An electric painting of the legendary tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins playing to the sky on the Williamsburg Bridge in 1968. In 1959 after numerous album releases including Saxophone Collusus, Rollins took a two year sabbatical from public performance and practiced daily, regardless of the season or the weather, on the Williamsburg Bridge's pedestrian walkway. He would often practice for 15 to 16 hours a day.

“What made me withdraw and go to the bridge was how I felt about my own playing. I knew I was dissatisfied.”

“I was getting a lot of publicity for my work at that time, but I wasn't satisfying my own requirements for what I wanted to do musically,” he says. One of his neighbours at the time was an expectant mother, so “there was an immediate reason, too: it was difficult to practise a loud horn like the tenor saxophone in my apartment without disturbing somebody”.

“It was so wonderful to be so close to the sky up there, any time of year. Maybe this might sound a little bit corny to people, but it was a spiritual feeling to me. Years later, I remember playing an open-air concert, somewhere in Buffalo or Maine, and I looked up at the sky and felt that communion with some kind of spiritual element. It felt great to me - that distance thing, reaching out to something beyond the people.²”

The painting is made from nearly 200 manipulated stills from the 1968 short documentary, Who is Sonny Rollins, directed by Dick Fontaine, and augmented with street views from the bridge.

¹ The Wanderer on the Bridge at Sunrise, a reference to Caspar David Friederich's The Wanderer above the Sea of Fog
² Sonny Rollins from the an 2022 interview by John Fordham.