BLP 4001

Sonny Rollins - Newk's Time

Released - January 1959

Recording and Session Information

Van Gelder Studio, Hackensack, NJ, September 22, 1957
Sonny Rollins, tenor sax; Wynton Kelly, piano #1,2,4-6; Doug Watkins, bass #1,2,4-6; Philly Joe Jones, drums.

tk.5 Tune Up
tk.9 Asiatic Raes
tk.13 Surrey With The Fringe On Top
tk.15 Wonderful! Wonderful!
tk.17 Namely You
tk.19 Blues For Philly Joe

Session Photos

Photos: Francis Wolff/Mosaic Images
https://www.mosaicrecordsimages.com/

Track Listing

Side One
Title	Author	Recording Date
Tune Up	Miles Davis	22/09/1957
Asiatic Raes	Kenny Dorham	22/09/1957
Wonderful! Wonderful!	Sherman Edwards-Ben Raleigh	22/09/1957
Side Two
The Surrey With The Fringe On Top	Richard Rodgers-Oscar Hammerstein II	22/09/1957
Blues For Philly Joe	Sonny Rollins	22/09/1957
Namely You	Gene de Paul-Johnny Mercer	22/09/1957

Liner Notes

EXCELLENCE seldom goes hand in hand with consistency; when it does, it is a unique occurrence. It is more difficult for a jazz musician to be consistent than almost anyone else: he is creating in public, for as much as six hours at a stretch, with no chance to revise a single note once it has been played. Under these extremely difficult circumstances, you are justified in considering yourself lucky if you hear one really inspired eight-bar passage in an evening. The rest of the time you get competent workmanship or a more-or-less artful stringing together of pet runs and cliches. Sonny Rollins is an excellent and inconsistent musician, but the night on which you heard only one inspired passage from him would be a rare one indeed. He is capable of much more than that. There are two reasons for his lack of consistency, both of which go toward making Rollins the complete jazz musician that he is. How he plays is entirely a matter of when you happen to hear him. Since he first appeared on the scene, his style has been in a continual process of evolution. He began, at a point which few men achieve, by being one of the better bop tenormen. By 1955, after work with Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk, he was obviously the best. From that point, rather than stopping, he continued to grow. His style, on the stand, altered almost nightly: by the time a Rollins record was released, Sonny was almost surely not playing quite that way any more. By now, he has created his own musical language, one that, while difficult to classify, is being imitated by so many that Rollins is in the sometimes unfortunate position of having created his own cliches.

Change is one reason for inconsistency. The second is the desire to play, a desire which of course varies with anyone, and with Sonny, this seems to be the determining factor: if you hear a phrase from Rollins on a listless night that you have heard before, you have almost surely heard it from him—he is merely repeating a few favorite words. When he wants to play, when he has something new to say, he extends himself constantly. In case any of the preceeding sounds like an apology, let it be made immediately clear that this record needs no apology. Blue Note is fortunate enough to have recorded Sonny Rollins under the best circumstances: on this particular afternoon, his style was at a point where it was fresh and vital to him, and he had an intense desire to communicate it. Sonny seems here to start slightly before a tune begins, and finish a little after it ends, trying all the time to get everything in. The group is a quartet, which allows him maximum freedom, and the rhythm section is made up of three musicians who understand Sonny's music and have played with him often: Wynton Kelly, Doug Watkins, and Philly Joe Jones.

The record opens with Miles Davis' Tune Up, on which the spontaneity of Sonny's phrases conceal the highly developed sense of structure that holds the entire solo together. Rollins has often been accused of being a "rough" musician, and gets casually lumped together with men to whom he is far superior. This performance can serve to disprove that opinion. There is as much organization here as there is in, say, a John Lewis solo, but it is an organization that holds the ideas together rather than exists for its own sake, and is partially masked by the enormous drive of Sonny's playing. An entire series of exchanges with Philly Joe is based on the rapid staccato bursts that Rollins usually employs only for emphasis, but here uses for a complete statement.

Asiatic Raes is a Kenny Dorham tune of difficult structure and shifting rhythms which Sonny negotiates with great ease. Most musicians use such rhythms only on the tune itself, going into straight four for their improvisations. Sonny has the grace to improvise in the rhythms of the song.

