If there ain't a Sonny Rollins thread yet, this could be one

I was in Paris a couple of weeks ago and there were up and coming concert posters everywhere with this awesome photo.

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_qoqrkp25A60/TJq801jX_zI/AAAAAAAACZE/uuR7uAdbz9w/s1600/sonny_rollins.jpg

Just saw him at Kennedy Center in Washington DC last night. Now, 81-year old Rollins has a huge gray-white haired 'fro and beard. He walked out there all hunched over and moving slowly, but when he was playing he suddenly straightened up his back at times. Longtime bassist Cranshaw, plus guitar, drums and a percussionist(I left the playbill somewhere that had their names). The set was only an hour and 10 to 15 minutes long but plenty enjoyable.

i'd love to see him sometime! some of the more recent live recordings i've heard make it clear he's still got some things to say.

Just been listening to a '74 set from Dime that I grabbed after watching the stuff on BBC4 last night. This was a bio doc including footage from his 80th birthday concert where he was joined onstage by Jim Hall and later Ornette Coleman. Also included footage of him revisiting the bridge of the lp title, not sure when that was shot, much earlier since his hair was still black not the fluffy white blob it is in the more current footage.

That was followed by a set from Ronnie Scott's that was filmed for the BBC in '74 with his electric band and Rufus Harley on horns and bagpipes. That'll presumably be doing the rounds before long. There's a version up on youtube already
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8SCquHKhzs
it's called rescued cos only part of the footage from the gig was used by the BBC at the time and one of the engineers reintegrated the edited bits to a reel which he kept in his attic since then.

I also found this from Copenhagen in '74
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMKuaYDOkdQ

and this from Holland in '73
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YPRik08kQFI
think there's more from that gig up there too

wife/daughter got me the live in europe 1959 3-disc set for father's day. so great! not sure of its import-y/bootleg origins, but it deserves a little more attention! all trio stuff of rollins at one of his peaks as a player.

I got a couple Sonny Rollins CDs, but he is definitely one of the titans of post bop jazz I really need to take a year or two and just listen to pretty much it all like I have with other jazz artists of his ilk.

yeah his career is a little bit hard to follow (at least for me) because he doesn't have one era where he had, you know, the classic band, the classic label, etc. he was always kinda bouncing around.

I dunno, I think a case could be made for The Freelance Years box (if there's one single classic Rollins era).

http://www.mensjournal.com/magazine/print-view/sony-rollins-the-colossus-20130819

Nice interview/feature. Despite some lung issues he's still working hard at 82.

Spoiler alert, this is a sad part from near the end of this fascinating to me article:

"I mostly stay in," Sonny said, sitting in his leather chair with his now familiar blood-orange skullcap on his head. He had a bunch of tests scheduled to check on his lungs, which he said had gotten "a little worse." He believed that the problem had been building for some time, perhaps back to 9/11. "I was living so close to the Towers, and when they fell down, we had to stay there," he said. "It was such an upsetting time, I really felt like playing. I took out my horn and took this deep breath, something I've done a million times. But I immediately felt sick, like I'd gulped down something bad. Some poison. It was just in the air."

Sonny looked wistfully at his sainted ax sitting on a brick shelf beside the fireplace. He hadn't played for months, the longest period since he returned from India in 1971.

But he wasn't feeling sorry for himself. Indeed, he appeared in good spirits, even jolly. It was difficult in the beginning, he said, not being able to practice. It was something he feared. "I really felt that would be the end of me, not being able to play. But I'm coming to terms with it. We're here for such a short time, you have to make the most of it. I've been lucky, getting to spend my life playing this horn. So how can I complain?"

Besides, Sonny said, it wasn't like the verdict was in for sure. There was every chance he'd play again. This was a good thing, Sonny said, because "I haven't really met my goals. I haven't made my full statement yet."

I hope he can play again. While he walked hunched over the last time I saw him, when he blew his horn he stood tall. Amazing

bump.

he's cancelled his show at the London jazz festival in November, which doesn't sound good.

Letter from Sonny Rollins to Coleman Hawkins.

ha that is great. was just listening to the sonny meets hawk album a little while ago -- lots of weird/wonderful stuff going on there. always find the end of "lover man" kind of terrifying, some kind of staring-into-the-abyss playing happening. obvious that rollins loved hawkins enough that he did not want to just let him coast through that session.

