Sonny’s crush

Brief thoughts on the childhood memories of a saxophone colossus.

I’ve been thinking about Sonny Rollins’ childhood crush for a straight week. He’d been thinking about it for seven decades.

I was interviewing the jazz dignitary — who died last Monday at 95 — over the telephone in 2011, and we were talking about all the big stuff. About the fundamental nature of jazz improvisation, which Rollins happily demystified as trial-and-error motion: “A step back … a step forward … a step or two to the side.” About the storied years of nights he spent practicing his saxophone in solitude on the Williamsburg Bridge: “I used to blow my horn back at the boats when the boats would blow … This was heaven.” About the meaninglessness of music when it becomes a business: “Jazz is dead every ten years.” And about the significance of music when it becomes a spiritual pursuit: “I’ll never realize perfection — I realize that.”

But based on the pitch of his magnificently squeaky voice, I’d say Rollins was most excited to talk about the sunny afternoon he saw Marjorie Brown — a 21-year-old woman whose name he learned god only knows how — sitting on the bandstand during an Erskine Hawkins set that Rollins had wandered his way into when he was 11 years old. The concert was held on Carr’s Beach in Annapolis, Maryland, where Rollins was spending the summer with his father, a chief petty officer in the U.S. Navy. It was probably 1942. Dud Bascomb had joined Hawkins on the trumpet. Paul Bascomb and Julian Dash each played tenor saxophone. And while Rollins remembered his ears locking into the sound of those splendid horns, his eyes stayed locked on Brown, a woman he’d previously seen floating around town. “The implications were that she was friendly with the band,” Rollins told me. “So that crushed my heart, you know?”

I felt dizzied by the intimacy of this memory, even though Rollins had probably shared it plenty of times before. I’ve found at least one interview — with Bob Belden in DownBeat circa 1997 — where Brown’s name pops up. Still, nearly 15 years after the publication of that magazine article, the memory of Marjorie Brown remained hot and vivid in Rollins’ mind. I could’ve sworn I heard him blushing through the telephone.

My enduring regret is that I failed to steer our chat back to the contact point between improvisational jazz and childhood crushes. There had to be one, right? The way Rollins was explaining it to me, improvisation was lifelike, and through years of listening to his music, I’ve since come to understand that it’s something we’re doing all the time. Taking a walk is improvisation. Folding the laundry is improvisation. A game of basketball is improvisation. A lover’s spat is improvisation. In each instance, we’re calling on our twinned resources — experience and intuition — to react to the present moment.

That’s what makes the case of Sonny Rollins and Marjorie Brown so interesting. There’s very little experience behind a childhood crush. It’s almost entirely a thing of intuition, of wonder — a decision that’s somehow been made for you. Whether you’re a kid with a curious heart or an adult with a bruised one, what are you supposed to do when you suddenly feel something so unknowable, so undeniable? Maybe take a step back. A step forward. A step or two to the side.