Saxophone Colossus: A Portrait of Sonny Rollins »

John Abbott’s award-winning jazz photography has been featured on more than 250 album and magazine covers. He has been the primary cover photographer for JazzTimes magazine since 2003.

 Bob Blumenthal is the winner of two Grammy awards and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Jazz Journalists Association.

Jazz legend Sonny Rollins will celebrate his 80th birthday this fall, and Saxophone Colossus will be published to mark this occasion and honor his incredibly prolific career. This intimate appreciation combines the images of John Abbott, who as Rollins’s photographer of choice for the past 20 years has captured the saxophonist at home and at work, and the essays of Bob Blumenthal, a jazz critic who has chronicled Rollins and his art for nearly four decades.

Sonny Rollins has been at the center of jazz and its evolution virtually from his birth. Growing up in Harlem in the heyday of swing and coming of age as the first wave of modernists announced their discoveries, he quickly found himself sharing bandstands with his idols and making music of his own that continues to influence and inspire. Saxophone Colossus, named for the 1956 masterpiece of the same title, is Abbott and Blumenthal’s tribute to Rollins’s music and spirit.

The Barnes & Noble Review

Saxophone Colossus is an artistic response to Rollins that does him full justice. You can fill in the gaps with Eric Nisenson's biography, Open Sky: Sonny Rollins and His World of Improvisation, in which Rollins is a first-person participant. If both books whet the appetite for an authoritative memoir or a deep-research biography on the scale of Robin Kelley's Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original, it must be said that they more than suffice for now.