Get the latest news and updates from Dawn
NEW YORK: Sonny Rollins, the “Saxophone Colossus” whose hard-charging yet flowingly meditative works made him the last in a golden era of jazz greats, died on Monday. He was 95.
“It is with deep sorrow and profound love that we announce the passing of Sonny Rollins,” a post to his social media page said, adding that he “died this afternoon at his home in Woodstock, NY.”
A constantly evolving creative force, Rollins found in jazz a means of social and spiritual commentary, with his tenor sax expressing the hopes of African Americans in the civil rights movement, the grief of the United States after the Sept 11 attacks, and the mystical path he found on extended retreats in India and Japan.
The Harlem-born Rollins — recognisable in his later years for a shock of white hair — was one of a handful of saxophone players who defined the instrument, a pantheon that includes Charlie Parker, Coleman Hawkins and John Coltrane, with whom he had an affectionate but complicated relationship.
