Sonny Rollins

Merely by setting foot on stage bearing a tenor saxophone and scattering a few clues to his signature calypso, St Thomas, Sonny Rollins does enough to make a London jazz festival crowd feel privileged to be in the same room.

Someone who works as a music critic spends many nights a week out listening to music of all styles in stadiums theatres pubs bars etc.

Reality demands that the Olympian saxophone improviser Sonny Rollins must slow down one day, and every time he appears, his fans look anxiously for signs.

Sonny Rollins the saxophone colossus is one of the seminal legends of jazz still performing in the 21 st century.

But the biggest show of the weekend featured just one man: Sonny Rollins the unchallengeable old lion of the tenor saxophone.

He replied “I hope we give you a good show that night remember jazz is a music that is not fixed it is always evolving always different.

Rollins looked more like a shaman than a legendary jazz tenor as he hobbled on to begin a concert celebrating his 80th birthday. With his stiff, arthritic gait, it seemed seven decades of performing jazz had taken a toll. But that perception only prevailed until he put the sax to his mouth. When he blew, the