The Bridge - Sonny Rollins (1962)

"Between 1953 and 1959, the jazz saxophonist Sonny Rollins released twenty-one full-length albums. This kind of prolificacy seems absurd now, during an era in which new musical material is meted out on a preordained, market-friendly schedule—a few weeks of recording, a year or two of touring, a cashed paycheck, repeat. But music rushed out of Rollins, like an overfed river. Miles Davis described Rollins’s output circa 1954 as 'something else. Brilliant.' In his book 'Black Music,' the critic and poet Amiri Baraka—then writing as LeRoi Jones—called his music 'staggering.' Baraka suggested that Rollins, along with John Coltrane and the pianist Cecil Taylor, was doing the necessary work 'to propose jazz again as the freest of Western music.' Then, in 1959, Rollins stopped. He was twenty-eight years old. According to 'Who Is Sonny Rollins,' a short BBC documentary from 1968, Rollins—who had been addicted to heroin in the late nineteen-forties and early fifties but sweated it out at the Lexington Narcotics Farm, a combination federal prison and rehabilitation facility, in Lexington, Kentucky—was exhausted by what he understood as a culture of nonstop degradation. Unsavory promoters, seedy clubs,'the whiskey.' ..."
New Yorker: A Quest to Rename the Williamsburg Bridge for Sonny Rollins
W - The Bridge (Sonny Rollins album)
NY Times: Sax and Sky by Sonny Rollins
Discogs
amazon: The Bridge, Black Music - LeRoi Jones
vimeo: Sonny Rollins with Paul Jeffrey 28:16
YouTube: The Bridge (Live)
YouTube: The Bridge (1962) (Full Album), SONNY ROLLINS on Monk and The Bridge

2012 September: The Singular Sound of Sonny Rollins, 2012 December: Village Vanguard, 2015 September: Rollins Plays for Bird (1957), 2016 February: Saxophone Colossus (1956), 2016 May: Plus 4 (1956), 2017 June: Inside Sonny Rollins’s Jazz Archive, Headed Home to Harlem, 2018 April: Tenor Madness (1956), 2017 May: Moving Out (1954)