The Last of the Jazz Titans

In August 1958, Esquire brought 58 jazz musicians together on a Harlem stoop for a photo shoot that became known as Harlem 1958. The image gathered talent spanning swing and bebop, including Count Basie, Gene Krupa, Charles Mingus, and Dizzy Gillespie. The musicians were assembled just as rock and roll was beginning to dominate pop music, leaving jazz to the margins. The last living participant, tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins, died at age 95. Rollins began recording in 1949 and later played with major figures such as Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Coleman Hawkins, and John Coltrane. His powerful sound and sharp intellect made him an embodiment of jazz, with famous works like “Doxy,” “Oleo,” and “St. Thomas.”

"In August 1958, Esquire invited 58 jazz musicians to meet on a stoop in Harlem for a photo shoot. The resulting picture, now known as Harlem 1958, became legendary for collecting some of the genre's greatest talents, stretching from the swing era (Count Basie, Gene Krupa) to the peaks of bebop (Charles Mingus, Dizzy Gillespie). The assembled musicians may not have realized that rock and roll was on the verge of taking over pop music, thus sweeping jazz to the margins-but the fact that it was made this photo a historic snapshot."

"The last living participant of that shoot was the tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins, who died on Monday at the age of 95. By the end of his life, no jazz musician of his importance was left-but then again, hardly anyone ever reached Rollins's colossal stature. Rollins made his first recordings in 1949, when he was 18 years old, and over the next several decades he played with nearly every modern great: Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Coleman Hawkins, John Coltrane."

"Rollins didn't just make some of the genre's finest recordings; his muscular sound and intense intellect turned him into an embodiment of jazz itself. "He may be the greatest virtuoso that jazz has ever produced," the influential critic Francis Davis once wrote. A native New Yorker, Rollins emerged onto the local scene during the '40s, which is commonly viewed as the moment when jazz went from mass entertainment to something resembling a finer art."

"To hear Rollins in a concert hall, as was typical late in his career, could feel torturous, because his music made you want to stand up and move. Unlike many modern jazz compositions, his were hummable earworms-the sleazy strut of "Doxy"; the syncopated, funky "Oleo." His most famous piece, "St. Thomas," is a calypso-influenced number that epitomizes jazz's cosmopolitanism. Named for his mother's home in the Virgin Islands, the tune comes from a Caribbean lullaby she sang him, which, in"

Read at The Atlantic