Walter Theodore "Sonny" Rollins was born September 7, 1930, in Harlem, the youngest of three children of Walter Rollins, a U.S. Navy steward, and Valborg Solomon, both of whom had emigrated from the Danish West Indies (his father from Saint Croix, his mother from Saint Thomas). Music ran through the household: his father played clarinet, his sister piano, his brother violin. He began piano at nine, switched to alto saxophone at eleven after hearing Louis Jordan, and moved to tenor at fifteen in 1946 under the spell of Coleman Hawkins's records. Growing up blocks from the Savoy Ballroom, he fell in with a circle of young Harlem musicians that included Jackie McLean, Kenny Drew, and Art Taylor, and by his teens he was rehearsing at pianist Thelonious Monk's apartment, absorbing a harmonic and rhythmic sense of humor that stayed with him for the rest of his career.

Rollins made his first recordings in January 1949 as a sideman behind bebop singer Babs Gonzales, and over the next several years worked and recorded with Bud Powell, J.J. Johnson, Miles Davis, and Monk. His three compositions on Davis's 1954 Prestige sessions, "Oleo," "Airegin," and "Doxy," entered the working repertoire of jazz almost immediately and remain standards. Heroin addiction interrupted his rise; in 1955 he committed himself to the Federal Medical Center in Lexington, Kentucky, and got clean. That same year he briefly rejoined Davis's quintet before joining the Clifford Brown/Max Roach Quintet, replacing Harold Land. In June 1956, at Rudy Van Gelder's studio with pianist Tommy Flanagan, bassist Doug Watkins, and Roach on drums, he recorded Saxophone Colossus for Prestige, an album built around his calypso-inflected original "St. Thomas," a tune he had known since childhood from his mother's Caribbean records. The album is now regarded as one of the defining tenor saxophone records of the decade.

The years around 1957 were extraordinarily prolific. Rollins recorded Tenor Madness with John Coltrane sitting in on the title track, cut Way Out West in Los Angeles with bassist Ray Brown and drummer Shelly Manne in the unusual pianoless format he would return to repeatedly, and made his Blue Note debut with Sonny Rollins, Volume 1. He appeared on Monk's Brilliant Corners and, that December, on trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie's Sonny Side Up alongside fellow tenor Sonny Stitt. His pianoless working trio, with bassist Wilbur Ware and drummer Elvin Jones, was documented live at the Village Vanguard on A Night at the "Village Vanguard" (1957, Blue Note), a record that helped establish "strolling," saxophone playing over bass and drums alone, as a legitimate small-group format rather than a novelty. In 1958 he cut Freedom Suite for Riverside, a nineteen-minute trio piece with Max Roach and bassist Oscar Pettiford that stated, unusually directly for the period, a political argument about the treatment of Black Americans.

By the summer of 1959, feeling he had exhausted a particular way of playing, Rollins withdrew from public performance and spent close to two and a half years practicing alone, largely on the pedestrian walkway of the Williamsburg Bridge, so as not to disturb his neighbors on the Lower East Side. He returned in November 1961 with a Jazz Gallery residency and, the following year, a contract with RCA Victor that produced The Bridge (1962), a quartet date with guitarist Jim Hall, bassist Bob Cranshaw, and drummer Ben Riley. Through the rest of the decade he pushed his music toward the era's avant-garde without abandoning its structure: Our Man in Jazz (1963) paired him live at New York's Village Gate with cornetist Don Cherry and drummer Billy Higgins, and Sonny Meets Hawk! (1963) brought him into the studio opposite his boyhood idol, Coleman Hawkins, with pianist Paul Bley. He signed with Impulse! in the mid-1960s, scoring the British film Alfie with an Oliver Nelson-arranged orchestra in 1966 and, that May, recording the harmonically open East Broadway Run Down with trumpeter Freddie Hubbard, bassist Jimmy Garrison, and Elvin Jones. He then withdrew from performing again between 1969 and 1971, spending part of that time studying yoga and Eastern philosophy at an ashram near Mumbai, India.

Rollins resumed touring in 1971 and signed with Milestone Records under producer Orrin Keepnews, beginning a productive final third of his career centered on Next Album (1972), The Cutting Edge (1974), and the calypso-heavy Don't Stop the Carnival (1978). He toured internationally with the all-star Milestone Jazzstars alongside McCoy Tyner, Ron Carter, and Al Foster, played the White House South Lawn for President Jimmy Carter in June 1978, and contributed uncredited saxophone to the Rolling Stones' 1981 album Tattoo You. He kept recording steadily through the 1980s and 1990s (G-Man, 1987; Global Warming, 1998) and won his first competitive Grammy Award in 2002 for This Is What I Do (2000). Having heard the World Trade Center's collapse from his nearby Greenwich Street apartment on September 11, 2001, he performed in Boston days later and later released the concert as Without a Song: The 9/11 Concert (2005); its track "Why Was I Born?" won a Grammy for Best Jazz Instrumental Solo in 2006. From 2008 to 2016 he released four volumes of archival concert recordings, Road Shows, on his own Doxy Records and, later, Okeh.

Rollins gave his final public performance at London's Barbican Centre in November 2012 and announced his retirement from playing in 2014 after a diagnosis of pulmonary fibrosis made it impossible to continue. He remained active as a writer, donating his personal archive of diaries, correspondence, and practice tapes to the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in 2017 and publishing an edited volume of his own notebooks, kept since 1959, in 2024. Sonny Rollins passed away May 25, 2026, in Woodstock, New York, at age ninety-five.

Rollins built his style on thematic improvisation, taking a melodic fragment and developing it through extended variation rather than running the harmonic changes in the manner most of his bebop contemporaries favored, a method critic Gunther Schuller analyzed at length in a 1958 essay on Blue 7. His tone was broad, "biting and clear," and his sense of humor showed up constantly in his playing, in interpolated quotations from nursery rhymes, show tunes, and other musicians' solos. He was also a formal risk-taker: he pioneered the pianoless saxophone trio as a working format, embraced Caribbean calypso rhythms years before "world music" was a marketing category, and worked unaccompanied cadenzas into his live performances more extensively than almost any other saxophonist of his generation. Coleman Hawkins was his first and most enduring influence; he later returned the favor by influencing a wide range of tenor players who came after him, and he is commonly named alongside John Coltrane as one of the two most important tenor saxophonists to emerge from the 1950s.