Sax appeal

More than an utterly distinctive tenor saxophonist, more than a master modern-jazz improviser, Sonny Rollins is one of the great surviving architects of the discipline itself. And if critics disagree on many things, they all agree that Rollins' medium is the live stage, far more than the recording studio.

Arriving at the Kimmel Center on Friday, not long after his 79th birthday, Rollins will be in his element. Hair and beard frosted white, he'll chase the elusive ideal he helped to invent - what the late critic Martin Williams called "spontaneous orchestration."

"A lot of my material is formed in performance," Rollins says, speaking of new tunes in the works, an impending European tour and, ironically, a likely studio album next year. Despite once telling a journalist, "I hate recording," Rollins isn't about to abandon the challenge.

"I'm getting to be able to function in a studio," he says by phone from his home in Upstate New York. "After all, I began recording in 1948 and I was playing in studios then, and we didn't even think about it."

Indeed, Rollins' early catalog is littered with such undisputed studio-made classics as Saxophone Colossus, Way Out West, Freedom Suite, and The Bridge. His output from the '70s on - including the just-reissued Reel Life (1982) - proved far more uneven, although Sonny, Please (2006), the maiden release from his own Doxy label, stands up well alongside the recent live albums Without a Song: The 9/11 Concert and Road Shows, Vol. 1.

At his best, Rollins can pour forth in "tempests of sustained exhilaration," as critic Gary Giddins once wrote. Quotations such as "Oh! Susanna" might crop up in the oddest places, conveying not just humor but sometimes jaw-dropping insight. And to this day, Rollins' cadenzas - unaccompanied, out-of-tempo showpieces, usually at the end of a ballad - remain unequaled in virtuosity and imagination, as made clear on "More Than You Know" and "Easy Living" from Road Shows.

Apart from an extremely rare trio engagement with bassist Christian McBride and drummer Roy Haynes at Carnegie Hall in 2007 (it included "Some Enchanted Evening," the final track on Road Shows), Rollins generally works with one of a number of different sextet arrangements. Prominent members include the fine Chicago guitarist Bobby Broom, compelling trombonist Clifton Anderson (Rollins' nephew), and old friend and ally Bob Cranshaw, who played upright bass on some of Rollins' early records but appears these days on electric. At the Kimmel, new member Sammy Figueroa will replace Kimati Dinizulu on percussion.

Rollins remains vague about the forthcoming studio project, but offers a tantalizing bone: "I'm liable to go back to trio at some point. I'm not sure - I might try to get Christian and Roy together again and do it that way. Right now I'm figuring out what I want to do musically, and then it's possible I might not use my working band on the upcoming CD." A studio session with tenor-bass-drums, the format that yielded some of Rollins' groundbreaking work in the late '50s, would be noteworthy, to say the least.

Theodore Walter Rollins is a Harlem native, but he recalls formative experiences in Philadelphia, the city that launched the careers of fellow tenor greats such as John Coltrane, Jimmy Heath, and Benny Golson.

"Philadelphia was a very important part of my early career," he says, citing his tenure in the historic Clifford Brown-Max Roach Quintet. (Brown, from Delaware, was essentially a Philadelphian.)

Pianist "McCoy Tyner was still in school, and he used to come see us. [Trumpeter] Lee Morgan, I met him in Philly, he was in there listening to Clifford, you know. I remember he had his mouthpiece - he started playing on his mouthpiece to show me what he could do. We used to play at Pep's Showbar, and another place out on Wyalusing. We had weeklong engagements at the Showboat; that was really our base.

"I spent a lot of time with [bassist] Percy Heath, who was on a lot of my earlier records with Miles [Davis], so I'd go down to the Heath family's house, at that time on Federal Street. It was a very familial feeling with the Heaths in particular."

As he worked alongside nearly every legend in jazz - Coltrane, Coleman Hawkins, Bud Powell, Charlie Parker, Davis, Thelonious Monk - Rollins took their innovations into his marrow and grew legendary as well, creating music full of drive, boundless melody, and an offhanded mastery of bepop vernacular. Along the way he composed his share of essential repertoire, including "Oleo," "Airegin," "Valse Hot," "Pent Up House," and "Doxy."

From the foundational bebop of The Amazing Bud Powell (1949) to the bracingly open-ended language of Our Man In Jazz (1963), featuring Ornette Coleman sidemen Don Cherry and Billy Higgins, Rollins' abiding concern has been individuality. This emerges in many aspects of his music, as in a continual return to calypso rhythms and themes, and in his often quirky personal style - the cowboy hat he wears on the Way Out West album cover, or the Mohawk haircut he sported for a time in the 1960s. Somehow he embodies the tradition while being a dogged modernizer (the Sonny Rollins iPhone app comes out in October).

In Giddins' apt phrase, "Rollins has been seriously challenged by only two saxophonists: John Coltrane briefly and himself eternally." In 1959, Rollins took off for two years to woodshed alone on the Williamsburg Bridge, and he talks as though he could do it again. "I'm still practicing every day, I'm still writing," he says. "I still see something else I'm trying to strive for. I'm hearing something a little more definitive in terms of my whole presentation, and I'm coming to a point where I'm beginning to get a little closer. There is light at the end of the tunnel."