In any discussion of Sonny Rollins, mention is sooner or later made of the unusual sources of his material. In the past, he has presented such varied songs as If You Were The Only Girl In The World, Wagon Wheels, Shadow Waltz, and How Are Things in Grocca Morra. Here he plays Wonderful! Wonderful!, a song whose familiarity rests almost entirely on a recording made by Johnny Mathis. In its mood and chord patterns, Wonderful! Wonderful! has definite overtones of Broadway musical comedy, and Sonny gives a happy showtune feeling in this performance. Many of Sonny's own tunes have the same feeling, Broadway apparently having a considerable influence on him, and the way this song is played here, it could almost be his own composition.

In recent years, the emphasis in the rhythm section has shifted, with the bass laying down the basic beat and the drums being used primarily for accent. Here, Philly Joe Jones becomes a one-man rhythm section, as he and Sonny duet on Surrey With The Fringe On Top. On first hearing this sounds like one of the tenor-bass-drum trio sides that Rollins has featured recently. The rendition has such a remarkable fullness that you only gradually realize that all the music is being made by two men. A tour de force for both Rollins and Jones, it is fine jazz even after you are finished being amazed at the technical virtuosity.

Blues For Philly Joe is Sonny's only composition on this record. Sonny is becoming a jazz composer of stature, and is already the author of two established jazz standards, Doxy and Valse Hot. His tunes have an unusual freshness and charm, full of humor and immediately affecting. On this record, however, his composing abilities are definitely subordinated to his talent as a soloist, and this Blues is merely the simplest basis for improvisation. Like most good jazzmen, Sonny has evolved a personal style of playing blues that is one of his trademarks. This is not one of those blues. A driving, freewheeling performance, it resembles nothing quite so much as the Wardell Gray-Dexter Gordon chase exhibitions of the late forties. Sonny sounds here as though he were involved in a chase with himself, playing both parts and enjoying every minute of it. Wynton Kelly contributes an unusually fine solo here, followed by Doug Watkins. Sonny, finally finding someone besides himself to reply to, enters with the main phrase of Watkins' solo and finishes out. That is Sonny you hear at the beginning of Namely You, sounding as though he were beginning a dance set. And he might well be. One of the time-honored functions of music is to be danced to, and many top jazzmen served extensive apprenticeship in dance bands. When a musician can preserve this dance feeling and still turn in a jazz performance, the result, as in this example, can be delightful. Much of the credit here must go to Philly Joe, who employs the light, easy rhythms that have given the Miles Davis quintet much of its charm.

These six pieces make up the present album, Newk's Time. (The nickname, by the way, derives from Sonny's resemblance to Don Newcomb, but Sonny is long past the point where he can benefit from borrowed glory.) The album, as I have said, is simply a record of how Rollins felt on one particular afternoon. It is a measure of his achievement that such fleeting impressions can have this much significance.

—JOE GOLDBERG

Cover Photo by FRANCIS WOLFF
Recording by RUDY VAN GELDER

RVG CD Reissue Liner Notes

A NEW LOOK AT NEWK'S TIME

Neither Joe Goldberg's description of Sonny Rollins' quixotic muse or his judgment on the value of this audio snapshot of the evolving tenor giant requires amendment. The passing decades, which have only confirmed the hit-or-miss nature of Rollins' art, have also validated the stature of Newk's Time as a document of that art at its best.

When The Village Voice polled nearly two dozen critics in 1996 to determine the five favorite Rollins albums, Newk's Time placed sixth. Four of the five titles receiving more votes — the three trio masterpieces from 1957-58 (Way Out West, A Night at the Village Vanguard and Freedom Suite) and East Broadway Rundown from 1966 — capture Rollins working without a piano in the rhythm section. Only Saxophone Colossus (1956), the favorite Rollins disc of all by a wide margin, drew more votes among sessions in standard quartet format, or for that matter among all Rollins recordings where piano or guitar appear in the rhythm section. Clearly, Rollins was inspired when he recorded Newk's Time, creating that sense of overflowing the musical boundaries that Goldberg describes so incisively, and that can be best heard when the saxophonist trades fours with Philly Joe Jones. In summary this album finds a perfect band playing a perfect program of music.

Jones is the key, an aggressive yet elegant presence with a rhythmic metabolism ideally suited to the saxophonist. They first recorded together in 1953, on the Miles Davis session where Charlie Parker also played tenor sax that provides an early document of the aggressive interaction between soloist and drummer that would define hard bop; and Rollins and Jones reunited three years later for the Tenor Madness album where Rollins encountered John Coltrane. This was the third and final example of Rollins and Jones together in the studio, and it is filled with such rhythmic delights as the 6/8 swagger of "Asiatic Raes," the soft-shoe glide of "Namely You" and the boisterous two-is-enough groove of the duet "Surrey with the Fringe on Top. " Rollins recorded four albums for Blue Note, each with a different drum giant (Max Roach, Art Blakey and Elvin Jones being the others)' and Jones' here is second to none.

