Schomburg Center For Research In Black Culture Acquires Sonny Rollins' Personal Archive

Photo by John Abbott

The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture has acquired a personal archive of Sonny Rollins' work.

Only a couple of months after getting a personal archive of James Baldwin's work, the Center will now be the home of a collection of Rollins' material, which will include recordings of "unheard music and practice sessions," Rollins' photographs from his travels abroad, and annotated sheet music as well as other personal writings such as letters that Rollins sent to his wife, Lucille Pearson Rollins. The archive will be located in the Center's moving-image and recorded-sound division.

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Rollins, who was born in Harlem in 1930, spoke favorably of the archive being acquired by the Center.

"Well, I'm home again," Rollins, now 86 years old, said in a statement. "Home, where I absorbed the rich culture which was all around me. Where, on 137th Street, two blocks from the Schomburg, I was born in 1930. This archive reveals my life in music, how someone principally self-taught became taught. How the spiritual light of jazz protected and fed me, as it does to this day."

In the same statement Kevin Young, the Schomburg Center's director, described Rollins' archive as "the profound nature of jazz, America's classical music" and "the entire spirit and scope of the Rollins archive show his sophisticated, sustained, and spiritual creative process up close in a way that may best be called literary."

Currently, the Center does not have any plans for major exhibitions of the material.