1962...Wow

I had never had a proper listen to The Bridge till recently, the middle 2 (John S + title track) are incredible. He sounds like a bit of a judgemental shit in that letter to Hawkins but he was deffo on a hell of a creative high when he wrote it.

http://wnpr.org/post/sonny-rollins-reflects-his-life-career-and-goals-both-musical-and-spiritual#stream/0

He got an honary degree from the University of hartford and in the interview says he's not done yet. Much of the post is an overview of his career highlights

I have been hammering The Bridge recently, about 60% of what I love about it is Jim Hall's guitar playing. Some of the standards on it are a bit workaday, but still lovely rainy Sunday music.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/music/artists/jazz-great-sonny-rollins-still-not-finished-at-85/

He's hoping new medication will help him with his (post-9/11)respiratory issues, and allow him to play and record again

I was afraid this thread had been bumped because he'd died.

Last month I set up a phone interview between Rollins and up-and-coming tenor saxophonist Melissa Aldana; here's a link for anyone who wants to read it.

happy 88th birthday, big sax colossus!

I've been listening to a lot of 70s Sonny and find it quite interesting. Horn Culture is good start to finish, but all of them have their merits. Not quite fusion, not quite crossover jazz-funk, but interesting on their own terms.

i like the way i feel which has lee ritenour, billy cobham, bill summers AND patrice rushen. doesn't quite live up to the lineup but fun anyway

I had been considering doing a string of blog posts about his 70s albums for a while. I was intrigued when he tossed a version of "Disco Monk" onto one of his Road Shows live compilations.

do it. the mccoy tyner series was awesome

Listening to the 2CD expanded version of 1973's In Japan now. The original album was 46 minutes long; the second disc (bonus material) is 58 minutes, including a 29-minute piece. The band is Rollins, Bob Cranshaw on bass, David Lee on drums, Mtume on congas, and Yoshiaki Masuo on guitar.

a string of blog posts about his 70s albums

would read

Masuo is great on Horn Culture- I didn't know him at all. I'll have to check out In Japan.

70s-wise, Nucleus (title thought to be a play on his nickname, which came from his looking like baseball's Don Newcombe, and he always has seemed like an athlete) was my gateway Rollins LP (dunno how the CD sound etc compares), and sounded like exemplary jazz with crossover and gateway appeal: accessibly melodic and robust and even-especially lyrical, but disciplined, and trusting the listener to have an open mind and a brain.
Wiki sez:
Track listing
All compositions by Sonny Rollins except as indicated.

"Lucille" - 6:08
"Gwaligo" - 5:58
"Are You Ready?" - 4:08
"Azalea" - 4:46
"Newkleus" (James Mtume) - 5:17
"Cosmet" - 7:20
"My Reverie" (Larry Clinton, based on Claude Debussy's "Reverie") - 7:39
Personnel
Sonny Rollins: tenor saxophone, soprano saxophone
George Duke: piano, electric piano & synthesizer (track 1,3,5-7)
Raul de Souza: trombone (tracks 1-4,6,7)
Bennie Maupin: tenor saxophone (all), tenor saxophone soloist on 4, bass clarinet (track 7), saxello (track 6), lyricon (track 5)
Black Bird McNight: guitar (tracks: 1-3,5,6); soloist on 2,3
David Amaro: guitar; soloist on 1
Chuck Rainey: electric bass (tracks 1-3,6)
Bob Cranshaw: electric bass (tracks 4,5,7)
Eddie Moore: drums (tracks 1-3,6)
Roy McCurdy: drums (tracks 4,5,7)
Mtume: congas & percussion (1-4,6), lead guitar (track 5)

Also enjoyed the live, Caribbean-tending Don't Stop The Carnival, with Tony Williams---and There Will Be Another You, an electrifying, immersive concert from the mid-60s, with Billy Higgins, unreleased 'til the late-ish 70s, and totally relevant to the latter era's still-ongoing evolution of progressive and free jazz---also relevant to, for instance, this year's belated releases of Coltrane's Blue World, Art Pepper's Promise Kept: The Complete Artist House Masters, and fuckin' finally Getz at the Gate. Rollins sued or pressured ABC about releasing this show, and the LP disappeared pretty quickly, though may have eventually come out on CD.

Impulse has it on a 2-for-1 CD, paired with On Impulse, a studio album from the same year. My favorite Rollins album on Impulse is East Broadway Run Down (it was David S. Ware's favorite, too).

Great to know, thanks! I meant something more like "the evolution of progressive jazz in response to the co-existence of free jazz," toward a new mainstream, or something personally expressive, yet/and inclusive, that didn't lose the freedom principle of jazz to trappings, tropes, milestones, incl. previous adaptations and resistance to same.