Given that variety of personnel was the rule on Rollins' Blue Note dates, Wynton Kelly's as the only sideman Rollins employed twice is worth noting. The two both came from families that had relocated to New York from the Caribbean, and had previously recorded together in 1949 with Babs Gonzalez and on Rollins' self-titled Blue Note debut in December 1956. Kelly's effervescence provides inspired support and solo contrast, and his pairing with Jones in a rhythm section would come to be considered classic.

While the two usually worked with Paul Chambers on bass, they are complemented here by the less extroverted but equally inspired Doug Watkins, who had previously served Rollins well on Saxophone Colossus.

The song choices are indicative of Rollins, and might be considered exemplary save for the absence of any calypso material. Two tunes acknowledge his longtime friends and frequent front-line partners Miles Davis and Kenny Dorham; a second pair draws on popular songs of the day ("Wonderful! Wonderful!" as noted was a Johnny Mathis hit, while "Namely You" was from the contemporary Broadway musical L'il Abner); and "Surrey," which Jones played frequently with the Miles Davis Quintet, adds a familiar standard. "Blues for Philly Joe" is one of the great Rollins blues performances, and not as removed from his norm as Goldberg suggests. The complex skein of thematic references that define what Goldberg calls the saxophonist's "personal style of playing blues" abound, albeit cloaked in a harsher, more urgent attack than Rollins employed on the more celebrated "Blue Seven" from Saxophone Colossus.

Confusion has long existed regarding the year in which Newk's Time was recorded, with references citing either 1957 or 1958. Studio logs confirm that the earlier date is correct. This means that Newk's Time predates A Night at the Village Vanguard by more than a month, although Blue Note issued the live album first; that all four of the Rollins albums on the label were cut in a period of eleven months, and that the number of Rollins masterpieces cut in less than the year that separates Way Out West and Freedom Suite proves to be even more incredible. Dating the album in 1957 also makes it only the second instance of Kelly and Jones recording together (they were heard with Clark Terry on Riverside earlier in the year), and the occasion for the premier recording of Dorham's "Asiatic Raes" (which the trumpeter first taped under its more familiar title "Lotus Blossom" on an Ernie Henry album two months later).

There are no alternate takes or unissued tracks from this session. While the original LP was less than 35 minutes long, only those who confuse quantity and quality will consider Newk's Time anything less than a masterpiece from beginning to end.

- Bob Blumenthal, 2003

Blue Note Spotlight - November 2012

http://www.bluenote.com/spotlight/sonny-rollins-55-years-later-its-still-newks/

It’s been 55 years since Sonny Rollins went into the studio to record Newk’s Time, his third album for Blue Note, and though much has changed for the saxophone colossus during the past half-century, much remains the same. This enduring classic, which gets its title from the striking resemblance between Rollins and erstwhile Brooklyn Dodgers pitcher Don Newcombe, features bassist Doug Watkins, pianist Wynton Kelly, and drummer Philly Joe Jones, bolstering the restless effervescence of one of the players who defined the sound of the tenor saxophone.

Rollins covers three popular songs: “The Surrey with the Fringe on Top,” from Oklahoma!; “Namely You,” from Li’l Abner; and “Wonderful! Wonderful!”, at the time a recent hit for Johnny Mathis. Abandon any perception that Rollins might have chosen his repertoire with a wink, though; in fact, he had great affection for these tunes. He recently held forth from his home in upstate New York on his never-ending quest for musical nirvana, his love for Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, and meeting President Barack Obama.

It’s an understatement to say that I’m a huge fan of yours. I grew up playing the saxophone, and playing “Airegin” and making it through the changes was like a rite of passage, if I could ever do it. For me, too, by the way.

You just turned 82. How has your perspective changed over the years, and how do you keep it fresh? I would say that I was fortunate in that I was a person who was never a finished musician, I was always learning more, getting more. I thought at one time that that was a handicap, but it turned out to be a blessing, because my style is always changing. I’m always evolving, or devolving. Some people liked me back in 1957, and so who knows, but the point is, I’ve never been able to be a musician that was proficient enough to play the same thing every night. That skill, I can’t do that. I’m not that good—I can’t play the same. I’m always completely improvising, playing what happens in the moment, as far as that concept can be realized in terms of the performance. So that’s why you might say that I keep fresh. I keep fresh because I’m never the same. I’m always trying to reach a point in my music which I haven’t reached yet. It’s a certain perfection, if you will, or there’s a sound that I haven’t reached, and I know that, and I’m striving for it, so that keeps me always different.

