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

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.

Amazing live footage from 1971, of Rollins with Bobo Stenson, Arild Andersen and Jon Christensen backing him up:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fm_WKmQt2JI

fantastic stuff!

Great interview by David Marchese in the New York Times.

yeah amazing interview!

Wow

Wow is right. Some heavy stuff discussed. But also some lighter topics—His comments re The Rolling Stones are funny.

My breathing seems to be O.K. My main problem is that I can’t blow my horn anymore. I’m surviving, but my problem is I can’t blow my horn.

How does it feel not to be able to blow your horn?

[Laughs] Well, that’s where living in the spirit world comes in. It felt pretty bad. I had a rough time getting through it, because I like blowing my horn. When I had to stop, it was quite a traumatic deal for me. From New Yorker interview

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/sonny-rollins-on-the-pandemic-protests-and-music

90 today.

90 today.

hb big ledge!

a couple of years back i was buzzing when he followed me on twitter, until i started getting suspicious dm's, sort of in character from the living legend asking for financial help and it turned out to be a fake phishing account that was promptly closed down, lol.

https://jazztimes.com/features/interviews/sonny-rollins-bright-moments/

Another good interview with Sonny.

Whew---one of those threads where every revive becomes a bit more worrisome---but thanks for the link.
We should add one to unperson's coverage of this
Sonny Rollins - Rollins In Holland (Resonance)
in his Stereogum column:
https://www.stereogum.com/2107860/the-month-in-jazz-november-2020/columns/ugly-beauty/

He can't play his horn any more---doctor's orders, reportedly---but maybe keyboards? Enough to direct other horn players? Wonder if he can write charts.

Also, this kind of crossover is my fascination (as I meant re xpost "coexistence" of free and hard bop, a new progressive mainstream confluence)---play it again, unperson:
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.
Yeah, the Rollins way is itself a confluence, which may incl. something he heard Marlene Dietrich sing in an old movie on The Late Show, or on the radio of a passing car, whatever comes back to him in the now (though he may have actually plotted at least some of this out, but seems spontaneous)---also, whenever I think of Hal Willner, I think of Rollins w Leonard Cohen, on Night Music, which Willner later said was the performance that seemed to establish the credibility of his approach on there---I don't trust ilx to let me post it, but no doubt somewhere on the 'Tube.

The Complete Village Gate set from a few years back gives a MUCH better picture of the Rollins / Cherry collab than Our Man In Jazz imo — it's amazing.

https://www.discogs.com/Sonny-Rollins-Quartet-With-Don-Cherry-Complete-Live-At-The-Village-Gate-1962/release/7008770

Yeah, and I was quoting from unperson's take on it, upthread---still gotta get that box!

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2022/jan/21/i-was-so-close-to-the-sky-it-was-spiritual-sonny-rollins-on-jazz-landmark-the-bridge-at-60

Rollins disappeared from the radar and stayed off it for the next two years – instead playing the saxophone on the bridge day and night, rain or shine, in solitary sessions of sometimes 15 hours

I'd read about this before but didn't realise he'd gone to such extremes!

The Bridge is one of the best.

i've been listening to the bridge nonstop lately, great to have this piece about it

I appreciated yr Jim Hall revive other day as well, Brad

Held my breath as I opened this thread. Feel so privileged to have seen him live.

Me too. Jim Hall actually played with him at one of the shows I attended (the 80th birthday gig with Ornette). Hall looked about 150 years old that night.

There's an excerpt from Aidan Levy's massive Rollins biography on The Wire's website. (I reviewed the book itself in the current issue.) It's all about the formation of the band that recorded Our Man In Jazz:

https://www.thewire.co.uk/in-writing/book-extracts/read-an-extract-from-saxophone-colossus-the-life-music-of-sonny-rollins-by-aidan-levy

wow! thanks for this. can't wait to pick up a copy.

new bio is terrific — about halfway done with it.

Phew, feared the worst when I saw the Rolling Obituary thread near the top of the page.