BN-LA-401-H2

Sonny Rollins

Released - 1975

Recording and Session Information

Van Gelder Studio, Hackensack, NJ, December 16, 1956
Donald Byrd, trumpet; Sonny Rollins, tenor sax; Wynton Kelly, piano; Gene Ramey, bass; Max Roach, drums.

tk.1 Decision
tk.2 Plain Jane
tk.6 How Are Things In Glocca Morra
tk.8 Bluesnote

Van Gelder Studio, Hackensack, NJ, April 14, 1957
Jay Jay Johnson, trombone #1,3-5; Sonny Rollins, tenor sax; Horace Silver, piano #1,3-5; Thelonious Monk, piano #2,5; Paul Chambers, bass; Art Blakey, drums.

tk.1 Why Don't I
tk.6 Reflections
tk.7 Poor Butterfly
tk.11 You Stepped Out Of A Dream
tk.12 Misterioso

Van Gelder Studio, Hackensack, NJ, September 22, 1957
Sonny Rollins, tenor sax; Wynton Kelly, piano #1,3; Doug Watkins, bass #1,3; Philly Joe Jones, drums.

tk.5 Tune Up
tk.13 Surrey With The Fringe On Top
tk.17 Namely You

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

tk.17 Striver's Row

Track Listing

Side One
Title	Author	Recording Date
Tune Up	Miles Davis	September 22 1957
Decision	Sonny Rollins	December 16 1956
Striver's Row	Sonny Rollins	November 3 1957
Namely You	DePaul-Mercer	September 22 1957
Side Two
Misterioso	Thelonious Monk	April 14 1957
How Are Things In Glocca Morra	Lane-Harburg	December 16 1956
Reflections	Thelonious Monk	April 14 1957
Side Three
Why Don't I	Sonny Rollins	April 14 1957
Poor Butterfly	Golden-Hubbell	April 14 1957
Plain Jane	Sonny Rollins	December 16 1956
Side Four
The Surrey With The Fringe On Top	Rodgers-Hammerstein	September 22 1957
Bluesnote	Sonny Rollins	December 16 1956
You Stepped Out Of A Dream	Kahn-Brown	April 14 1957

Liner Notes

SONNY ROLLINS

The sound grabs you first. A Washington Post writer describes a "rich, ironwood tone," The Village Voice applies the adjectives "sinewy, commanding," and a friend comments, "it's a sound you feel in your gut." But these word-pictures are inadequate. You listen. With today's music schools turning out technically formidable saxophonists whose sounds are interchangeable, just one note from Sonny Rollins' horn can produce a refreshingly indescribable psychophysical sensation.

Rollins — or Newk, as he's sometimes called — grew up in Harlem with some of the most individual sounding musicians of our time. Jackie McLean was a childhood chum. Bud Powell and Coleman Hawkins' were neighborhood idols. The young Rollins used to wait on Hawkins' stoop late into the night for the master saxophonist to return home from engagements and all those nights, devoted as they were to a kind of worship of one of the original pillars of jazz, are in Rollins' sound. It's a sound squarely in the "Classic Tenors" tradition; some listeners hear a touch of Don Byas, others some Ben Webster, and of course Hawk. Still, Rollins' is a tenor sound that won't be mistaken for anyone else's.

The saxophonist's sense of humor and choice of material are intimately related, and equally distinctive. The present compilation of Rollins recordings from 1956-57, his most-productive period, includes at least two tunes which would stand out like sore thumbs in any jazzman's book, "How Are Things in Glocca Morra" and "Poor Butterfly." Miraculously, the first becomes in Rollins' hands perhaps the most convincing example on record of his debt to the Hawkins/Webster/Byas style of ballad playing. It hovers precariously on the edge of sentimentality and never, not for an instant, does it lose its balance. True, the theme statement is so ardently tender it just might be satirical, but it develops into a committed, warm-toned improvisation that literally takes the tune apart, with Rollins' exemplary control of the entire range of the tenor a marvel throughout. The saxophonist again hints briefly at parody on "Poor Butterfly" before he engages in some intense double-timing and turns the proceedings over to the more-than-capable J.J. Johnson and Paul Chambers.

Hawkins was not the only saxophonist young Sonny Rollins idolized. Newk has mentioned to several interviewers his early infatuation with rhythm-and-blues saxophonist Louis Jordan, leader of the stomping Tympany Five. Interestingly enough, Ornette Coleman was an early Jordan emulator and John Coltrane, Rollins' only "rival" as the most influential modern tenor stylist, served a lengthy apprenticeship in stylistically related R&B bands. Of the great mass of critical writing pertaining to Sonny Rollins, very little discusses the saxophonist's mastery of the blues idiom. Fortunately, that mastery is handsomely displayed in this collection. Thelonious Monk's "Mysterioso" is given its most down-home reading on record and Newk's own "Bluesnote" features hot, growling saxophone in a style which is intermittently reminiscent of Big Jay McNeeley's.

