I became a Sonny Rollins fan on my 13th birthday, when my dad took me for the first time to his favorite record store in Portland, Oregon. He gave me $50, which in 1987, netted me twelve LPs. One was a European bootleg of Moving Out . It was only two bucks, and I was drawn to the imposing portrait of Rollins on its cheap cardboard cover. When we got home, I put the record on the turntable and sat between our two kitchen cabinet–sized speakers as Rollins banged through the title track’s four-second melody and launched into a deliriously fast solo. In that moment, for me, everything changed.

Almost forty years later, I was waiting to go on stage at an experimental jazz club in Amsterdam when the opening band’s pianist started improvising on a riff from “St. Thomas.” Someone behind me whispered, by way of explanation, “Sonny Rollins died last night.” Another moment of change—this time not a beginning, but an ending, for me and for American culture.…