“What made me withdraw and go to the bridge was how I felt about my own playing,” the artist recalled. “I knew I was dissatisfied.”

Every New Yorker is dissatisfied in their own way, but only one withdrew from the public eye for three years from what had seemed to be an Olympian peak of talent and fame to then climb the steep iron steps of the Williamsburg Bridge, blocks from his apartment on Grand St., and blow his horn day after day, hour after hour, in rain or shine.

“I was getting a lot of publicity for my work at that time, but I wasn’t satisfying my own requirements for what I wanted to do musically,” Sonny Rollins told Guardian jazz critic John Fordham a couple of years ago about his now legendary but then entirely private journey.

The tenor saxophone colossus, who retired in 2014, was 28 in 1959 when he simply stopped publicly performing or recording to renew a craft he felt dead-ended in even as worldly rewards heaped up, while he also quit smoking and began practicing yoga.

One of his neighbors was expecting a baby, and “it was difficult to........

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