That meant a new contract with RCA and a streak of adventurous recordings. But before long, he started hearing that same “inner voice” that told him to scale the bridge. “I was a little disillusioned,” says Rollins of the music business at the time. “Jazz is dead every 10 years. That was part of it.” He’d also grown curious about meditation, yoga, Rosicrucianism and “things of the spirit.” In 1970, he checked in at an ashram near Bombay.
“I took this trip because I wanted to find out for myself — and sort of be in the atmosphere and the ambiance — where all these people supposedly made all of these great revelations,” he says. But Rollins’s revelation couldn’t have been more simple.
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Sunday night’s Kennedy Center Honors offered tributes to Meryl Streep, Neil Diamond, Barbara Cook, Sonny Rollins and Yo-Yo Ma.
“I have a lot of trouble meditating,’’ he says. “A lot of these practices have to do with meditating and trying to get away from ordinary life. The swami said, ‘Well, Sonny, when you’re playing your horn, you’re meditating.’ A light came on in my head. ‘Wow, that’s true!’ It seems like it might be obvious, but some of these things, even though they seem to be so plain, you need something to sort of light them up.”
Rollins says he’s kept the lights on ever since. “I was playing and I was thinking positive thoughts and I was really getting deep inside of my music,” he says. “Which is really what I do when I improvise, anyway. The idea is to get into a subconscious state.”
* * *
He kept leaping from one world to another. After the towers of the World Trade Center crumbled not far from his apartment building, Rollins and his wife, Lucille, moved to a farm in Upstate New York. When Lucille died in 2004, he found comfort in endless rehearsing and founded a label to release his recordings. Today, Rollins lives both at home and on the road. His current tour ends on Sunday at the Kennedy Center, where he’ll be given a medal with a rainbow ribbon hopefully big enough to lasso the cumulonimbus of hair atop his head.
Rollins doesn’t see the recognition as any kind of trophy or happy ending. It simply allows his work to go on. “I might get better jobs so I can continue my life and what I’m doing,” he says of receiving the Kennedy Center award. “Pursuing that musical thing that I’m looking for and, at the same time, representing this great music that is so much bigger than I am.”
It’s a pursuit that has no endpoint.
“I’ll never realize perfection — I realize that,” Rollins says. “But I want to get closer than where I am now.”
See the rest of this year’s Kennedy Center Honorees:
• Meryl Streep | photos
• Neil Diamond | photos
• Yo-Yo Ma| photos
• Barbara Cook | photos
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