There's more going on here than the blues, though. Rollins' work from the late fifties is uniquely important in that it anticipates certain elements of the free form jazz which would develop during the subsequent decade. "Striver's Row," from the first lp ever recorded live at the Village Vanguard in New York's Greenwich Village, is a case in point. It's fairly typical of other Rollins trio works from this period (c.f. Freedom Suite and Way Out West) and, as such, quite atypical of fifties jazz in general. Its harmonic and rhythmic freedom are much more redolent of the sixties and, indeed, drummer Elvin Jones and bassist Wilbur Ware went on to become two of the most important rhythm section innovators of that revolutionary decade. "I've always liked playing without a harmonic base," Rollins told interviewer Bob Blumenthal in 1973, "because of the added freedom. To do that, you have to have the right kind of drummer and the right kind of bass player. A lot of drummers and bass players are good, but if you were to take away the guitar or piano they wouldn't sound as good. You need special people to play like that." Jones and Ware filled the bill.

Perhaps the most frequently and laboriously analyzed aspect of Rollins' art — and we are talking about a "failed" painter who became a Picasso of the saxophone = is the thematic unity of his improvisations. Gunther Schuller (now President of the New England Conservatory of Music) wrote an article in The Jazz Review in 1959 which dissected a Rollins solo in great detail and stated that the saxophonist's ability to break a theme down into motivic elements and manipulate those elements as a composer might in the course of a solo, as opposed to simply blowing on chord changes, constituted the most important new development in jazz since Lester Young and Charlie Parker extended the rhythmic and harmonic bounderies of the improviser's working vocabulary. "I guess it's true," Rollins said when Blumenthal asked him about the Schuller article, fifteen years alter it first appeared, "but I had never thought about it; I was just playing it." In this collection "Why Don't I," with its stimulating thematic intervals and head-related solos by both Rollins and J.J. Johnson, is an excellent example of the approach Schuller found so praiseworthy.

Rollins did not come to his artistry effortlessly; he was not, as Ornette Coleman seems to have been, a born innovator. In fact, he seems to have accomplished his musical growth one step at a time, halting here and there and then pressing on resolutely. He was born Theodore Walter Rollins, September 7, 1930, in New York City. An older brother and an older sister were both music students, and acquaintances in the neighborhood included drummer Art Taylor and pianist Kenny Drew in addition to the "Gods," Powell and Hawkins. At the age of seventeen Rollins took up the saxophone, but he was still thinking about painting. It was not until 1948, when he first recorded, that he decided to aban don the visual arts (though the deft strokes of his coloristic textural variations on the tenor suggest that he never abandoned them entirely) in order to devote himself full time to music. He was a favorite of the top players in short order; by 1950 he had recorded with Powell, J.J. Johnson, and Fats Navarro.

Hard drugs, hard drinking, and unscheduled, non-stop living were au courant in the world the teenage saxophonist plunged into. some of this was due to the example set by Charlie Parker, who according to Rollins was "our hero. He was our leader." In his unusually candid Washington Post interview Newk recalled that in 1953 "I told Byrd I was clean (i.e. not using narcotics) and I wasn't...So when I saw his reaction — he was beaming and happy — it struck me about what this meant to him. I realized I would have to stop." Rollins checked himself into Lexington and cleaned up in 1955, the year Parker died.

On emerging from this dark night of the soul he played around Chicago briefly and then joined the Clifford Brown/Max Roach quintet, the top small band of its day in terms of its influence on serious improvisers. Brown, the brilliant trumpet player, and Richie Powell, Bud's younger brother and the band's pianist/arranger, were killed in an automobile accident in 1956. Rollins stayed with Roach for another few months and then branched out on his own, appearing often with trios (c.f. "Striver's Row") and recording most of the lp's critics have named as the finest of his career, Then, in 1959, he abruptly disappeared. He was, as Blumenthal noted in The Boston Phoenix, "at the peak of both his power and popularity."

"In 1959," he explained to Blumenthal, "there were a lot of pressures on me. Also, my health wasn't too good; I was drinking a whole lot, smoking a whole lot. So I left to go back and do some more music and studying; it was really a sabbatical. I went back and studied some more, and meditated by myself." Upon his reappearance in 1961 Rollins began recording for RCA Victor and won top honors in most of the magazine polls. In 1964 he demonstrated his interest in the emerging free jazz trends he had already pioneered with his trios by hiring trumpeter Don Cherry and drummer Billy Higgins from Ornette Coleman's group. Rollins' ties to the new wave were generational as well as intellectual; he is six months Coleman's junior.

He played both "inside" and "outside" through the mid-sixties and then, in 1967, he dropped out of sight once again. This time he stopped playing his horn altogether for nearly two years and travelled to India and Japan, where he studied Vedanta, Hatha Yoga, and Zen Buddhism. He did not return to recording and performing until the early seventies. As of 1975 he is performing fairly regularly in the U.S., Europe, and Japan. His playing is not the best of his career but it is, on a good night, the most assured and breathtaking of any living tenor saxophonist's.

