By Stuart Mitchner
I used to blow my horn back at the boats when the boats would blow. All of that was great. I was in a place where nobody could see me. This was heaven. This was heaven.”
—Sonny Rollins (1930-2026)
That second emphatic heaven is tenor man Sonny Rollins putting the strength of his sound into words, enthusing to a journalist in November 2011, 50 years after he ended his sojourn on the Williamsburg Bridge. Listening to him play “Manhattan” with a trio, muted bass, drums, no piano, you can imagine how it might have been in the last year of the fifties when he found his sanctuary on the bridge, just him and his instrument alongside the Brooklyn-Manhattan-bound subway. However absorbed he was in what he was doing, he said, “I’m sure subconsciously I change what I’m playing to blend with the sound of the train. It all has its effect.” If you were living in his music in the summer of 1961, it meant a lot to know the man on the bridge was there, standing in the shadows, honing his art, on leave from the scene. As Gary Giddins (Visions of Jazz) has said, “Rollins possesses you with his own possession, getting inside you to restore recollections of the first time you ever realized music was bigger than life.”
Born September 7, 1930, Theodore Walter Rollins took possession of Memorial Day when he died on Monday, May 25. Jazz stations on the FM dial celebrating the centenary of Miles Davis, born on May 26, 1926, had to make room for the player born four years and four months later.
Ginsberg in Prague
I began 2026 with this quote from Franz Kafka’s Diaries, 19 June 1916: “Forget everything. Open the windows. Clear the room. The wind blows through it. You see only its emptiness, you search in every corner and don’t find yourself.” At the compositional moment I find myself midway through the year on June 3, the day that Franz Kafka died and Allen Ginsberg was born two years later.
On April 30, 1965, according to the July 11, 1965 New York Times, Allen Ginsberg landed in Prague in time for the May Day Festival: “I walked in the May Day parade that morning and that afternoon some students asked me to be their king. I agreed; they put me on a truck, and I traveled in the procession of the Polytechnic School, with a Dixieland band on a nearby truck. The procession went through the city to a main square, where 10,000 to 15,000 people had gathered. I made a speech, dedicating the glory of my crown to Franz Kafka, who once lived on that square.”
Ginsberg also made a poem, “Kral Majales” (King of May), in which the Czech police who arrested him “entered Joseph K’s room at morn and entered mine, and ate at my table, and examined my scribbles, and followed me night and morn from the houses of lovers to the cafés of Centrum — And I am the King of May, which is the power of sexual youth.”
Two Journals
In June 1952, a little over a decade before his descent on Prague, Ginsberg repossessed three passages from Kafka’s Diaries in his Journal (Grove 1977), all from 1912: (Feb. 7) “Future never out of my sight. What evenings, walks, despair in bed, and on the sofa are still before me, worse than those I have already endured.” Having appropriated Kafka’s focus on the future, the 22-year-old self-described “Buddhist Jew” injected himself with Kafka’s energy: (Feb. 25) “Hold fast to the diary from today on! Write regularly! Don’t surrender! Even if no salvation should come, I want to be worthy of it every moment.” Most likely transcribed on the same day, the third quote is headed Last Days before Riva Sanitarium: “In me, by myself, there are no visible lies. The limited circle is pure.” A few years later Ginsberg will compose Kaddish (City Lights 1957) for his schizophrenic mother Naomi, who died at Greystone State Mental Hospital in 1956.
June 1916
The strange, mysterious, perhaps dangerous, perhaps saving comfort that there is in writing: it is a leap out of murderers’ row; it is a seeing of what is really taking place.
—Diaries, 27 January 1922
After beginning 2026 with Kafka’s wind blowing through the still empty year, I formed a small monument on the bedside table: two editions of the Diaries 1910-1923, my preferred Greenberg-Hannah Arendt translation side by side with the recent, “uncensored” one by Ross Benjamin, along with Stanley Corngold’s anthology Expeditions to Kafka and his translation of The Metamorphosis. With a June 3 publication date in view, I opened the Greenberg edition for the first time this year to June 2, 1916, and found this:
“What a muddle I’ve been in with girls, in spite of all my headaches, insomnia, grey hair, despair. Let me count them: there have been at least six since the summer. I can’t resist, my tongue is fairly torn from my mouth if I don’t give in and admire anyone who is admirable and love her until admiration is exhausted. With all six my guilt is almost wholly inwards, though one of the six did complain of me to someone.”
In case you wondered about the actual nature of Kafka’s relations with the six girls, in early July of the same year, he says, as if for the record, “I have never yet been intimate with a woman apart from that time in Zuckmantel. And then again with the Swiss girl in Riva. The first was a woman, and I was ignorant; the second a child, and I was utterly confused.”
Sonny Rollins in Prague
Having just finished reading Kafka’s account of Gregor Samsa’s last moments of life in The Metamorphosis (Modern Library paperback 2013), I watched a YouTube video of Sonny Rollins performing at an unidentified venue in Prague in 1982. Garbed in red with a red fisherman’s hat on his head, he’s treating the audience to an encore of Calypso-driven ecstasy after reinventing “Smoke Gets In Your Eyes,” hoisting his tenor joyously up and down the way he did at the Five Spot in New York in the summer of 1964, garlanded with a jingling necklace of sleigh bells.
But thanks to my recent reading, I’m in Kafka’s Prague, a blending of beautiful music and death shadowing the musician of the moment in the form of Samsa’s violin-playing sister, who is sharing the stage with Rollins, everything in a Kafkaesque “muddle,” everyone everywhere has Kafka’s face, men, women, and children, including the young bassist, drummer and guitarist accompanying Rollins. Although it’s a bit unnerving, I enjoy the illusion, a kind of Kafka consensus in opposition to the accepted wisdom that Gregor’s creator hated music — even though his most famous work of fiction pivots on the “monstrous vermin” brother’s adoration of his sister’s musicianship, she who’s playing the violin “so beautifully” so that he crawls forward “a little farther, holding his head close to the floor, so that it might be possible to catch her eye. Was he an animal, that music could move him so? He felt as if the way to the unknown nourishment he longed for were coming to light.”
Meanwhile Sonny Rollins, still playing, moves a few steps forward, as if tempted to leap the space between him and the audience in his Calypso euphoria, moving with a controlled abandon as if he were recalling the concert in Saugerties, N.Y., when he fell off the stage between the heaves of a cadenza and continued playing on his back.