Between 1953 and 1959, the jazz saxophonist Sonny Rollins released twenty-one full-length albums. This kind of prolificacy seems absurd now, during an era in which new musical material is meted out on a preordained, market-friendly schedule—a few weeks of recording, a year or two of touring, a cashed paycheck, repeat. But music rushed out of Rollins, like an overfed river. Miles Davis described Rollins’s output circa 1954 as “something else. Brilliant.” In his book “Black Music,” the critic and poet Amiri Baraka—then writing as LeRoi Jones—called his music “staggering.” Baraka suggested that Rollins, along with John Coltrane and the pianist Cecil Taylor, was doing the necessary work “to propose jazz again as the freest of Western music.”

Then, in 1959, Rollins stopped. He was twenty-eight years old. According to “Who Is Sonny Rollins,” a short BBC documentary from 1968, Rollins—who had been addicted to heroin in the late nineteen-forties and early fifties but sweated it out at the Lexington Narcotics Farm, a combination federal prison and rehabilitation facility, in Lexington, Kentucky—was exhausted by what he understood as a culture of nonstop degradation. Unsavory promoters, seedy clubs, “the whiskey.” I imagine he’d simply grown desperate for something less decadent and wayward—a self-imposed hiatus from a life style that he knew could devastate him. These moments of reckoning—in which something that once felt exciting begins to seem noxious, mephitic, dangerous—are important to heed. (I think of Bob Dylan, leaving Juárez in the rain: “I’m going back to New York City,” he sang. “I do believe I’ve had enough.”)

For jazz musicians, “woodshedding” refers to the taking of a kind of lunatic sabbatical—a retreat to some isolated idyll, wherein the artist disconnects from his community and plays relentlessly and with a pathological focus. The goal is not so much output as self-betterment. Though woodshedding is a particularly popular move in jazz—in 1937, Charlie Parker, after a fumbled gig in Kansas City in which the drummer Jo Jones may or may not have Frisbee’d a cymbal at him, decamped to the Ozarks with a pile of Count Basie 78s and memorized all of Lester Young’s saxophone solos—the practice can be employed by anyone looking to drop out and obsessively hone a craft. You go off to get good.

Of course, Rollins was already good. I asked the jazz critic Aaron Cohen about Rollins’s triumphant run in the nineteen-fifties. “It wasn’t just the count but the quality—even though he was coming out of a hard-bop tradition, he was so far ahead of what his contemporaries were doing,” Cohen said. “He was clearly the greatest tenor saxophonist of that era.” Cohen figures his sabbatical was a necessary self-accounting: “Jazz itself was moving at an incredibly fast rate at that time. For Sonny Rollins, getting away from it all was, I think, a chance to reassess his role in a rapidly changing world.” Kwami Coleman, a musicologist and jazz pianist who writes on black musical avant-gardism, evoked “Sonny Rollins and the Challenge of Thematic Improvisation,” an article by Gunther Schuller, published in a 1958 issue of The Jazz Review. “Basically, Sonny Rollins had mastered this way of improvising using themes and theme fragments—inventing melodies and fragments of melodies, and developing them in a way that was not unlike how Beethoven might develop a theme in one of his symphonies,” Coleman explained to me. “With Sonny Rollins, we reached a new level in jazz, where the improviser was now a consummate artist, a composer. It’s not composition in the sense of writing it down in notation—it’s happening live, in the moment. Sonny Rollins is that dude. He’s the continuation of Charlie Parker. He’s the top tenor player.” Coleman agreed that Rollins was likely doing more than just woodshedding. “I imagine he was looking for a new direction in 1959.”

But where had Rollins gone? In 1961, a story by Ralph Berton appeared in Metronome, a trade rag that turned into a serious jazz magazine under the editorship of Leonard Feather and Barry Ulanov. (Miles Davis suggested that Feather and Ulanov were the only white writers in New York who understood bebop: “The rest of them white motherfucking critics hated what we were doing,” he wrote.) Berton had come across Rollins playing atop the Williamsburg Bridge, which crosses the East River and connects North Brooklyn to the Lower East Side of Manhattan. He filed a short dispatch about the encounter. In an effort to keep Rollins’s practice space private, Berton changed the location to the Brooklyn Bridge, and gave Rollins the somewhat ridiculous sobriquet “Buster Jones”:

When I first heard the sound I thought that I had imagined it. It was an improbable one to hear in the middle of that bridge, the sound of a tenor sax, floating to me in faint recurring fragments through the bright empty air, like footnotes to the remote desultory lowing of tugs on the river far below . . . tenor sax. Jazz tenor sax. Expert, first-class jazz tenor sax, the sound of a master . . . He was running weird changes and curves, jumping octaves with the smooth stride of an Olympic hurdle-racer.

Almost every day between the summer of 1959 and the end of 1961, Rollins—who was born in Harlem, and at the time lived in an apartment at 400 Grand Street, just a few blocks from the entrance to the bridge—walked out and stationed himself adjacent to the subway tracks, playing as cars full of commuters rattled past. Though Rollins has said that he tried to conceal himself (“I used to blow my horn back at the boats when the boats would blow. All of that was great. I was in a place where nobody could see me,” he told the Washington Post, in 2011), it remains strangely thrilling to me that, in 1960, a person could have looked up from her book at the exact right moment and glimpsed some bit of Rollins, hunched and ecstatic, huffing into his tenor saxophone.

In “Who Is Sonny Rollins,” he speaks a little about the atmosphere: “Usually, I don’t pay too much attention to the trains—I’m usually absorbed in what I’m doing,” he said. “I’m sure subconsciously I change what I’m playing to blend with the sound of the train,” he admitted. “It all has its effect.” He also spoke about solitude—what it offered him. “Eventually I want to communicate, but it might take being alone to communicate.”