Bridge - Peter Bishop






Introduction: The Telling of the Bridge

Jazz on a bridge

A well-known story travels the jazz circuits. On a New York sum-

mer’s evening in 1961 a music critic of Metronome magazine and

his wife were strolling from Manhattan to their Brooklyn home,

across the little-used pedestrian walkway on Williamsburg Bridge

that spanned 488 metres (1,600 ft) over the East River. Directly in

front they heard the sound of a saxophone in the hands of a gifted

musician playing complex and sophisticated music. It was Sonny

Rollins, already a legend, developing a piece of creative work

as he struggled to emerge from a difficult and reclusive period.

Between 1959 and 1961 Williamsburg Bridge, close to Rollins’s

home, was where he went to work on this new piece,

aptly called The Bridge. Perhaps Rollins chose the site due to a

single-minded insistence on prolonged place-immersion as part of

his composition and performance, or maybe this was just a conducive

spot. Rollins insisted that it was for privacy, both his and

that of his neighbours, whom he did not want subjected to

the loud noise of a saxophone at all hours. Perhaps

it was the idea of the bridge that inspired him, a kind of creative cipher, one that

condensed both physical structure and root metaphor of a collect ive imagining.


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