THE COLOSSUS.(Sonny Rollins)(Saxophonists)

Not long ago, the jazz drummer Victor Lewis was hanging out at the Village Vanguard, and declared that he had finally decided what he wanted to be when he became an old man: Sonny Rollins. Lewis had recently performed with Rollins in Antibes. "Do you know that man stood up there and gave a three-and-a-half-hour concert and did most of the playing?" Lewis said. "He wasn't coasting or floating, either. He was deep in it, playing his ass off. That's surreal. Seventy-three years old, out in the hot sun, blowing a saxophone for that long--who can believe that?"

Rollins works at extremes. He is either astounding or barely all right. He hates cliches and signature phrases--"licks"--and refuses to play them. Consequently, for him there are no highly polished professional performances. When he's on, which is seven or eight times out of ten, Rollins--known as "the saxophone colossus"--seems immense, summoning the entire history of jazz, capable of blowing a hole through a wall. On his off nights, though, he can seem no more than another guy with a saxophone and a band, creeping through a gig. Those who hear him on such nights come away convinced that the Sonny Rollins of legend is long gone.

I've heard Rollins play many times during the past several years, and I've seen many versions of him. In an amphitheatre in Washington, D.C., a few summers ago, he was in good form, teasing the audience by embellishing familiar songs with new, invented melodies and fast themes. For an encore, he played "I'll Be Seeing You," a ballad turned swinger, and sent the notes soaring out over the crowd. Later, at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center, in Newark, he pulled out a song that very few in the audience would know, "Let's Start the New Year Right," which was played by Louis Armstrong, one of Rollins's musical heroes. ("He found the Rosetta stone. He could translate everything," Rollins has said of Armstrong. "He could find the good in the worst material.") Rollins's calypso "Global Warming" was shrieking and rhythmic; the low notes hit with a thud. He played his horn almost to the point of hyperventilating. On the song "Why Was I Born?," he came up with a distinct motive for each eight-bar section--a remarkable expression of the power of his idiom. Rollins was heard over the hill that night.

But when Rollins is faced with a young crowd he often resorts to banal calypso tunes, playing one after another. This was the case at the House of Blues in New Orleans one night a few years ago, when I went to hear him with a writer and pianist friend. My friend was so disgusted that he vowed never to take another chance on seeing Rollins live. "Sonny gets insecure in front of young people and doesn't have the confidence to depend on his swing," a musician who used to play regularly with Rollins told me. "He knows the kids can hear that calypso beat, and he gives it to them."

Since 1980, Rollins has made more than a dozen records in the studio, but unlike many of his fellow-titans on the tenor saxophone--Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, John Coltrane--he has realized his talent almost exclusively on the bandstand. His finest recordings in the past twenty-five years have been live ones, legal and bootlegged. Running through a repertoire of Tin Pan Alley songs, jazz standards, originals, and festive calypsos--something old, something new--Rollins seems to have an endless catalogue on which to draw. If jazz improvisation is a kind of democratic expression, then Rollins may well be our greatest purveyor of utopian feeling.

For more than thirty years, Rollins has lived in a modest two-story house in Germantown, New York, a couple of hours north of Manhattan. (He kept an apartment in Tribeca, near the World Trade Center, but gave it up after September 11th. Television audiences saw Rollins board the evacuation bus wearing a surgical mask and carrying his saxophone.) The Germantown property includes a large converted stable that is used as a garage. There is a swimming pool in the back and, beyond it, a small house where Rollins writes and practices music for many hours a day. In the studio, there are pictures of Rollins on bandstands around the world; a Japanese ceramic version of him wearing Oriental robes and blowing a horn; stacks of music; an electric keyboard; and various trophies and mementos.

Rollins lives alone; Lucille, his wife of nearly forty years, died in November. (They had no children.) The bucolic simplicity of the place and the soft tones in which Rollins tends to express himself are at odds with the muscularity of his music. "I like the quiet, and I prefer being left alone," Rollins said when I went to visit him last spring. "Up here, I can choose contact with the world when I want it. That kind of freedom is a blessing, and I don't take it lightly."