SONNY ROLLINS
The ten pop songs and jazz standards in this album were recorded 18 years ago. Old business, one might say — but since these are previously unreleased performances by Sonny Rollins, Wilbur Ware and Elvin Jones they inevitably create a tremendous sense of anticipation. Even in the flood of mass-produced superstars and technological overkill that has marked jazz in the past few years, it has become increasingly obvious that the music's greatest moments often just happen, as exceptional individuals find themselves in stimulating company and sympathetic surroundings. Thus, amidst all of the current space-age hardware and studio sophistication, we hail recently discovered records of Art Tatum, making the rounds in 1941 Harlem; or Charlie Parker,. sitting in at Monroe's for a masterful "Cherokee"; or Clifford Brown, jamming at Philadelphia's Bop City the night before his death, as some of the most exciting' 'new" music of the '70s.
The excitement present when Sonny Rollins made his nightclub debut as a leader at New York's Village Vanguard nearly two decades ago hasn't begun to wear away with the passing years. Here is Sonny, in the midst of perhaps the critical period in his stylistic development, accompanied by two of the most important and daring musicians of the era. Their collective efforts produced one album which was released in 1958 and quickly acclaimed as a masterpiece (A Night at the Village Vanguard, Blue Note 81581). Now we have further documentation of what went down on the afternoon and evening of November 3, 1957.
For those listeners familiar with the music of Sonny Rollins it's redundant to call this record something special. Martin Williams, while discussing Sonny's 1956 Saxophone Colossus album, observed that "you sense the importance of (the) music immediately;" I would extend that judgment to all of Rollins' work in that period, or, for that matter, to just about anything that Sonny has ever recorded. Even as a Harlem teenager still not fully committed to a career in music, his 1949 recording debut with Babs Gonzales revealed Rollins as a commanding, totally identifiable soloist. The leading creators of the time quickly recognized Sonny's talent, for he preceded to work and record with only the best: J. J. Johnson, Bud Powell, Miles Davis (on several occasions, one of which also included Charlie Parker on tenor), the Modern Jazz Quartet and Thelonious Monk. By 1955 Rollins was serious enough about his own importance to remove himself from his native New York for several months of personal and musical purification and evaluation. Late in the year he emerged in Chicago, replaced tenor saxophonist Harold Land in the popular Clifford Brown-Max Roach Quintet, and returned East to begin a series of classic recordings.
1956 saw the waxing of several Rollins albums for Prestige, the finest being the previously cited Saxophone Colossus. This was also the year of Clifford Brown's tragic death, a loss which catapulted Sonny to the position of star soloist in the Roach band. When Rollins' affiliation with Prestige expired at year's end, he embarked on his most extensive period of recording, employing a wide variety of settings and appearing on several labels. Monk's Brilliant Corners and some trio sessions for Riverside, Way Out West on Contemporary and Sonny Rollins Volume Two (Blue Note 85158) are all Rollins classics recorded in a six-month period ending in June 1957. By this time the critics were acknowledging Rollins as the new giant of the tenor sax, and the public was reacting with similar enthusiasm.
Sonny responded by taking his music in even more daring directions and, after leaving Roach for a brief stint in Miles Davis' group, preparing to step out as a leader. In September 1957 he cut Newk's Time (Blue Note 84001), among his greatest studio performances. A few weeks later Sonny was at the Vanguard, leading bands of shifting size and personnel over the course of a multi-week engagement which culminated in the music at hand.
One man could not sustain so much intense activity alone, and the importance of Sonny's associates to both his own development and the success of his several recordings cannot be overlooked. A brief list of the men who recorded with Rollins in the year preceding the Vanguard date includes Monk, Oscar Pettiford, Kenny Dorham, Ray Brown, J J, Johnson, Horace Silver, Percy Heath and Wynton Kelly. (Looking a few months beyond the present session one could add Dizzy Gillespie, Sonny Stitt and the Modern Jazz Quartet.) I save the truly comprehensive list of drummers for last — Roach, Shelly Manne, Art Blakey, Roy Haynes and Philly Joe Jones! No wonder Sonny produced records of such startling variety and continued to broaden his already mammoth conception while maintaining a rare level of musical excellence.
