Rain, dawg

When it rains, it pours, as the fella says.

I bet a lot of backyard ’Burque barbecues wound up in the kitchen yesterday. The rain started in midafternoon, laid about a half inch on us in four hours, then took five for the holiday.

When I stumbled out of bed this morning at stupid-thirty our weather gizmo reported (drum roll, please) another half inch overnight. No wonder I slept so well. Rain is a fine thing for sleeping. Also for farms, forests, and other living things, as long as they’re not sleeping rough in an arroyo.

Any morning you wake up on the right side of a damp lawn is a good one.

Sonny Rollins didn’t make it to Tuesday. But he left his mark in a big way before heading west yesterday at the age of 95. The giant of the tenor sax had such a commitment to the music that he put his career on hold before it really took hold, because he wasn’t satisfied with his sound.

In 1959 he stepped away from the clubs and the studio and just played, often come nightfall at the Williamsburg Bridge near his place on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. And he stayed gone for two years.

“A lot of people couldn’t comprehend why I would stop playing,” he told DownBeat magazine in 2001. “But I learned something. It was necessary for me to do to have the kind of confidence I need to play music like this.”

His comeback album was called “The Bridge.”

Sonny would slip away once more, that time for a spiritual pilgrimage, but he came back and kept reaching, hoping to grasp. A Saxophone Colossus indeed.