Jazz legend Sonny Rollins dies aged 95

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1. Sonny Rollins, Giant of the Jazz Saxophone, Is Dead at 95

Sonny Rollins, Giant of the Jazz Saxophone, Is Dead at 95

Even by the standards of a music that prizes individuality, he stood out, as both a musician and a personality.


Sonny Rollins in 2006. He flirted with the avant-garde, jazz-rock fusion and other styles over the years, but he was ultimately unclassifiable. Stephanie Berger for The New York Times

By Peter Keepnews
May 25, 2026

Sonny Rollins, whose forceful and imaginative approach to the tenor saxophone made him one of the dominant jazz musicians of the post-World War II era, died at his home in Woodstock, N.Y., on Monday. He was 95. ... His death was announced in a statement from his publicist, Terri Hinte.

Even by the standards of a music that prizes individuality, Mr. Rollins stood out, as both a musician and a personality. ... In the late 1940s, when most young jazz saxophonists favored a light tone with minimal vibrato, he developed a fat, full-bodied sound that was a throwback to the older style of Coleman Hawkins, the first great tenor saxophonist in jazz. In the late 1950s, when his career as a bandleader was just getting off the ground, Mr. Rollins abruptly began a hiatus that lasted more than two years — mostly, he explained later, because he was not satisfied with the quality of his playing.

Mr. Rollins came of age when a new kind of jazz known as bebop was in ascendance, and from the start his playing was suffused with bebop’s harmonic sophistication and rhythmic daring. To classify him as a bebopper, however, would be an oversimplification. ... Over the years he flirted with the avant-garde, jazz-rock fusion and other styles. But with his ferocious energy, his penchant for playing the unexpected note at the unexpected moment, and his unusual sound — sometimes harsh and mocking, sometimes lush and romantic — he was ultimately unclassifiable.


Mr. Rollins performing at the Detroit Jazz Festival in 2012. He played his last concert that year; two years later, he stopped playing altogether. Jack Vartoogian/Getty Images

“The music I play is too big to be put into any one style,” he told an interviewer in 2002. “Every time I pick up the horn, I want to hear something fresh.” ... That commitment to freshness was the key to Mr. Rollins’s approach, and to his appeal. The jazz critic Francis Davis wrote in 2000 that Mr. Rollins “is the greatest living jazz improviser, and if we redefine virtuosity to include improvisational cunning as well as instrumental finesse (as we probably should when discussing this music), he may be the greatest virtuoso ever produced by jazz.”

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