Sonny Rollins died on Memorial Day at the age of 95, five years shy of a centennial that would have been celebrated around the globe. It would have been a worthy tribute for such an important artist. And since radio waves can travel into outer space, Sonny Rollins’ music is being heard in the hereditary home of Sun Ra and other unknown extraterrestrials.

One of Sonny’s greatest albums is titled “Newk’s Time.” It was recorded in 1957, the last year that the Dodgers were in Brooklyn, and the title of that album was perhaps an aspirational wish for Don Newcombe coming off a 1956 season that saw “Newk” win both the Cy Young and the Most Valuable Player award. It may also have been one for Rollins himself, as he was becoming one of the great saxophone players, building on the music he learned from Charlie Parker and Coleman Hawkins.

Sonny Rollins carried the nickname “Newk” because of his strong resemblance to the pitcher Don Newcombe. It was given to him by Miles Davis after a cabdriver that was taking them through Harlem thought he was driving the Dodger pitcher. Sonny went along with the ruse as Davis drove the joke deeper, telling the cabdriver how he would strike out Stan Musial that night at Ebbets Field. From then on folks in the Jazz community started calling him “Newk.” The joke was two-toned, in that although he looked like the Dodger pitcher, Rollins was a Yankees fan and probably also a fan of The New York Black Yankees of the Negro Leagues. “Newk” and “Newk” wouldn’t meet until fifty years later, finally shaking hands backstage after a concert.

Rollins’ death happened in a year in which the world is celebrating the centennial births of both Davis and John Coltrane, and baseball will offer an acknowledgement for the centennial birth of Newcombe, a key player for the beloved era of the Brooklyn Dodgers. He was part of baseball’s great migration to the West Coast, just as his own family was part of his own migration that escaped the southern states for a better life in the North. After a brief stop in Cincinnati, he eventually traveled further to Japan and finished his career in a land that, according to Gerald Early, revered two-thirds of what made America great: jazz music and baseball. In 1946, in Nashua New Hampshire as part of a Dodger minor league team, Newcombe played on the first integrated professional baseball team in the United States in the 20th century.

Don “Newk” Newcombe was born in Madison, NJ in 1926 and Sonny “Newk” Rollins was reincarnated in Harlem in 1930, on opposite sides of the Hudson River. They arrived in an America that was marked by this country’s refusal to integrate its national pastime which for a brief time was jointly played by Blacks and whites. At the same time the nation’s greatest musical art form was being created in a Black world that did not bar white players from playing alongside the originators of a music now worshipped on every continent.

Newk and Newk lived in jazz and baseball communities that were existing in unison. They didn’t live in parallel lines of existence like Babe Ruth and Oscar Charleston or Ty Cobb and “Cool” Papa Bell, who were playing the exact same game in different ways.  Some were forced out of town by sundown and the others free to spend the night in the brothel of their choice. “Bix” Beiderbecke was allowed to step into the world created by Satchmo and Joe Oliver without at the end of the day feeling a rope around his neck while white folks set up picnic tables and later in the week sold postcards of the lynching. Newk and Newk shared a pathway via jazz and Negro League baseball to their own individual greatness, supported by a community that looked out for each other in the collective of bandstands and nightclubs and roadside hotels and homes that kept a roof over their heads as they traveled through a segregated landscape.

As with the deaths of players that exclusively had their careers in the Negro Leagues, such as Buck O’Neil or Josh Gibson, and others who crossed over into the major leagues like Jackie Robinson, Willie Mays and Hank Aaron, the passing of Sonny Rollins is a seismic end. Rollins was the last of the innovators and inventors—and because he lived so long, pushing the art form forward with every recording and appearance on stage, he became the greatest practitioner at the heart of the art form which is improvisation. 

Didn’t Mays take the innovations and improvisations of baseball that he learned from Negro Leaguers and transpose those notes into a song white American baseball fans never heard before? But unlike baseball, jazz never transposed those hate-filled words from Tom Yawkey and said, “Get that white boy off the bandstand.” Dodo Marmorosa, George Wellington, Buddy Rich, Stan Getz, Gerry Mulligan and jazz’s answer to Branch Rickey, Benny Goodman, were all allowed to play alongside Black musicians, contributing to an art form that rarely resisted change. It was a continuum that baseball would not achieve until 30 years after Jackie Robinson joined the band and the second generation of Black and Afro-Latino players were a permanent part of baseball.

Jazz music always had a connection to baseball. In 1931 Louis Armstrong had his own all-Black baseball team known as “Armstrong Secret Nine” which played in a semi- pro league in New Orleans. Its players were members of the Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs. In August of 1931 his band played a concert before the beginning of a doubleheader and Satchmo took the mound for a ceremonial first pitch. Ella Fitzgerald was regularly seen at both Negro League and major-league games and had an extensive collection of autographed baseballs from the Dodgers and the Giants. She also sang the National Anthem at many ballparks.

Every baseball fan should know the jazz song, “Did You See Jackie Robinson Hit That Ball,” recorded by both Buddy Johnson and Count Basie in 1949, along with the Jazz classics, “Two Bass Hit” written by Dizzy Gillespie and John Lewis and “Hi Fly” written by Randy Weston.

Big bands such as Duke Ellington’s and Count Basie’s had enough musicians to field their own teams and played against one another and other orchestras. In what became known as The Florida Tour Games, Duke Ellington and his band played baseball games outside the segregated hotels they stayed in. As Casey Stengel said, you can look it up.

But for every Sonny Rollins and Don Newcombe celebrated and known by given names and nicknames, there is a Frank Barnes who also has a centennial birth this year. Barnes is a baseball version of a jazz session player: He had a solid but unspectacular career, but never led his own combo at a jazz festival, or recorded albums under his own name. Most of the time he played in the minor leagues, a baseball blues song set in a minor key.

Barnes was born in Mississippi and, from what is little known about him, Mississippi was his home when he wasn’t living in a baseball town. He and Elston Howard were acquired by the Yankees (the last franchise in a three-team New York City to integrate in 1955). As a Black player in a pre-free agent era in segregated America, it’s a painful irony to write that his rights were sold numerous times during the decade of the 1950s. He may have gotten some relief from racism playing in Canada for the Toronto Maple Leafs before he experienced discrimination and name calling in the Texas League, where he pitched the first of his two minor-league no hitters. He arrived in St. Louis two years ahead of Bob Gibson and as they may have done in Omaha, supported one another during the 1960 season, Barnes’ last in the majors and Gibson’s second.

On August 26, the 100th anniversary of the birth of Frank Barnes will not be mentioned in any broadcasts or on a single web page of MLB.com. But as a Kansas City Monarch, Frank Barnes rode the same buses as Jackie Robinson and stayed in the same rooming houses where Sonny Rollins slept. Rollins, Newcombe, and Barnes were supported by the collective Black communities of America. They took care of those that realized they had a talent that, in some cases, changed the athletic and artistic soul of the country that was rejecting them. 

And if Frank Barnes just kept a steady beat and played the right chords, and unlike Sonny Rollins didn’t invent alternative tonalities or unlike Don Newcombe didn’t offer new approaches to his adversary in the batter’s box, he should still be celebrated because he played the American game on multiple levels. He underwent racial exclusion followed by athletic acceptance and eventually some form of equality. And when he died in Greenville, MI in 2014 he lived through “Get that N***** Off That Field” to see Barack Obama occupy the White House, who gracefully placed the National Medal of Arts and The Kennedy Center Honors around the neck of Sonny Rollins. And for that he should be celebrated.

Victor Sanchez is a writer and filmmaker living in Harlem.