Ladies and gentlemen, Sonny Rollins, the saxophone Colossus.

There's nobody quite like Sonny Rollins

in the All-American Sound and Story of Jazz.

He was a teenager in Harlem in the 1940s

when major players caught on to a rising star.

Steadily over the decades, Sonny Rollins built

one of the genius careers on the tennis saxophone

alongside his rival and friend, John Coltrane.

More than that, Sonny Rollins was making his music

a way of life, a mission of self-study and self-improvement,

a moral and philosophical course of inquiry and reinvention,

of gentleness and peace all at the same time.

In his 93rd year of life, Sonny Rollins

now has the affirmation of a 700-page biography,

meticulous and monumental,

modeled, I think, on Robin Kelly's life

of Sonny's friend, Thelonius Monk.

It lets all of us see Sonny Rollins up there

with Walt Whitman and a few others

on the Olympus of American Art and Storytelling.

Aiden Levy, welcome.

You've written one of the great artistic biographies

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