The quintet on Plus Four (march 1956) was nothing but the Clifford Brown-Max Roach Quintet (a piano quintet with Clifford Brown on trumpet and Max Roach on drums). Two eight-minute Rollins originals, Valse Hot (in 3/4 meter) and Pent-Up House, elevated the album above the stereotypes of hard bop.

Tenor Madness (may 1956), that borrowed Davis' quintet (Red Garland on piano, Paul Chambers on bass, Philly Joe Jones on drums), offered a twelve-minute duel between Rollins and tenor saxophonist John Coltrane in Tenor Madness.

A quartet with Tommy Flanagan on piano and Max Roach on drums recorded Saxophone Colossus (june 1956), the real launching pad for Rollins' career as a leader, containing two of his most celebrated composition: the calypso St Thomas and Blue Seven, the manifesto of his "thematic" improvisation. This was improvisation based on melody, not on chords, as bebop was, or on modes, as Davis' modal jazz was. Unlike the traditional kind of melodic improvisation (that was basically an embellishment of the original melody), Rollings' "improvisation" was a process of recursive variation and therefore of melodic reinvention.

Tour De Force (december 1956), for a quartet with Drew and Roach, introduced Rollins' Ee-Ah, B. Quick and B. Swift.

Volume One (december 1956), for a quintet with Donald Byrd on trumpet, Wynton Kelly on piano and Max Roach on drums, delivered powerful performances of Rollins' Decision, Bluesnote, Plain Jane, and especially Sonnysphere. Volume Two (april 1957) was emblematic of the transition from bebop to hard bop: both Thelonious Monk and Horace Silver play piano on Monk's Misterioso, but elsewhere (e.g., Why Don't I) Rollins' quintet (Silver, trombonist James "J.J." Johnson, Chambers and Blakey) rips bebop apart.

Rollins found the ideal vehicle for his thematic improvisation in the sax-bass-drums trio of Way Out West (march 1957), although the material was odd at best (his own Way Out West excepted) to the point of sounding like a parody of the originals. Rollins was now regarded as the greatest tenor of his generation, a status confirmed by It Could Happen to You, his first unaccompanied solo, off The Sound of Sonny (june 1957), and even by mediocre albums such as Newk's Time (september 1957), but especially by the second album for piano-less tenor-saxophone trio, A Night At The Village Vanguard (november 1957), featuring drummer Elvin Jones.

Every aspect of Rollins' art culminated in the the 20-minute title-track of Freedom Suite (march 1958), the first piece of jazz music to successfully wed politics and music.

After a mostly disappointing experiment with a large ensemble, documented on Big Brass (july 1958) and Brass and Trio (same sessions), Rollins retired from music in 1959, but promptly returned two years later in a quartet featuring Jim Hall: The Bridge (february 1962). Its follow-up, What's New (may 1962), featured two trio numbers, Jungoso and Bluesongo, that resumed his favorite format and wed it to his passion for Latin rhythms. But the real comeback was Our Man in Jazz (july 1962): a quartet with bass, drums and Don Cherry on cornett performing colossal versions of Oleo (25 minutes) and Doxy (15 minutes). Rollins repeated that exploit with the dissonant 20-minute East Broadway Run Down (may 1966), a bold thematic improvisation on the riff of Lionel Hampton's Hey Baba Rebop featuring Freddie Hubbard on trumpet, Jimmy Garrison on bass and Elvin Jones on drums. Then he retired again.

When he returned in 1972, his creativity declined slowly: Next Album (july 1972), with The Everywhere Calypso and a long version of Hoagy Carmichael's Skylark, and Horn Culture (july 1973), partially overdubbed, were the last interesting albums.

However, Rollins remained a sensational performer. Sonny Please (2006) was one of the few studio albums that managed to capture that creative energy.

Few players summarized and embodied the history of jazz saxophone as well as Rollins, whose solos harked back to the classics as well as extending towards the avantgarde (and whose compositions were simply designed to maximize this ability). His art never truly progressed: he assimilated the innovations of his age only to the extent that they had become of the jazz tradition. In a sense he kept refining the shape of the "ideal solo" the same way that renaissance architects kept refining the concept of the ideal city: by continuously ad recursively reinterpreting the connection between past and future. Unlike the experiments of many contemporaries, Rollins' style was not a tribute to himself but a tribute to jazz music.

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