Like Sonny is a Jazz composition written by John Coltrane as a tribute to his friend Sonny Rollins. Coltrane first laid down the piece during his Giant Steps recording session on March 26, 1959, with Cedar Walton, Paul Chambers, and Lex Humphries, but it did not appear on Giant Steps (released February 1960). He re-recorded it on December 2, 1959 with Wynton Kelly, Paul Chambers, and Jimmy Cobb, and that take was issued on Coltrane Jazz in February 1961. The title signals homage to Rollins, and the melody is said to be lifted from Rollins’s solo on My Old Flame on Kenny Dorham's Jazz Contrasts (1957). In a separate session on September 8, 1960 Coltrane again cut the tune with McCoy Tyner, Steve Davis and Billy Higgins; that version appeared on Roulette Records as Simple Like. In 1964 the Coltrane Quartet recorded Like Sonny for a Canadian film, Le chat dans le sac, and the master tapes surfaced decades later; that soundtrack was released as Blue World in 2019. The piece sits squarely in the jazz genre, reflecting Coltrane’s late 1950s hard bop and early post-bop language and is widely regarded as a loving nod to Rollins.
