Black Music Sunday is a weekly series highlighting all things Black music, with over 275 stories covering performers, genres, history, and more, each featuring its own vibrant soundtrack. I hope you’ll find some familiar tunes and perhaps an introduction to something new.

Welcome to another Black Music Sunday celebration. Today we celebrate the life and music of tenor saxophonist Walter Theodore Rollins, who you know as Sonny Rollins. Though he retired from performing in 2014 due to pulmonary fibrosis, his body of work, spanning decades, is impossible to cover in just one story. I’ll try to do the best I can.

In 2020, he talked to New York Times journalist David Marchese about his retirement:

You never made any formal retirement announcement. Did you ever want to say goodbye to the peop

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