compositions that could be versatile, going from raw, tender, mellow, swinging, and impulsive. He could move into enduring long tones, hard bop lines, and crisp bop rhythms.

“Spiritually, I couldn’t feel better,” Rollins told Levy recently in a June 2024 interview in JazzTimes, enjoying his ninety-fourth birthday and retirement after a 2014 diagnosis of pulmonary fibrosis. “I feel great, man. The physical part of it to me is just that—physical. You know, we’re all going to get sick. That’s what this little picture’s about. The body gets sick, and turns back into dust. But the soul is what makes it, as we can understand it at least. Try to understand why we’re here, and realize we’re not here to be a body looking at things. That’s so small.”

Packed with detailed research and recollections, Levy harnesses his admiration for jazz music and its history in Saxophone Colossus: The Life and Music of Sonny Rollins, and this bio proves to be the perfect companion piece to the legendary artist’s wealth of recorded music. For the reader, we learn about one jazz master’s dynamic journey. For the jazz purist, Levy discusses the extensive index of the bulk of every recording and concert of Rollins, a musical alchemist. It’s about more than Rollins’s soaring sax, but about the man who loved Sinatra and Crosby, Bogart, black-and-white films, and comic books. Crack open this revealing book and learn about Mr. Rollins the visionary.