It’s not about your music—it’s about what makes your music your music. You’ve got to have a feeling like that. You have to have a reason for your music. Have something besides the technical. Make it for something. Make it for kindness, make it for peace, whatever it is. You know what I mean?
Sonny Rollins
Paul Holdengräber: He [Sun Ra] said something that I think you could expand on, and I’d love you to. He said, “Jazz, in all stages of its development, had to do with freedom. Otherwise it wouldn’t be jazz.”
Sonny Rollins: Absolutely. Absolutely. That’s so true. Wow, that’s very profound. And that’s why jazz is so different in a sense. Because when I think about jazz, you have to think about the social aspect of jazz being played in a society in which it was reviled and looked down upon. And the guys who played it broke through so many of the barriers of the day. You know, the blues guys, they played and everybody accepted them. Jazz, we had to break through things that were already set up. Where you’re not supposed to play this technical. We had to do that. You say think about the great blues players, well, they played what they played and everybody accepted them for that and that was it. They didn’t have to break through anything. They did what they did.
Jazz is a music of freedom, as Sun Ra said, because we had to create. We had to fight. We had to struggle. We had to break down barriers. And that’s why jazz has something special. Something quite a bit different about jazz than there is in some of these other black music. It encompasses all of them, of course, but it has that element too of bravery and struggle and freedom as you’re playing and having to do that. That was freedom. That entailed freedom, to even attempt to do what the jazz people were doing.
(From The Quarantine Tapes 130: Sonny Rollins)
Sonny Rollins website