Always read the album notes, kids. The cover of The Bridge features a rather impassive Sonny Rollins waging a silent war against a gravitational force that seems to affect only human hair. But the back of the album elucidates the literal and metaphorical allusions the title intends to evoke—and that is a jazz heritage minute worth expounding upon.

Background: Rollins graduates high school in 1948, and within about five years he had spent ten months in Rikers while still managing to record with Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, and Thelonious Monk. In 1957, he releases Saxophone Colossus—which is immediately hailed as a massive critical success—popularizes a new, piano-less instrumentation for jazz, and makes his Carnegie Hall debut.¹

So what does 1959 hold for the ever-ambitious Rollins? Naught but those two bitter mints: disillusionment and disappointment. In his own words from a later New Yorker interview:

People are not doing things as well as they can do them any more. The par of products is not high enough, and in 1959 I felt that way about my playing. The extraneous things had gotten in the way of it. I didn’t have time to practice, and I wanted to study more. I was playing before more and more people, and not being able to do my best. There was no doubt that I had to leave the scene, and it was just a matter of when I could bring it about. I’d lost the ability to play what I wanted to play every night without the interference of emotionalism. I was filled with question marks.

A heady self-assessment indeed from one of the most influential saxophonists in jazz at the time; and one not yet 30 years old, at that. At first, Rollins honed his craft in the solitude of his apartment, but after recognizing that neighbours have only limited patience for experimental saxophone (even of the world-class variety) Rollins decamped. In what one presumes was a moment of electric clarity, Rollins realized that the Williamsburg Bridge (which connects Manhattan and Brooklyn) was all the studio he needed. There he spent the better part of two years hiding in plain sight while practicing up to 16 hours a day.

I started walking over the bridge, and I found it’s a superb place to practice. Night or day. You’re up over the whole world. You can look down on the whole scene. There is the skyline, the water, the harbor. It’s a beautiful scene, a panoramic scene. The bridge offers certain advantages that can’t be duplicated indoors. You can blow as loud as you want. It makes you think. The grandeur gives you perspective. And people never bother you. I saw the same people almost every day. Sometimes they stopped and listened, sometimes they just went by.

There's the story of The Bridge, but what of the music itself? Well, it's interesting: remember, the whole point of this two-year hiatus—at the height of Rollins's rising popularity!—was for him to catch up to peers like Miles Davis and Ornette Coleman, who were laying the groundwork of what jazz could look like beyond hard bop. Under those circumstances, one might expect Rollins's return to mark a stark departure from his earlier work, but that's not really the case: The Bridge plays it straight, keeping a tight focus on a small ensemble. Rollins's signature rhythmic experimentations are very much present, but the end result is far from avant-garde. I found that surprising; we first heard Rollins on Sonny Meets Hawk! (released a year after The Bridge), and that album pushes the boundaries of what one can tunefully do with a saxophone—I was expecting to hear some of that on The Bridge as well. When it comes to specific tracks, my favourite ones this week were the fastest (as any semi-frequent reader might have guessed): "John S." and "The Bridge." The end of the former features stellar interplay between sax, guitar, and drums, while in the latter the bass always grabs my attention with non-stop runs up and down throughout.

Of course, Rollins isn't the only musician playing on The Bridge. Just like last week, one of the most striking features of the album is the supremely sublime electric guitar. And also just like last week, the particular guitarist responsible is Jim Hall—and wait a minute, he was also the guitarist on "The Train and the River‽" Alright, Jim: you are well on your way towards earning the illustrious "Fifty Weeks of Jazz – Most Influential Sideman" award.²

So: The Bridge represents not only the literal setting of Rollins's first dramatic self-isolation³, it is also the metaphorical bridge between two formative periods of this pioneering saxophonist's career.⁴ Given Rollins's close association with the Williamsburg bridge and his ensuing cultural influence, some people have called for making that near-metonym official by renaming the bridge after Sonny (who is still alive today—he'll be 95 in two weeks' time!). You can find out more about that initiative on their website.

Favourite track: The Bridge