I discover, in a belated obituary in Sermos Galiza, that Sonny Rollins has died. The feeling is one of deep astonishment that I recognize from earlier moments of astonishment. But Sonny Rollins was still alive? Those were the questions we asked ourselves in the early 2000s when we traveled around Europe.

I remember my amazement at a poster on an avenue in Rome, in the summer of 2003, trying to figure out whether it was a tribute or whether that figure who, in my mind, always appeared alongside ghostly figures like Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Thelonious Monk, or Miles Davis, might have dodged death and was still playing the sax around the world. And yes, he had. And it did not take long before I could verify it myself.

These days everyone remembers the 2010 Barcelona concert, the only time I saw Sonny live, the only time I could get a glimpse of something I had only known through recordings, many of them with other demi-gods, some signed solo and dated before my parents were born. I remember a kind and vibrant man, with very white hair, for whom moving while holding the instrument or raising his arms were beginning to be challenges he refused to stop attempting. He tried to connect with an audience I remember as somewhere between cold and affected.

There is something almost entomological about going to see an eighty-year-old person perform who, it is said, is on his final tour. There is something like ticking off a duty, like peering into History with a capital H, which very rarely has the chance to merge with our own personal history. I felt that lack of connection that night, still struck by the ticket prices and by a suspicion of snobbery in a Barcelona that was gradually revealing all its faces. But in any case, I was in the city because of a long affair with a saxophonist, so I had no excuse not to be there, taking a look at a world I knew I could never afford and at a part of my past, when Saxophone Colossus was one of the albums that accompanied my midnight coffee, the one that gave me the push to keep studying or writing.

I always try not to speak from the false desire that nostalgia brings, even though an obituary is not the right place for that. I remember a time when we listened to jazz fascinated by its complexity, by its roots among the dispossessed and in social struggle. Perhaps by 2010 Sonny Rollins was already a sign of how that trend was moving toward decline. Just in case, tonight I will play his music again, I will summon the ghosts of those who survived the ghetto and heroin, of those who raised their arms with effort while so many people had already written them off as dead.