The material in this album, selected from four classic Blue Note lp's which have long been out of print, consists for the most part of uniquely informal entries in the Rollins discography. There are several heady, perhaps insufficiently cautious moments, as when the saxophonist blunders into one of Blakey's fours during the exchanges at the end of "Why Don't I" or when he and young Donald Byrd play "Plain Jane's" head so loosely they sound momentarily like Coleman and Cherry of a few years later. But — and this is where the present album differs most from the bulk of Newk's late fifties recordings — these two cuts, imperfect as they are, contain some of the collection's most intense and expressive playing.

"Mysterioso" is looser and in many ways more revealing than the more widely celebrated Rollins/Monk collaborations, such as the pianist's Brilliant Corners. The atmosphere is that of a jam session; it sounds very much as if Monk wanders from the piano bench after his solo, to be replaced for the second piano solo by Horace Silver. The tempo of the introduction is somewhat erratic and Monk's restatement of this passage toward the end of the performance seems to momentarily discomfort everyone with its sudden halts and starts. But the Rollins/Johnson/Monk sonority on the theme statement is the kind of sound books could be written about and the tenor solo is a gem, Rollins' plastic sense of line dovetailing perfectly with Monk's precisely off-center timing. J.J, Johnson, whose technically astounding solo work from the period was often criticized as lacking in warmth, comes through with a statement which is buttery and enveloping and Art Blakey is in excellent form. The other Monk composition, "Reflections," is performed by saxophone and rhythm only. It's rich in harmonic nuance and, in the hands of Rollins, it becomes a meditation of timeless profundity.

Silver is the only pianist on "Why Don't I," "Poor Butterfly," and "You Stepped Out of a Dream." The first of these includes a rather traditional and un-boppish solo by Johnson, though the trombonist does use theme fragments to pace his solo. "You Stepped" features some of the album's most heated improvising, with Rollins spitting out notes at a fast and furious clip and, apparently, ruminating on the theme as he does so. Paul Chambers contributes a fine bass solo, with a bow in the direction of Oscar Pettiford.

Elvin and Philly Joe Jones (who are not related), Max Roach and Art Blakey, the four most distinguished drummers of the post-Kenny Clarke era, are all featured extensively throughout this album. Each brings out a different facet in Rollins. Roach, the perfectionist, emphasizes concise developmental techniques and thoughtful solo construction; Blakey pops and pulls and brings out both drive and drama. Elvin, even at this early stage in his career, suggests polyrhythmic directions, and Philly Joe simply burns, pushing Rollins into supercharged, eloquently emotional solo flights. On "Tune Up," for example, the saxophonist snaps Off phrases sharply, rips through tumbling and ascending strains, and works in high-speed permutations of the line's intervals, with energy to burn. "Namely You" is ostensibly a medium-tempo bounce but Jones stokes it relentlessly and engages in some exciting, only slightly underplayed fours with Rollins. "Surrey With the Fringe on Top," an unlikely but inspiring mid-fifties vehicle for Miles Davis as well as for Newk, is rendered here as a saxophone-drums duet, Rollins is by turns gruff and thrusting, sly, controlled, surreal, and Jones' deep-toned, liberated earth rhythms prefigure his late sixties collaborations with Archie Shepp.

Wynton Kelly, who joined the Miles Davis quintet after these performances were recorded, is an excellent foil for Rollins' virtuosity. The saxophonist has sometimes employed limited or self-effacing pianists, but Kelly already had a distinctive touch and a fresh approach to chord voicings and fitted inperfectly. On "Decision," "How Are Things in Glocca Morra," "Plain Jane," and "Bluesnote," Kelly, bassist Gene Ramey, and Max Roach are joined by young Donald Byrd, who had left Detroit only two years earlier and was already in demand for countless sessions. As much as Byrd recorded during the fifties and sixties — and his lp appearances are almost numberless — listeners and fellow musicians never seemed to tire of his exemplary tone, his rounded, streamlined turns of phrase, and his continuing surge of ideas. He played in front lines with Coltrane as well as Rollins during this time and was a member of one of the first Rollins groups after the saxophonist left Max Roach's band. As of 1975, Byrd is the best-selling artist in the history of Blue Note records.

Sonny Rollins maintains his own popularity and preeminence after nearly thirty years in the forefront of jazz and at least twenty as the recognized contemporary master on his instrument. His art simply hasn't aged, nor have the examples of it in this album been diminished in any way by the many fads and innovations which have come to pass since they were recorded. Their continuing musical freshness is astonishing, but their emotional, communicative staying power is more remarkable still. For once an art form's public, critics, and practitioners agree on an artist's place in the scheme of things: Sonny Rollins is a genius and a humanist, who speaks through his horn with Vox Humana, the Voice of Man.

ROBERT PALMER
Robert Palmer writes regularly on jazz for Rolling Stone and The New York Times and teaches Afro-American Music History and Improvisation at Bowdoin College.