Our gentle giant has gone through the portal - may his eternal musical soul journey safely through the galaxies and shine brightly amongst the brightest of stars, up there just as it's done down here.

• https://www.npr.org/2026/05/25/519445169/sonny-rollins-colossus-of-the-saxophone-has-died-at-95

• With more than 60 albums released from the late-1940s onwards, including collaborations with Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane and others, Rollins was one of the last living stars of the bebop generation, who took jazz from a predominantly dance or ballad form into startlingly expressive new territory.
  
  
• Rollins himself was a genius of melody, whose bright, catchy lines – whether jazz standards or self-penned – would be unpicked, extended and refashioned in improvised and sometimes epic solos. Saxophonist Branford Marsalis has called him “the greatest improviser in the history of jazz” alongside Louis Armstrong; when presenting him with the 2010 National Medal of the Arts in 2011, Barack Obama said Rollins had inspired him to “take risks that I might not otherwise have taken.”
  
  
• Rollins once described himself as “primitive … I’m going with my feelings more than my brain”, and it was this willingness to break with convention and embrace improvisation that helped chart a new course for jazz alongside Davis, Charlie Parker and others in the bebop scene that soon loosened further into hard bop and post-bop. Davis himself wrote about how Rollins quickly became “a legend, almost a god to a lot of the younger musicians … he was an aggressive, innovative player who always had fresh musical ideas”. For his part, Rollins said when reminiscing about his early life: “Jazz is good. It’s not just lecture music, it’s not shake your booty music. It’s everything. It doesn’t make you feel like fighting. It makes you feel that there is a God.”
  

 

Sonny Rollins -Saxophone Colossus -1957 (FULL ALBUM)

R.I.P.

 

Sad news. He was so damn brilliant!! RIP