1 1

The Notebooks of Sonny Rollins

The Notebooks of Sonny Rollins

by Sonny Rollins, edited and with an introduction by Sam V. H. Reese

$17.95
$17.95
American Literature Available as E-Book Biography & Memoir Visual & Performing Arts
Format
This title can be purchased from your favorite e-book retailer,
including  many independent booksellers.

Buy on Amazon   Buy on iBooks   Buy on Barnes&Noble

Sonny Rollins is one of the towering masters of American music, a virtuoso of the saxophone, and an unequaled improviser whose live performances are legendary and who has reshaped modern jazz time and time again over the course of a career lasting more than sixty years. A turning point in that legendary career came in 1959, when Rollins stepped back from performing and recording to begin a new regime of musical exploration, which saw him practicing for hours, sometimes all through the night, on the Williamsburg Bridge. This was also the moment when he started the notebook that would become a trusted companion in years to come—not a diary so much as a place to ponder art and life and his own search for meaning in words and in images.

At once quotidian and aphoristic, the notebooks mingle lists of chores and rehearsal routines with ruminations on nightclub culture, racism, and the conundrums of the inner life. And always there is the music—questions of embouchure, fingering, and technique; of harmony and dissonance; of his own and others’ art and the art of jazz. “Any definition,” Rollins insists, “which seeks to separate Johann Sebastian Bach from Miles Davis is defeating its own purpose of clarification. . . .The Musings of Miles is then the Bouncing of Bach both played against each other.”

Edited and introduced by the critic and jazz scholar Sam V.H. Reese, The Notebooks of Sonny Rollins provides an unequaled glimpse into the mind and workshop of a musical titan, as well as a wealth of insight and inspiration to readers.

Additional Book Information

Series: New York Review Books
ISBN: 9781681378268
Pages: 176
Publication Date:

Praise

Rollins pushed the art of melodic improvisation to transcendent new heights, his charismatic sound, his snaking melodies and his rhythmic liquidity ringing the changes as surely as Louis Armstrong had done thirty years earlier.... Rollins kept returning to the possibility of documenting his thoughts about music and other spin-off ideas inside a book.... Here are the workings-out for that never-completed book.
—Philip Clark, The Spectator

It is possible to imagine the jazz musician Sonny Rollins’s life as a novel, pitched between realism and surrealism in the manner of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man...He stares at his psyche as if in front of a full-length mirror. He fills the pages with lists — of books to read, of favorite songs, of possible titles for his own books. He deplores his impatience, and his lusting after women. He wants to be more punctual...Rollins was a true eccentric.
—Dwight Garner, The New York Times

An indispensable look into the mind and interior life of one of the most celebrated jazz musicians of all time.
—The Millions

Through his notebooks, Rollins emerges as a driven, humble, thoughtful, dedicated, persistent, and spiritual soul in search of a higher force through music.... [These are] illuminating diary entries by a jazz legend.
—Dave Szatmary, Library Journal

A welcome peek into the mind of the great jazz musician.... Reese, author of Blue Notes: Jazz, Literature and Loneliness, delves into the tenor saxophonist’s substantial archives in the New York Public Library, unearthing these fascinating notebooks. Divided into four chronological sections covering nearly 50 years, they capture how Rollins’ thinking about a wide range of subjects evolved.... Heady musical and philosophical stuff.
—Kirkus Reviews

Music critic and short story writer Reese celebrates tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins with ... the 93-year-old jazz legend’s personal notes spanning from 1959 to 2010. Individually precise, yet somewhat loosely arranged into four broad sections, Rollins’s undated jottings break down his practice routine in commentary that can be mundane or surprisingly philosophical.... [A] sense of the artist’s complicated internal life and nearly religious dedication to his craft comes through powerfully and poetically.... This will be a boon for Rollins’s myriad admirers.
—Publishers Weekly

The notebooks, edited by Sam V.H. Reese, are full of memorable riffs and insightful soliloquies.
—Dominic Green, The Wall Street Journal

View full details

  • Shopping for someone else but not sure what to give them? Give them the gift of choice with a New York Review Books Gift Card.

    Gift Cards 

  • A membership for yourself or as a gift for a special reader will promise a year of good reading.

    Join NYRB Classics Book Club 

  • Is there a book that you’d like to see back in print, or that you think we should consider for one of our series? Let us know!

    Tell us about it