As threatened, here's the first in a three-part series about Rollins' 1970s albums, discussing Sonny Rollins' Next Album (mostly solid), Horn Culture (some peaks and one very deep valley), In Japan (incredible, especially the 2CD reissue which adds a full hour of bonus material) and The Cutting Edge (also quite good - the addition of bagpiper Rufus Harley was a fucking brilliant choice).

Bless you for this series, but I disagree with your take on Sais- indeed it was that very track that prompted me to revive this thread. I was utterly blown away by how weird and long that soprano solo is. When it first comes on it sounds like someone just moaning like they got kicked in the nuts & they're trying to sing it out... unreal!

Part 2 is up today. TL;DR: Nucleus is pretty great, The Way I Feel is mostly not-great, the live There Will Never Be Another You is surprisingly rough and hardcore, and the double live Don't Stop the Carnival has its moments. Tony Williams doesn't add as much to it as I'd hoped, but Donald Byrd does.

I just picked up 'Carnival' on the cheap and have to agree. The r&b material is much better represented on the studio LPs and Williams is pretty rote. Sides 1 & 4 offer the most excitement imo.

unperson, thanks so much for doing the blog posts ! highly stimulating so far -- i'm pacing myself so i can spend some time with the records before i move ahead. great excuse to discover (and sometimes re-visit) the '70s catalogue.

anyway, i have to agree with Sparkle Motion re: "sais", i think it's great

unreleased 'til the late-ish 70s, and totally relevant to the latter era's still-ongoing evolution of progressive and free jazz

dow, this is interesting, but i'm curious, apart from the art pepper archival release you mentioned, what late '70s recordings do you have in mind ?

p.s. i like sonny rollins just fine but absolutely worship don cherry and am wondering about this box:

https://www.jazzviews.net/uploads/1/5/1/1/15113040/661287698.jpg?259

SONNY ROLLINS QUARTET WITH DON CHERRY - Complete Live at the Village Gate 1962

(6 CD SET)

​SONNY ROLLINS, tenor sax; DON CHERRY, cornet; BOB CRANSHAW, bass; BILLY HIGGINS, drums
July 27th to July 30th 1962

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=srweoZIlao0

xp to dow

sorry meant to phrase that more as, in addition to art pepper archival release, what mid / late '70s records do you see as being of a piece with this "progressive" tendency in some of these SR recordings ? just trying to figure out more clearly what you mean by opening up the sample size a bit

That 1962 box is amazing; I bought it a few years ago and wrote about it for BA:

The original Our Man in Jazz featured only three tracks—a side-long exploration of “Oleo,” and versions of “Dearly Beloved” and “Doxy”—and was not regarded as a landmark Rollins album, even though it was one of the first things he released after a hiatus that had begun in 1959. Now, though, a box has emerged, on the Solar label out of Spain, that adds 18 previously unreleased recordings, and the full-length “Dearly Beloved,” from the band’s four-night stand at the Village Gate, expanding the album to a six-CD set. Complete Live at the Village Gate 1962 is similar to Miles Davis’s 1995 box Complete Live at the Plugged Nickel 1965, in that it documents a band at work over multiple nights, allowing comparison between multiple performances of the same book of tunes. But the Davis quintet would stay together until 1968, its sound evolving from year to year, its studio albums building one on top of the other until they became one of the most beautiful and brilliant discographies in jazz. The Rollins/Cherry band, on the other hand, was a comet, rocketing across the scene and vanishing nearly as fast as it arrived.

The most immediately notable thing about these performances is their length. When these guys dug into a tune, they kept on digging. Two of the four versions of “Oleo” here are more than a half hour long, and even the released take is nearly a full minute longer on the box than it was on Our Man in Jazz. The “shortest” version of the tune runs more than 17 minutes. The album edit of “Dearly Beloved,” included here on Disc One, was eight minutes and change; the full version, found on Disc Three, runs 18:41. Other tracks, like versions of the Duke Ellington ballad “Solitude” and a series of untitled pieces apparently improvised in the moment, run between 15 and 30 minutes.

Of course, the quality of the music is also impressive as hell. The original album can seem overly loose at first listen; the opening version of “Oleo,” which is also the first thing recorded during the band’s three-night stand, drops you into a world that’s initially hard to navigate. The melody, one of Rollins’ most powerful (that’s why it’s become a standard), is rendered in an oblique and digressive manner, with the saxophonist and the trumpeter talking past each other as Cranshaw and Higgins push and shove. There’s a visceral, bluesy swing to the rhythm, with the drummer attacking in an almost martial manner at times, but it almost feels like there are two separate conversations going on, one up front and one in back.

