Born September 7, 1930, in the midst of the Harlem Renaissance, Rollins grew up in the Sugar Hill section of Harlem and was exposed to early giants of jazz like Charlie Parker, Dizzie Gillespie and Bud Powell who were playing legendary venues like the Apollo and The Cotton Club.

When I was growing up there was so much music in Harlem,” says Rollins via telephone from his home in the Hudson Valley of upstate New York. “People like Fats Waller, the great jazz pianist, singer, and sort of comedian, in a way, but he was a really great musician. A bon vivant, I guess you could say. All the other people like Louis Armstrong and all the music I was blessed to hear growing up allowed me to imbibe the music through my pores just by living around there, and playing as a little boy around all of these historic places like The Cotton Club. I was really fortunate to have heard all of these people and assimilate the music and acquire a real love for it.”

A love which led him to join Bud Powell on a recording for Blue Note on August 9, 1949, which was released as The Amazing Bud Powell, Vol. 1. The lineup was stellar – Fats Navarro on trumpet, Tommy Potter on bass and Roy Haynes on drums. It was just the beginning. Soon after, he began a relationship with Miles Davis, which would endure for decades.

“I started playing with Miles in 1948 or ’49,” Rollins says. “We were opening for him at a place in the Bronx called the club 845. On Sundays they used to have jam sessions with a lot of the jazz stars, people like Dexter Gordon, Eddie Davis, Bud Powell, Miles Davis, J.J. Johnson. All of those guys would play jam sessions at the Club 845. I was jamming at a place called Minton’s Playhouse, and the guy who was putting on those sessions heard me there and offered me a job as an intermission act between the All-Stars. That was when Miles heard me, and then, of course, that was a big lift for my career. I was a big admirer of his and Charlie Parker as well. That started our relationship in the late ’40s. At that point I had just graduated high school which was in 1949.”

Rollins had attained this level without the benefit of a musical education.

“I had a high school education, but it wasn’t really a musical education,” he says. “All my life I’ve been trying to acquire more knowledge. I’ve been fortunate because I’ve been tutored by some of the great people that I’ve been around like Coleman Hawkins, Little Lester Young, Thelonious Monk and a lot of the older big musicians who took me under their wing. In a way that’s where I received a lot of my education.”

He built upon that foundation and has become one of the most influential alto-sax men of the bop era. At the time that jazz was swinging into be-bop, Rollins says those in the midst of its creation weren’t aware of the impact that they were having.

“At the time there wasn’t as much acceptance, and I put that word in quotes, as there is now in jazz. So the people that we are talking about were scuffling trying to get a job and enough money to support themselves and their families. They were going from job to job. So people didn’t really have a chance to ponder ‘Well, what ultimate impact is this music going to have on culture.’ It was just a really hard existence for most of these people.”

The South was, as Rollins put it, “conspicuous in its lack of support of jazz.” The music that America invented has had a tenuous existence until recent years, forcing many of the greatest of its creators to assume ex-pat status. The rest of the world accepted jazz as a legitimate art form long before the States did. “I watched a lot of my heroes die in squalid poverty, or not being recognized by the public at large,” says Rollins. He later went on to say that he is pleased that times have changed drastically since then.

Politics, Rollins says, play a major role in jazz, especially, for its inspirational value. Rollins’s most recent release is entitled Global Warming, and deals with the degradation of the environment which is extremely hot in his mind at the moment.

My new CD speaks to the environmental problem that we are facing,” says Rollins. “It’s a very pressing one that in many ways supersedes the ethnic problem we have in the States. Because this is going to be the destruction of the whole planet rather than the exclusion of one or another ethnic group in society. It threatens to be more of a disaster. It’s a political issue, and jazz has always had to contend with political issues. We have to try to address these issues in order to keep jazz a vital form of music. There is a big push to make jazz into a museum piece. In some ways I’m not against that. The things that Wynton Ultimately, Emerson is the type of college where the experimentation, diversity, and intellectual encouragement that I most desire composes the very environment of the school and cultivates the types of students who choose to attend. Marsalis and these guys have been doing has been good. Jazz needs to be respected and looked at in any way that brings it respect. However, it’s got to be alive music. It’s got to speak to issues.”

Over the years Rollins’s music has continued to evolve, making him one of the most viable jazz musicians alive. How has he been able to do it for the past 50 years?

“You have to be a person, at least I’ve got to be a person that isn’t stuck in one period,” he says. “It’s presented somewhat of an interesting paradox for me because people view me in terms of the be-bop period, for which I am very grateful for being associated with such a great period. I’ve always been a musician that considers myself to be a work in progress. I still practice on a regular basis and improve myself. I haven’t really felt as though I’ve found my niche, so to speak. I’m always looking for new things. There are new sounds going on in music as a result of the change in political times. The passage of time, with all things new things coming out, that’s what life is all about.”