A decade ago, on September 9, 1998, the YMCA building at 3763 S. Wabash became an official Chicago landmark. Completed in 1913, it gained an annex in 1945, and today it remains a hub of neighborhood activity. Stately on its quiet and well-kept Bronzeville block, it bears a plaque describing it as “an important center of community life” that offered housing and job training for “new arrivals from the South during the ‘Great Migration’ of African-Americans in the first decades of the 20th century.” In a perfect world, there would be a second plaque below it: “Sonny Rollins slept here.”
Rollins, who’s a few days from his 78th birthday and makes his home in a small town in upstate New York, is often called the greatest living saxophonist in jazz. He opens this year’s Jazz Fest in spectacular style on Thursday, with a free concert in Millennium Park. In the 50s, like many of his peers, he extended and expanded upon the innovations of Charlie Parker, but it was Rollins who most clearly showed how bebop, a product of the 40s, could respond to a new decade without losing its original soul. Like James Dean, his music spoke of cool rebellion; like Mort Sahl, it did so with wry commentary and wit. In the late 50s, working with such towering figures as Monk, Roach, and Coltrane, Rollins emerged as perhaps the genre’s most innovative structuralist.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Determined to make the cure stick, Rollins left Lexington and went not to his New York stomping grounds but directly to Chicago, which had appealed to him on previous visits. In fact he’d been here just before entering Lexington. “I was ‘carrying the stick,’” he says. “You know what that means? It means you’re homeless, like a hobo; I was sleeping in parked cars during the winter and all this stuff. I was doing very nefarious things.” But despite all that, Rollins says, “I loved Chicago. It was so earthy. There were a lot of musicians, a lot of music going on—24-hour jam-session clubs, all this kind of thing. I found a home there.”
“When I got there, I saw a lot of old friends, a lot of the guys: ‘Hey Sonny, let’s go get high,’” Rollins says. “I had to be strong enough to withstand that. And that’s where I faced my Goliath. It was hard, man, because some of these guys knew I was not that far from using drugs. It was one of these biblical-like temptations. I resisted—my palms got sweaty and everything, but I resisted. I went back to my custodial job, but I thought, ‘I gotta get back into music.’ It was very difficult, because to tell the truth, I just escaped that first time; I just was able to resist all my friends offering these free drugs. But I thought, ‘I’m a musician and I have to be strong enough to be around drugs,’ because that was the scene.”
The next time Rollins came to Chicago, in the summer of 1956, it was as a member of the Brown-Roach quintet. Clifford Brown and the band’s pianist, Richie Powell, were driving in from Philadelphia with Powell’s wife, Nancy, but they never made it; Rollins, Roach, and bassist George Morrow had already arrived here when they learned that the car carrying the others had gone over an embankment in the rain, killing all three. Rollins briefly stayed on in Roach’s band, then left to lead his own groups.
