Sonny Rollins

He’d worked with Miles Davis and Bud Powell before he turned 20. And, with Coleman Hawkins as his idol and Thelonious Monk as his mentor, Theodore Walter Rollins went on to establish himself as one of the finest tenor saxophone players of all time.

A near-legendary performance at the 2010 London Jazz Festival proved that he still plays with the imagination and vitality that helped turn jazz on its head in the 1950s and 1960s. Now the octogenarian returns to the festival to defend his title of ‘saxophone colossus’ – or, as The Telegraph put it, ‘the most revered and honoured jazz musician on the planet’.