News of the passing of Sonny Rollins arrived on Monday through a statement posted on his official website, describing the loss “with deep sorrow and profound love”. His publicist, Terri Hinte, later confirmed the announcement.

Rollins, widely known as “the Saxophone Colossus”, died at his home in Woodstock, New York, on Monday afternoon. No cause of death was disclosed.

The statement also included a reflection from Rollins on mortality and creativity, in which he said, “I think when the creative person ends, he continues in the next existence. I’m a person who believes this life isn’t the be-all and end-all of everything. A spiritual person doesn’t feel like that.”

Across a career that stretched from the late-1940s, Rollins recorded more than 60 albums and collaborated with leading figures including Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane. He was among the final surviving major names of the bebop era, a movement that reshaped jazz into a more exploratory and expressive art form.

His approach to performance was defined by strong melodic invention that he would stretch, fragment and rebuild during improvisation. Saxophonist Branford Marsalis once described him as “the greatest improviser in the history of jazz”, placing him alongside Louis Armstrong. In 2011, Barack Obama awarded him the National Medal of Arts, noting that Rollins had inspired him to “take risks that I might not otherwise have taken”.

Born Walter Theodore Rollins in New York City in 1930, he grew up in Harlem, where his grandmother gave him the nickname Sonny. His parents came from St. Croix and St. Thomas, Virgin Islands. He began learning saxophone at age seven, influenced by a musical family and early jazz figures such as Louis Jordan and Fats Waller. While still in school, he played with musicians who would later become prominent, including Jackie McLean, Kenny Drew and Art Taylor, and soon performed with established artists such as Bud Powell and JJ Johnson.

Rollins later described his artistic approach as instinct-driven, saying, “I’m going with my feelings more than my brain.” Miles Davis wrote that he became “a legend, almost a god to a lot of the younger musicians”.

His early career was disrupted by heroin addiction, and in 1950 he committed armed robbery to support his habit. He served 10 months in Rikers Island prison before overcoming addiction through rehabilitation in 1955.

Sobriety marked a period of intense productivity. He released his debut album in 1953 and followed it with landmark recordings including Saxophone Colossus (1956), Way Out West (1957) and Freedom Suite (1958), the last of which engaged with themes linked to the civil rights movement. He worked with Dizzy Gillespie, Max Roach and Art Blakey during this period.

In 1959 he stepped away from public performance, later practising for hours each day on the Williamsburg Bridge. That period informed his 1962 return with The Bridge. He also took a break between 1969 and 1971 to study yoga, philosophy and meditation in India. Later decades saw experiments with fusion, film music and popular genres, including contributions to the Rolling Stones’ Tattoo You in 1981

Rollins retired in 2014 due to pulmonary fibrosis. Reflecting on his life in 2017, he said he had come to appreciate his career despite its difficulties, noting gratitude for the chance to pursue music.

He is remembered as one of jazz’s most influential improvisers, an artist who repeatedly pushed his work beyond established limits while reshaping the language of modern jazz.

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