When I started this blog in January, I was interested in giving myself a space to find organic musical connections outside of the flood of new albums that release faster than can be contextualized. For years I had found the flow of the new too fast and the historical archives too vast to engage with. What I can keep up with is music that comes into my life through friends, circumstances, and coincidences. It is the latter category which brings Sonny Rollin’s The Bridge into my life.

Last weekend I attended Newport Jazz Fest for the fourth year. It functions partly as a way to learn to appreciate jazz through immersion and also as a yearly family vacation that fits the venn diagram of everyone’s interest. Little by little I have started seeing the immensity of the genre- the far out music theory, the virtuosic playing, the skill of listening and playing simultaneously during improvisation, the vital ways it shaped other music. This year had newcomers like SML which push jazz in a modular synth and krautrock direction alongside soul-stirring legends like Charles Lloyd.

When I got back home from the trip, I felt a strong urge to walk across the Williamsburg Bridge, which connects Manhattan to Brooklyn over the East River. It is a beautiful stroll that always helps me clear my mind and appreciate the immensity of the city against the water. On the train ride back I saw a article in n+1 written by Nate Wooley about the jazz saxophonist Sonny Rollins, someone I had always meant to check out. I had no idea that from 1959 to 1961 Rollins took a break from recording and performing and went to that very bridge every single day to practice saxophone for hours!!

When I got home I gave his album based off of this time, aptly named The Bridge, a listen. At first it seemed like any other jazz album that might be playing in the background somewhere, but I let myself settle in and hear his years of searching while looking at the same water I had just peered into. I thought about what other music was being performed in America in 1962, stuff like I Want To Hold Your Hand by the Beatles. I appreciated the delicate ways his melodies threaded through space and the expert accompaniment the guitar layed down making the complex sound simple. I’m sure someone has told me to listen to this album in the past yet it took the actual living of life before it sank in.