“What made me withdraw and go to the bridge was how I felt about my own playing,” the artist recalled. “I knew I was dissatisfied.”
Every New Yorker is dissatisfied in their own way, but only one withdrew from the public eye for three years from what had seemed to be an Olympian peak of talent and fame to then climb the steep iron steps of the Williamsburg Bridge, blocks from his apartment on Grand St., and blow his horn day after day, hour after hour, in rain or shine.
“I was getting a lot of publicity for my work at that time, but I wasn’t satisfying my own requirements for what I wanted to do musically,” Sonny Rollins told Guardian jazz critic John Fordham a couple of years ago about his now legendary but then entirely private journey.
The tenor saxophone colossus, who retired in 2014, was 28 in 1959 when he simply stopped publicly performing or recording to renew a craft he felt dead-ended in even as worldly rewards heaped up, while he also quit smoking and began practicing yoga.
One of his neighbors was expecting a baby, and “it was difficult to practice a loud horn… in my apartment without disturbing somebody.”
That’s a New York story if ever there was one.
So he walked each day, for about a thousand of them, from his apartment on Grand St. to the bridge, to practice and play as trains rumbled by.
“I could have probably spent the rest of my life just going up on the bridge,” he later recalled. “I realized, no, I have to get back into the real world.”
Rollins released The Bridge, his classic album with a pianoless quartet, after getting back, and then kept blowing the truth for more than a half century.
He’s put his horn down but is still with us, living upstate now, which means there’s time to rename the bridge in honor of one of the last surviving greats of perhaps the greatest era of the greatest American art form while he’s here to appreciate it.
A petition and push to do that drew public attention nearly a decade ago, including a bill from then-Councilman Stephen Levin that was backed by then-Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams.
That petered out, but there’s no reason it can’t happen now.
Rollins, born in Harlem, is the sort of New Yorker who Adams — our first native-son mayor in more than 20 years — has offered himself as an avatar of.
The artist was arrested and did time as a young man for an armed robbery and then for violating his parole by possessing heroin before finding ways to make the most of his vast talents.
That ascent can be glimpsed in a newly published selection of the notebooks he started keeping as he withdrew to the bridge and that’s ideally read with his music playing, the words a mix of mundane and spiritual concerns broadly familiar to many who haven’t achieved his creative heights.
The building on Grand St. that Rollins lived in is gone now, replaced by a more luxurious one called The Rollins, natch. There’s not so much as a plaque about him on the Williamsburg Bridge.
Why not rename the utilitarian crossing, no stone cladding here, in honor of a man who struggled with demons, wrestled with angels and emerged with transcendent sounds?
Rollins’ sojourn above the sidewalks, below the sky and between the boroughs on the bridge’s lonely footpath received no public notice until the critic Ralph Berton happened to walk by and guess who he was listening to.
Berton wrote about the artist in an article, “Conversations on a Bridge,” for Metronome in 1961, where “out of respect for his privacy” the author referred to Rollins as Buster Jones, and fuzzed up which East River crossing the saxophonist was using as his woodshed.
“I felt for a long time I wasn’t going anywhere, that I had ceased to speak the truth,” Berton quotes Buster telling him. “I had to get to be myself again somehow. I had to ask myself who I was and what I was trying to do with my music.”
“What I’m doing now,” the musician continued, “doesn’t concern anybody but me. One of these days I’ll come out again. Then the whole story can be written.”
That’s a New York story if ever — one the city can honor now.
Siegel (harrysiegel@gmail.com) is an editor at The City, a host of the FAQ NYC podcast and a columnist for the Daily News.
Harry Siegel: Rename it the Sonny Rollins Williamsburg Bridge
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14.04.2024
“What made me withdraw and go to the bridge was how I felt about my own playing,” the artist recalled. “I knew I was dissatisfied.”
Every New Yorker is dissatisfied in their own way, but only one withdrew from the public eye for three years from what had seemed to be an Olympian peak of talent and fame to then climb the steep iron steps of the Williamsburg Bridge, blocks from his apartment on Grand St., and blow his horn day after day, hour after hour, in rain or shine.
“I was getting a lot of publicity for my work at that time, but I wasn’t satisfying my own requirements for what I wanted to do musically,” Sonny Rollins told Guardian jazz critic John Fordham a couple of years ago about his now legendary but then entirely private journey.
The tenor saxophone colossus, who retired in 2014, was 28 in 1959 when he simply stopped publicly performing or recording to renew a craft he felt dead-ended in even as worldly rewards heaped up, while he also quit smoking and began practicing yoga.
One of his neighbors was expecting a baby, and “it was difficult to........
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