Bare Necessities

Duke Ellington deemed them "beyond category," artists whose singular talents transcend classification. Count tenor saxophonist Theodore Walter Rollins, 79, on that short list. Jazz's known universes, Art Tatum through Ornette Coleman, records protean blowers Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, and Sonny Rollins, but only the latter's full-force gale of cogitative melodicism survives today, huffing and puffing one of the genre's enduring voices.

More than a decade ago at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, Rollins blew the house down, just as he's been doing since the late 1940s. Rollins' Road Shows, Vol. 1 in 2008 recedes only after 10 minutes of "Some Enchanted Evening" from the previous year, bebop's golden horn untarnished since the era that he and jazz's original punks changed the course of global culture with their musical asteroid.

"I'm a big Duke Ellington fan," muses Rollins by phone from his home in New York, his voice oaken – ancient, textured. "I was sort of in his company once. I was coming offstage at a festival, and he was going on with his band. He sort of looked at me, not in a discouraging way, but I didn't know if he was taken aback or what."

Let Sonny Rollins' hot and cool air masses collide at the Bass Concert Hall this Sunday, and perhaps like Ellington, you will be.

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Austin Chronicle: You were near the epicenter of 9/11. Do you still live there?

Sonny Rollins: No. I was about six blocks from Ground Zero. I saw the plane, saw the fire, the whole thing, you know? It was quite a scene.

AC: You were forced to give up that place in the aftermath?

SR: Yes, I was evacuated the next day, and even though my wife and I kept the place a little while longer, we never slept there again.

AC: That must have been a big blow.

SR: Well, we had lived there almost 30 years. Fortunately, we also had a place here in the country. I had a lot of music, I had a lot of records, I had a lot of clothes, and I had a lot of books, a lot of things I eventually had to leave there because of the contamination.

AC: Accounts have you evacuating with your saxophone.

SR: That's right. I got my saxophone, my briefcase, and I think a little backpack that had some things in it. We had to walk down 40 flights of steps because there was no electricity, of course.

AC: Just the bare necessities, eh?

SR: Bare necessities.

AC: You've lived your whole life in New York.

SR: Yeah, I was born in Harlem, and I've lived here all my life. I love to travel and so on, and I've lived in a couple of other places, but even then I was a New Yorker.

AC: Do you miss your old running buddies, Clifford Brown, Thelonious Monk?

SR: Yeah, I think about them all the time. I think about them to the extent that I don't miss them, because I'm always thinking about them. So it's almost like we're all still together doing what we did then. So that makes it pretty easy as far as feeling lonely. I feel very close to Monk and Coltrane, Clifford Brown, guys that were my contemporaries. I played with all of them. I think about playing with them someplace, some of the experiences we had together. So that's very good for me. I don't feel they've gone anyplace really.

AC: How much difference is there in your having been a working musician in the 1950s and 1960s and your being a working musician now?

SR: As far as I'm concerned, there's not much difference, because I'm still applying my trade. I'm still trying to improve myself. I still practice every day, and I'm still trying to find the lost chord. So to me, it's the same, what I was doing then and what I'm doing now. I'm still performing, and that performance means there's really not a lot of difference. I'm still trying to get better.

AC: How does your playing today compare to your playing of the past?

SR: [Laughs] You're not really asking me that!

AC: [Laughs] Musically, piano players become so rich with age. They express their entire lives on these keys. Is it the same for horn players?

SR: Well it's certainly true for me, because I'm not a good enough musician to be able to repeat things that have been successful to the point that I can just go to work and not think about it. "Play this; this works. Play that; that works." I'm sort of an experimental person in my mind, and as I said, I'm searching. I'm still searching for something. So although I'm not 20 years old anymore, I think I have learned something. It's great to be young, so they say, but I certainly wouldn't want to be 18 years old again and start my life again. I did a lot of things. But I think I've learned something now, and, musically, I'm trying to prove that to myself all the time. It's really a great pursuit.

AC: Writers sometimes worry about running out of words. Do you ever worry about running out of things to say on the saxophone?

SR: During my career, a couple of times, I've run into a brick wall, but it hasn't lasted long. Of course now, no, I don't have that experience at all. I don't have the physical strength to practice endlessly like I used to practice, 18 hours, just all day, but I try to practice two hours every day. There's always something to do, so I end up not having enough time. I find sometimes that I have to leave it off. Which is good, because then I have something tomorrow. I always have something to learn tomorrow.

AC: I don't think you've played Austin in decades. Any impressions of the area?

SR: I remember in Austin, we used to have a lot of fun playing at a place called the Armadillo. We played there several times, and it was always great. Of course I know Ornette [Coleman], and I played Fort Worth one time. But Austin and the Armadillo are always near to my heart.

AC: Keep the flame burning for us.

SR: I'm going to try. I'm going downstairs to practice right now.

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Sonny Rollins blows down Bass Concert Hall, Sunday, May 3. Tickets: www.utpac.org. For more of this interview, see austinchronicle.com/earache.