BLP 1581

Sonny Rollins - A Night at the Village Vanguard

Released - December 1957

Recording and Session Information

"Village Vanguard", NYC, afternoon set, November 3, 1957
Sonny Rollins, tenor sax; Donald Bailey, bass; Pete La Roca, drums.

tk.2 A Night In Tunisia (afternoon)

"Village Vanguard", NYC, evening set, November 3, 1957
Sonny Rollins, tenor sax; Wilbur Ware, bass; Elvin Jones, drums.

tk.10 That Ol' Devil Moon
tk.12 Softly, As In A Morning Sunrise
tk.13 Sonnymoon For Two
tk.14 I Can't Get Started
tk.17 Striver's Row

Session Photos

Photos: Francis Wolff

Track Listing

Side One
Title	Author	Recording Date
Old Devil Moon	E.Y. Harburg, Burton Lane	03/11/1957
Softly, as in a Morning Sunrise	Oscar Hammerstein, Sigmund Romberg	03/11/1957
Striver's Row	Sonny Rollins	03/11/1957
Side Two
Sonnymoon for Two	Sonny Rollins	03/11/1957
A Night in Tunisia	Dizzy Gillespie, Frank Paparelli	03/11/1957
I Can't Get Started	Ira Gershwin, Vernon Duke	03/11/1957

Credits

Cover Photo:	FRANCIS WOLFF
Cover Design:	REID MILES
Engineer:	RUDY VAN GELDER
Producer:	ALFRED LION
Liner Notes:	LEONARD FEATHER

Liner Notes

This LP constituted a double premiere. For the first time Sonny Rollins is heard appearing before the public as leader of his own combo. For the first time the Village Vanguard, one of New York's most proudly prescient night clubs, comes to life through the medium of an in-person recording.

Neither development will come as much of a surprise to anyone who has followed the career of Sonny Rollins as a sound in modern jazz or the Vanguard as a nursery of rising talent.

On a recent night, during the Rollins incumbency at the club, I caught its proprietor, Max Gordon, in a reminiscent mood. "We opened the Vanguard in April 1935," he said. "It was originally one of those real Bohemian hangouts. There wasn't much music for the first couple of years — just a piano player. Then came The Revuers in 1938, with Leonard Bernstein at the piano. The Revuers stayed about a year, and after that we had a lot of folk artists and we began to go in for jazz in the early 1940s.

"Those Monday night jam sessions — boy! did we have some stars! Nat "King" Cole, Earl Hines, Benny Morton, Vic Dickenson, anyone you can name. I ran into Dizzy Gillespie last summer at Newport and he said, 'Man, when I see you, it reminds me how old I am.'" A photograph in the book Inside Jazz (formerly known as Insider Bebop) shows a February 1942 jam session at the Vanguard with Dizzy, Vido Musso, Billy Kyle, Cootie Williams, and Charlie Shavers.

"When The Revuers came back the second time," recalls Gordon, "we had Eddie Heywood playing piano, not long after he had left Benny Carter's band. At one time he worked with a trio, using Albert Nicholas and Zutty Singleton. Then we had Art Hodes's trio and Maxie Kaminsky and all the great blues folk singers like Josh White and Leadbelly."

In the late 1940s and the early '50s, jazz generally took a back seat at the Vanguard; except for the Dixie spots, it had moved uptown, first to 52nd Street and then to the Broadway clubs. But in May 1957, Gordon decided, in his own words, to "refresh the whole entertainment setup." Since last summer he has used a provocative mixture of the greatest in modern jazz, from Chico Hamilton and Stan Getz to J.J. Johnson, interspersed with verbal entertainment by performers who, in one way or another, were hip enough or sufficiently jazz-associated to please the audiences who had come primarily to inspect the music; men like Mort Sahl and Irwin Corey, who, in their respective categories, may well be the two funniest men alive, and Jack Kerouac, whose occasionally jazz-tinted adventures in his novel, On the Road, led to his employment at the Vanguard, reading some of his own writings to a jazz background.

That Sonny Rollins could fit into such a scene was logical and perhaps inevitable. Gordon had been listening to Rollins on records and then had gone to hear him during Sonny's tenure with Miles Davis. When Sonny decided to branch out on his own, he offered him the use of the hall.

Sonny spent his weeks at the Vanguard experimenting, toying briefly with the idea of using a quintet. For the first week he had trumpet, piano, bass, drums and himself. The second week he dropped the trumpet and brought in a new rhythm section. Still not feeling that he was getting quite the right presentation, he wound up with the economy-sized combo that turned out to be the most satisfactory to him — the tenor sax-bass-drums trio heard on these sides.

Sonny's sidemen on five of these six tracks are both familiar to the followers of recent developments in jazz. Wilbur Ware, first heard with Thelonious Monk after he breezed into town from Chicago, has previously been heard on Blue Note with Sonny Clark, BLP 1570. Elvin Jones, third member of this distinguished Michigan family that produced brother Thad and Hank, was Featured on Thad's Blue Note album, BLP 1546.

On "A Night In Tunisia," which was recorded the same evening but with a different personnel, Sonny used bassist Donald Bailey from Baltimore (not related to Jimmy Smith the drummer) and Pete La Roca on drums.

From the start it is apparent that Sonny's motive in whittling down his unit to the compact trio heard here was the concentration of attention on his own personality, an aim well justified by the results when, with no complex arrangements to impede him and nothing but drums driving and bass beating behind him, he tears info four minutes of improvisation on "Old Devil Moon," and only gives up momentarily during a series of fours with the drummer. For the last minute or two this track develops into a protracted coda built around the tonic, a device Sonny employs to dramatic effect.