Looking back at the Newk’s Time session, almost 55 years ago to the day, you had Wynton Kelly on piano, Doug Watkins on bass, and Philly Joe Jones on drums. What was it like working with those guys? They were all great musicians, all well-known at the time. Doug was a great player that was on my Colossus record. He was a very fine player, in demand by all the people who were hiring jazz bassists. Of course, Philly Joe Jones, we know his reputation and his work with Miles Davis and so many other people, and Wynton Kelly was also with Miles. I knew Wynton from around New York. He was from Brooklyn, but I didn’t hold that against him. He was a good player, he was very well-known and very respected. So it was really a break for me to be able to hire those guys. They were all top-notch people, and it was a real pleasure playing with them.

On Newk’s Time, you recorded “The Surrey with the Fringe on Top,” which is from Oklahoma! and “Namely You” from Lil’ Abner. You’d already done Way Out West. Why record tunes that were so quintessentially unhip? I was really blessed by having a mother who always introduced her children to the arts, and I remember being a very small boy when I went to see The Pirates of Penzance by Gilbert and Sullivan. I used to go to City Center on 55th Street. They had a lot of operettas there. I went to Broadway shows. I was introduced to these cultural archetypes from a very, very early age, and as a matter of fact, I actually saw Li’l Abner on Broadway when I was older. I like all this music. I was very fortunate—I had a lot of music in my household, but specifically, I grew up listening to a lot of what you would refer to as popular music. So to play it wasn’t anything strange for me, because I liked the songs. I like “Namely You,” and “The Surrey with the Fringe on Top” I probably saw in the movies. I had the freedom to choose my repertoire, which I’ve always had, even with producers. They’ve always realized, “Well, Sonny is his own producer, because the music he plays is music which he relates to, so whatever he does is okay.” So I was never influenced not to play Broadway show tunes or anything of that sort.

What would have been John Coltrane’s 86th birthday passed recently, as did the 45th anniversary of his passing. Looking back on it now, what was it like to work with Trane, and does that experience still influence your playing? Sure. When Trane was alive, it was a little bit difficult for me to take a lot of music from him because we were looked at as adversaries, so it was sort of impossible. I had to be different. But through the years, of course, I’ve been able to incorporate his many contributions. He was a great friend of mine, a great person, a great musician. The funny part about this whole thing with Coltrane was that I was four years his junior, yet I was famous before Coltrane. I was famous and had a reputation in music—Coltrane was invited to play on one of my records. So at first, it was sort of funny, but then, as the years went by, I realized, Coltrane was Miles’s age, and those guys had four more years at it. I was able to realize that. Coltrane was older than I was, I was just more famous in the business than Coltrane. But what can you say? One of the greats of our music, very few people would be in that firmament with Coltrane. It was great that we knew each other. He was a beautiful person, and I was very privileged. The music he gave to the whole world, I was finally able to use some of it after his passing.

You’ve influenced so many players. You said you listened to a lot of popular music growing up. Who are some of those influences and who are the people who influenced you the most? Well, I was influenced a great deal by everything and everybody. My older brother, who was five years my senior, he was a very serious European classical violinist. So I used to listen to him practice in the house. So I heard classical music. I heard a lot of people on the radio. And in those days, the movies were sort of what television is today, but it wasn’t in your home, so you had to go to the movie shows. I liked people like Bing Crosby and Louis Armstrong. I liked Frank Sinatra—I saw some of those movies. Martha Raye, I think I first saw her singing “I’m An Old Cowhand” from my Way Out West album. I liked Jimmy Durante, anybody that was a performer. That’s who influenced me. I liked people like Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald. I liked Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire. So this is my background. I was born in Harlem, and people have to understand that just because you’re black and you’re born in Harlem doesn’t mean that you just like black music. No, I like music, and in America, I was exposed to a lot of music in my household, and I listened to all of it. It’s all who I am.

Not too long ago, you got a Kennedy Center award from President Obama. How do you feel about Barack Obama? One of his people told me that he doesn’t like all kinds of jazz, but he likes me. So I was very flattered. Later on, I met him, and he said, Sonny, I used to listen to your music when I was in school and it helped me get through my school days. That’s very flattering to me. That’s part of what I do. My music is supposed to reach out and influence other people, beyond my own practicing and studying. It’s supposed to be for people.