In 1959, at the height of his fame, Sonny Rollins stopped performing and went off to practise alone on the Williamsburg Bridge in New York. He filled a notebook while he was there and was still adding to it fifty years later.
Rollins died on 25 May 2026 at his home in Woodstock, New York, aged 95. These five Sonny Rollins books are the best way into what he was doing on that bridge, and into everything before and after it.
Four of the five are about his life and music. The last is for players.
1. Saxophone Colossus: The Life and Music of Sonny Rollins — Aidan Levy (2022)
The definitive biography, and the place to start. Based on more than 200 interviews with Rollins himself, family members, friends, and collaborators, as well as Rollins’ extensive personal archive, it is the comprehensive portrait of the man as saxophonist, composer, civil rights activist, and environmentalist.
It covers his early career alongside Bud Powell, Miles Davis, and Monk; his time on Rikers Island; his battle with heroin addiction; the famous two-year sabbatical on the Williamsburg Bridge; and his later years studying at an ashram in India. Winner of the American Book Award in 2023 and longlisted for the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award, it is the most thorough biography of him by some distance.
At 784 pages it’s a serious commitment. For Rollins fans, it’s essential.
2. The Notebooks of Sonny Rollins — edited by Sam V.H. Reese (2024)
In 1959, Rollins stepped back from performing and recording to begin a new regime of musical exploration — the period when he famously practised for hours, sometimes all through the night, on the Williamsburg Bridge. This was also the moment when he started a notebook that would become a trusted companion for the next five decades — not a diary so much as a place to ponder art, life, and his own search for meaning.
Published by New York Review Books in April 2024 and edited by jazz critic and scholar Sam V.H. Reese, the notebooks mingle lists of chores and rehearsal routines with ruminations on nightclub culture, racism, and the inner life. One passage stops you cold: “I face the startling and intriguing reality that there is within me a force working hard for my own destruction, even as I try to improve.”
A slender book, but an intimate one — the closest thing we have to Rollins unfiltered.
3. Saxophone Colossus: A Portrait of Sonny Rollins — Bob Blumenthal & John Abbott (2010)
Published to mark Rollins’ 80th birthday, this is a different kind of book entirely — part photo essay, part critical appreciation. John Abbott, Rollins’ photographer of choice for over 20 years, contributes around 90 photographs capturing the saxophonist at home and at work. Bob Blumenthal, a jazz critic who chronicled Rollins for nearly four decades, structures his five essays around each track from the classic 1956 album Saxophone Colossus, using them as entry points into Rollins’ motivations and methods across his entire career.
A beautiful object as much as a book, and a fine introduction for anyone coming to Rollins for the first time.
4. Open Sky: Sonny Rollins and His World of Improvisation — Eric Nisenson (2000)
Predating Levy’s exhaustive biography by more than two decades, Nisenson’s book was the first serious attempt to document Rollins’ life and music at length. Based on extensive interviews conducted in the late 1990s, it contains a remarkable amount of Rollins’ own voice — his thoughts on escaping heroin, his desire to remain humble in the face of success, and his restless musical philosophy.
Less comprehensive than Saxophone Colossus, but a valuable companion to it, and essential for anyone who wants to hear Rollins think out loud.
5. Sonny Rollins Omnibook — Hal Leonard
Strictly for musicians, but worth including. Published by Hal Leonard, the Omnibook contains 50 note-for-note transcriptions of Rollins’ most iconic recorded solos — complete with chord symbols, metronome markings, and recording references. Titles include “St. Thomas”, “Oleo”, “Doxy”, “Airegin” and “There Will Never Be Another You”.
If you want to understand what made Rollins extraordinary from the inside out — the wit, the space, the melodic logic that made him unlike anyone else — this is where you go.
Which other Sonny Rollins books would you add to this list? Let us know in the comments below.
