In an intriguing genealogical chart at the end of an essay on Rollins by Ira Gitler for Prestige, Gitler points out that Charlie Rouse, the contemporary Allen Eager, J.R. Monterose, Hank Mobley, John Coltrane, Dexter Gordon, and Phil Urso have all been shaped in part in the forge of Rollins' style. Scores of lesser-known tenors throughout the country and now abroad also have been marked by Rollins.

Sonny is currently with Max Roach's quintet, and is an important factor in the climbing excitement generated by that unit. The position with Roach is Sonny's first regular gig in some time and represents an important stage in what has been up to now a rather disorganized career.

Theodore Walter Rollins was born in New York on Sept. 7, 1930. He recalls, "There was always some kind of music going on in the house." An older brother was a violinist good enough to be considered for the Pittsburgh Symphony orchestra, but he finally chose medicine instead.

When he was 8 or 9, Sonny took a few piano lessons at the behest of his parents, but his first self-propelled instrument was the alto on which he took lessons both privately and at Benjamin Franklin High School where drummer Sonny Payne and tenor Percy France were among his contemporaries. Rollins' first influence was the virile Louis Jordan and his Tympani Five. "He opened me up to really listening more and finding out musicians' names!" he says.

Then there was Coleman Hawkins -- "his conception, the way he was able to play changes." Hearing Hawkins and Lester Young was one factor in Sonny's switch to tenor in 1946. He had played a few gigs around the city as well as in school on alto, and he found the number of jobs increased after the change of horn.

Sonny finds in retrospect no clash in having been influenced by both Hawkins and Young. "The things that were alike about them were more important than their differences. As for Lester's tone, I never thought it was a bad tone. The saxophone, after all, is a very young instrument, and people are still finding criteria by which to judge its players. There are still a lot of different ways a person can sound and still have acceptable tone. To me Lester had a very big sound. Hawk's was different because he played with a bigger vibrato."

By the time he was graduated from high school where he had majored in music, Sonny had got to the point "where I could handle a gig." His music major had introduced him to elementary theory, and he first planned to go to the Manhattan School of Music. He didn't, not yet convinced that music was to be his career.

"I don't think I ever did decide," he says. "I seemed to mold myself into it. I'm fortunate that I'm making a living at it now because I'm not equipped to do anything else. As the years went by, music was the only thing I was doing."

After high school, Rollins gigged around New York and New Jersey. Among the youngsters coming up with him were Jackie McLean and the late Richie Powell. The next and most searing major influence had also struck Sonny by this time.

"I heard Bird first on record and then I began to see him in the early forties at a lot of sessions on 52nd St. and at others around town like the Lincoln Square center on 61st St. Bird seemed to combine all the things I'd heard so far and liked. What he was doing seemed all new when I first heard it because I didn't really understand it.

"After I under-stood what he was doing, I realized it was a combination of everything up to that point, plus himself. He added something without taking away from what had come before.

"I got to know him, not as well as I would have lik