It was a telephone interview. I imagined Sonny Rollins sitting there in his Hudson River Valley country home north of Rhinebeck, New York; sitting there in a nimbus of ennui waiting to be prodded and poked with an assortment of those unpleasant, blunt instruments we journalists call questions.

His wife Lucille had answered the phone and handed it to her husband. "This sure is going to be a mighty short interview," she thought as she walked out the door, got into her car, and drove off on some mid-morning errands. Maybe she even pitied the poor schnook on the other end of the line a bit. She was surprised -- actually "astonished," she admitted later -- to return in an hour and a half and find the conversation still pumping along and probing the merits of cowboy actor Ken Maynard, "B" westerns and actress Joan Leslie.

How Sonny Rollins got down from Down Beat to Joan Leslie within 90 minutes is the subject of this modest tale at hand. He took the scenic route, by and large, along the little roads of conversation not always traveled in the music interviews. The kind that demand a little improvisation. But Rollins knows about that, doesn't he? The talk avoided the long and familiar chronological expressways that wind past more than 40 years of various "sabbaticals," crises, triumphs and what have you. All that's been well mapped in insightful essays by such career cartographers as Gary Giddins, Francis Davis, Bob Blumenthal (in his booklet accompanying the new seven-CD Prestige set, The Complete Prestige Recordings) and Charles Blanca in his book Sonny Rollins: The Journey of a Jazzman.

So, the assumption in this article will be that no reader needs to be instructed on any of this; or on Rollins' immensity and influence as a tenor saxophonist, an influence that may in the aggregate dwarf that of his one-time contemporary, the late John Coltrane. With all this as given, then, back to Down Beat.

"I find it petty," he groused on. "I find the things it says about great musicians petty. It tries to denigrate people with these John Simon-type reviews. I guess that's what pays off, though. Writers have to write this type of piece to become famous. I know that's the way it goes. I also know you won't print any of this." (Thus insuring that every word would get printed. Rollins is no media amateur.)

In the twenties, I reminded him, H.L. Mencken liked to say of his fellow journalists that it was their duty "to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable." To which Rollins replied that no jazz musician is ever comfortable.

"There are those celebrities who are comfortable," he admitted; "movie stars and rock musicians. But jazz musicians are not movie stars. Knowing what it takes to play jazz, and live the jazz life, I would disagree with any writer who assumed that the jazz musician in this society is comfortable, and thus fair game for attack. I know Down Beat's been pretty hard on me recently, which I suppose is a kind of badge of honor. Maybe now that Miles is dead, they figure they have me to kick around. I'm not saying I'm beyond criticism. That's not where I'm coming from. I'm my biggest critic. I know when I'm not sounding good before Down Beat or anyone else tells me so. But I object to Down Beat for what I've seen it do to other musicians." He didn't offer a bill of particulars; his wife, whom he met in 1956 and who stills hates the word "gig," reads the articles and reviews, only occasionally passing one along to him. But then he said this:

"I think that the jazz business is fragile enough. It's a real art, and it should be boosted. That's how I feel."

Ah ha, now it was clear. Of course! That's exactly how he should feel. He's a jazz musician. Natur