But the deeper you get into this set, the more you absorb the band’s collective language, the clearer it becomes. A few critics have claimed that Rollins and Cherry were incompatible, that they weren’t capable of deep communication. But I think what was really going on was, people were used to hearing Cherry next to Coleman, whose style was built around extrapolations of a song’s melody. And Cherry could do that really, really well; there’s almost a giddiness to their interplay on albums like This Is Our Music and The Shape of Jazz to Come, like you’re listening to two little kids making up a song together. Rollins, though, was on the surface a more traditional jazz player, who improvised (and still does) by building on the chord structure of a tune, occasionally (okay, frequently) throwing in apposite quotes from other songs, sometimes as punctuation, other times seemingly as filler to allow him to gather his thoughts. The fuller, heavier sound of the tenor saxophone is the ideal tool for this job, just as the alto’s lighter, floatier tone is great for loose, wandering melodies.

Oh man I had no idea of this box set's existence! Our Man in Jazz is such an amazing record, I am going to have to seek this out.

It's incredibly cheap; if you see someone selling it for more than $25, keep looking.

yeah that rollins/cherry box is the deal of the century

xxxxpost hi budo, did you also see my attempted clarification of a 40-year-old impression?
I meant something more like "the evolution of progressive jazz in response to the co-existence of free jazz," toward a new mainstream, or something personally expressive, yet/and inclusive, that didn't lose the freedom principle of jazz to trappings, tropes, milestones, incl. previous adaptations and resistance to same.

― dow, Thursday, October 31, 2019 9:21 PM (two weeks ago) Rollins was way ahead of the curve with this, of course, but the 70s albums I was thinking about in the 70s re expansion of the progressive mainstream prob came more from the "outside," since that's mostly what I was listening to then: Archie Shepp's Sea of Faces, the duo albums with Horace Parlan, Shepp's performance on Charlie Haden's The Golden Number, also the rest of that album, where Haden was taking Liberation Music Orchestra and Old and New Dreams in that era, the later/last Mingus albums---but There Will Be Another You was more challenging, although he always found his way back to the (improved!) melodies he'd started with, after taking them places I would not have known of: the hardest and knottiest of hard bop x fire music, spinning around and around, and it comes out here, in his version of the new normal, 'til the next show, or tune.

I didn't hear Art Pepper until the early 80s, so I wasn't thinking about him in those terms yet.

Oh and also in the 70s, Gato Barbieri's Chapter One: Latin America and Bolivia: romantic melodies and skronk on an extended honeymoon.

Which was not as far from the progressive mainstream or charts as you might think; he'd already gotten 70s-type interest via his soundtrack for Last Tango In Paris.

It's incredibly cheap; if you see someone selling it for more than $25, keep looking.

― shared unit of analysis (unperson), Sunday, November 17, 2019 1:13 PM (four hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

yeah that rollins/cherry box is the deal of the century

I haven't bought a CD in nigh on a decade but this might convince me.

He had the calypso thing, but they had very different visions of infinity. Or perhaps...not so different after all?

THE NOTEBOOKS OF SONNY ROLLINS came out today from NY Review Books

at a glance, there's nothing to dispel the idea that he is a mad genius

Phew, thought we'd lost him there.

every time this thread is revived

#musingsofmiles #bouncingofbach

Just finished Saxophone Colossus and listening to his entire discography.

It’s now a challops but the Milestone run is better than its reputation and I quite enjoyed The Solo Album even if that one has not been rehabilitated.

Saxophone Colossus the book, that is

had to look up which albums are milestone

I think nucleus and global warming are pretty great but I haven't heard most of the others. I heard bad things from jazz nerds which I took too seriously when I was young and insecure about being into jazz so I'm sure there's lots to uncover

I heard the solo album maybe once as a teen and found it boring because it wasn't accessible hard bop or extreme free jazz so I didn't understand the point of it

I'll link to the three long things I wrote about Sonny in the '70s, which I'm sure are upthread somewhere:

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

More on the Notebooks of Sonny Rollins

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/18/books/review/notebooks-of-sonny-rollins.html

I'm not a huge fan tbh, but I'm listening to the 40 minute version of 'Four' and it certainly is something (mostly a monument to the rhythm section, sustaining that level of swing and energy and attention at the same tempo for that long).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7KCDJtiY8sg

Also kind of amazing that it just keeps speeding up, lol

I'm not a huge fan tbh