Legendary jazz saxophonist and Hudson Valley resident Sonny Rollins will be remembered tomorrow night in Saugerties.
Documentary filmmaker Robert Muggy will screen his 1986 film "Saxophone Colossus." It features footage of Rollins performing live at Opus 40 - which is also where the movie is being shown. I spoke with Muggy ahead of the screening.
INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT
SAM DINGMAN: You don't just capture Sonny playing with... I would say the word I would use is abandon, just complete abandon. You know, his head is tilted back, he's blowing these long whole tone notes. But there is also this moment of great legend where, in a fit of improvisational vigor, he jumps off the stage.
ROBERT MUGGE: Yeah! Well, as you watch in the film, he's getting sort of more and more anxious as he paces back and forth. Ultimately, as you say, he jumped six feet down off of this upper ledge, ended up falling on his back. We later learned he had broken his heel. He didn't move at first, and suddenly he lifts his saxophone to his lips as he's lying there, and he starts to play "Autumn Nocturne."
Before the concert in Socrates, he had the saxophone re-lacquered, and he said, when you do that, it can change the tone. You can be playing, and you go to play a vowel and out comes a consonant. He was having a nervous breakdown. He could think of no way to stop the pain other than simply to jump.
SAM DINGMAN: That is remarkable. Thank you for sharing that, Bob. I mean, it reminds me of something that he says in the film, which is he's talking about his physical relationship with his saxophone, and he's sitting next to his wife...
SONNY ROLLINS: The saxophone is closer to me...I hate to say, it's almost closer than Lucille. But she knows this already, so she's not jealous, you know. Before I was married to Lucille, though, I did have problems with girlfriends and my saxophone, I must say.
SAM DINGMAN: What did that moment suggest to you about him as a person and a performer?
ROBERT MUGGE: Sonny was so devoted to increasing his level of craft and art, he spent his entire life with this search for what he would consider a perfect use of the saxophone, of song structuring and soloing, and all this. And always claimed he never quite got there. What you quoted is an indication of just how important his ongoing research and exploration of the saxophone meant to him.
SAM DINGMAN: Yeah, well, we see him at the very end, as the crowd is applauding, he walks over to the piano, and he leans his arm on the edge of the piano, and he grimaces ever so slightly. And you see him kind of favoring his foot. It struck me as a moment of self-awareness, like, "Oh, I might have gone a little too far on this one."
ROBERT MUGGE: Well, I think you've actually sort of tapped into something else important, you know. I open the film with something he said about how prior to a performance, he thinks about all the different things he could do, he fills his mind with all the possibilities, and then he stops. He goes out for the performance, and he just lets it flow. He creates this sort of almost trance-like meditation-like performance approach. And so what you see, I think, is him kind of coming out of it.
SAM DINGMAN: So Bob, before I let you go, I have to ask you, the performance of Sonny's concerto for tenor saxophone that you capture, that he performed in Japan, is so gorgeous. Was that ever released as its own record, or does it only exist in your film?
ROBERT MUGGE: When Sonny got to hear the whole recording, he decided there were two movements he wasn't satisfied with, and he asked that we not include those in the film. And even later, late in his life, when I was getting ready to release the latest Blu-ray of "Saxophone Colossus," I offered to, if he wanted, just for the historical record, to include the audio of the whole concerto on there. So he said, "Well, let me hear it again."
So I sent him a copy again, and for some reason he was so upset about what he heard, because nothing ever ever reached his own personal standards, that he actually got mad at me, and not only wouldn't let me include it, but didn't even want to talk to me again after that.
SAM DINGMAN: Wow. Well, I mean that makes me extra grateful that we have your film, but it also strikes me in the vein that we've been talking about today as such a quintessential Sonny Rollins story.
ROBERT MUGGE: Never totally satisfied with anything.