Sonny's own announcement introduces "Softly As In A Morning Sunrise," in which Wilbur's own line behind Sonny's melody is a feature of the first chorus. Sonny's horn then grabs the spotlight in a performance that reflects his volatile personality — the flurry of notes at the end of the first eight measures is typical. Wilbur then has a long solo, brilliantly conceived and stupendously recorded (courtesy of Rudy Van Gelder). Elvin maintains the kind of beat one would expect from a member of the Jones family, both in his solo and in his fours with Sonny, as well as in the trio passages. "Striver's Row," a Rollins original that closed this side, is a medium-bright performance based on a familiar chord sequence.

The Second side opens with "Sonnymoon For Two," a simple repeated riff based on the blues, in a descending phrase. The Rollins horn is in control for a full five minutes, impassioned and inventive, before Wilbur relieves him with a series of fours.

"A Night In Tunisia," the Dizzy Gillespie composition known in jazz circles for fifteen years, is taken at a faster tempo than usual. Sonny pulls a surprise by changing the melody of the customary interlude between the first and second chorus, while retaining the original pattern of its chord changes. Later on he blows some phrases from Dizzy's current big band arrangement of the tune. Drummer Pete La Roca, who was discovered at a Jazz Unlimited session in New York, has an impressive solo.

"l Can't Get Started" is the only ballad track of the session. The Vernon Duke standard is taken at a slow tempo to which Sonny applies his forceful tone and individual melodic ideas without destroying the original concept of the tune.

Blue Note was happy to have the friendly cooperation of Max Gordon and the Vanguard in the making of these sides, just as jazz fans are happy to have the Vanguard as one of New York's foremost havens of contemporary jazz — just as all of us are delighted to see Sonny launched on the road to what should be a brilliant and successful new phase of his career.

— LEONARD FEATHER

RVG CD Reissue Liner Notes

If a truth-in-titling rule applied to jazz albums, this classic recording would have to be renamed A Day And Night At The Village Vanguard. The original, single-album release contained one track ("A Night In Tunisia" with Donald Bailey and Pete LaRoca) recorded at the Vanguard's Sunday matinee performance, as well as five with Wilbur Ware and Elvin Jones from sets on the same evening. A two-record set of additional material, one more performance from the matinee, appeared in 1975, and all of the music presented in the order of recording on two compact discs in 1987. This release makes all of the properly sequenced music available in one package, and adds several of Rollins's spoken introductions on the first of the two discs. Stage announcements are admittedly less valuable than musical performances, yet it is a treat hear Rollins alluding to a children's radio show in his opening welcome and asking the audience for help in identifying the Broadway source of "Old Devil Moon." His stage announcements at age 27 sound more relaxed than those he provides today — or perhaps back then he was simply less impatient to get to the music.

One would not call his playing laid-back, though. It is relentless, fierce, totally engaged; and the trio context provides the necessary latitude to pull and bend the material without having it fly apart. This was one of Rollins's first engagements as a leader, after two years spent working primarily with Max Roach as well as occasional jobs in Miles Davis's quintet during the absence of John Coltrane. It is not surprising that he relied on a book of pop standards and jazz classics by his mentors Davis, Gillespie and Charlie Parker ("Striver's Row" is the chord changes of "Confirmation" without a new written melody); but he took these compositions to their limits, in an unyielding flow of ideas and emotion. Even though the term is generally applied to improvisations that omit fixed harmonies, these takes could easily be considered the beginning of energy music.

They are also the first documentation of the mature Elvin Jones style. The drummer did not have everything in place by 1957, and one sometimes senses that his mind is ahead of his limbs; but the power and the complexity of conception were ideally suited to what Rollins was after, as was the heavy stroke and bulldozer momentum of Ware's bass. There are moments when the evening trio sounds like it is comprised of three drummers, while the two takes of "Softly, As In A Morning Sunrise" find them adopting a gentler (though hardly kid gloves) touch. The tracks with LaRoca and the otherwise obscure Bailey are beautifully executed as well, albeit with a less singular ensemble sound. This was the first important appearance on record by LaRoca, who also had a clear vision of new approaches to rhythm. He visited Rudy Van Gelder's studio a month later, taping tracks for a Sonny Clark session that went unreleased for 20 years, then began turning heads in earnest with his work on Jackie McLean's New Soil, recorded in February 1959. Like Jones, LaRoca would go on to become a Blue Note leader; and like Jones and Rollins, he remains a major creative force to this day.

Rollins made several records for several labels between late 1956 and the fall of 1958. He had strongly negative feelings about his years under contract to Prestige, and felt that spreading his work around was the best career move he could make. Fortunately, he hooked up with the best of the era's independent producers, Contemporary's Lester Koenig and Riverside's Orrin Keepnews as well as Blue Note's Alfred Lion. Each of these affiliations produced a classic Rollins trio recording, and it is instructive to hear A Night At The Village Vanguard in relationship to Way Out West (Contemporary, March 1957, with Ray Brown and Shelly Manne) and The Freedom Suite (Riverside, February 1958, with Oscar Pettiford and Max Roach) to appreciate how Rollins was uniquely inspired by these different sets of masters, and how he in turn inspired them.

There is little point in ranking these masterpieces, given their overall excellence, just as it would be more frustrating than valuable to argue about the best of the many live recordings that would be produced at the Vanguard. You may prefer the Bill Evans Trio's Sunday At The Village Vanguard and Waltz For Debby, or the John Coltrane Quartet's Coltrane Live At The Village Vanguard and Impressions, all of which were taped at the club in 1961; but this one is just as magnificent and just as influential. So these recordings can also be celebrated as the beginning of a live recording tradition that, as much as the fabled ambience and list of legendary performers, has marked the Village Vanguard as the world's leading jazz club.

— Bob Blumenthal, 1999