Even after these illustrious precedents, this album's more Spartan and (at the time) less renowned trio of Rollins, bassist Wilbur Ware and drummer Elvin Jones is among the most memorable Rollins units. "I've always liked playing without a harmonic base because of the added freedom," Sonny has said in explanation of his decision to omit a pianist from this and other sessions, but "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."
Donald Bailey and Pete LaRoca, the bassist and drummer who played behind Sonny during the matinee performance on the day of recording and are heard here on "I've Got You Under My Skin," surely meet Sonny's standards, but it is no slight to them to state that Ware and Jones are indeed very special people. The difference in the two rhythm sections is immediately evident when one compares "Night in Tunisia" with the preceding track, or better still, with the Rollins-Bailey-LaRoca "Night in Tunisia" included on A Night at the Village Vanguard. Of course the tempo is an obvious difference, but I'm speaking of the more decisive shift in group personality.
Bands do indeed have personalities, just like people; they speak in identifiable voices and move forward with their own distinct gaits. With interaction so central to the end results, a substitution in even one chair may work immense changes on that personality. When Bailey and LaRoca, two extremely talented, totally contemporary (for 1957) players are replaced by the iconoclastic Ware and Jones, the personality shift is truly astounding,
Wilbur Ware's bass is at the center of this trio's identity. In a 1958 analysis of Ware's approach, reprinted in the collection Jazz Panorama, fellow-bassist Bill Crow wrote that "Wilbur uses the same tools that other bassists use, but his concentration is more on percussion, syncopation and bare harmonic roots than on the achievement of a wind-instrument quality in phrasing and melodic invention," Crow goes on to detail how Ware fuses straightforward techniques (the use of open fourths, double-stops, etc.) and simple harmonies into an extremely sophisticated and radical style. Here was the perfect bassist for Sonny and Elvin Jones, a man who could ground his cohorts' more loose-limbed excursions while at the same time participating in their explorations.
Ware's solo work is well displayed here on "Softly As In a Morning Sunrise." "Woody'n You" and "All the Things You Are" (the last at Ware's ideal tempo). He also performs critical ensemble functions in spots like the theme statement of "Night in Tunisia" and contributes ceaseless rhythmic drive throughout (his rubber-band beat on "Four" is something else). Ware is clearly a highly underrated musician, but his total effort here argues that he was also one of the most visionary musicians of his day. In what was still the Charlie Parker era, with every instrument attempting to reproduce the melodic fluidity of Bird's alto, Ware was the first to put the bass-ness back into bass playing. He thus not only anticipated such later masters on his instrument as Charlie Haden and Richard Davis, but also gave encouragement by his example to horn players like trombonist Roswell Rudd who reintroduced the more idiosyncratic traits of their own axes.
Elvin Jones is both a more visible giant on the hisotical stage and a more perceptible influence. His drum barrages behind John Coltrane, which were such an inseparable ingredient of 'Trane's music between 1960 and '65, are legendary; and the several fine Blue Note recordings which followed by his various combos stand among the strongest blowing sessions of the past decade. These triumphs lay ahead for Elvin in 1957. At the time, he had been in New York for less than two years, one of many fine musicians to emigrate from Detroit. He worked in Bud Powell's trio, freelanced in a variety of settings, and began to rehearse and gig with Rollins.
Jones was surely not the most polished drummer Rollins employed during this period; on the contrary, in some ways he was the least together of Sonny's percussion partners. It is clear that the free-floating, polyrhythmic approach to drumming (which requires the precise coordination of all four limbs) that Elvin was to perfect with Coltrane was still evolving on this night at the Vanguard. Occasionally Elvin's hands and feet can't quite execute the ideas in his head, but his is a daring sloppiness which merits our appreciation and definitely had a stimulating effect on Rollins. LaRoca may be a steadier drummer in his one appearance here, but Elvin is into strange and dangerous regions which only he and Roy Haynes had yet dared to explore, (Sonny, by the way, did not always have the luxury of such inspiring talents once he became a full-time leader, The day after these recordings found him in a recording studio with a drummer possessing neither LaRoca's finesse nor Elvin's imagination. The effect on Sonny's playing is obvious.)
Both Ware and Jones had previously played with Rollins on separate occasions, but his well-matched trio had never worked as a unit before the night of recording, "A Night at the Village Vanguard was just that," says Sonny. "We did one night for the recording." The spirit and extreme risk-taking of these performances become that much more amazing. Given the one-shot nature of the situation, plus the need to produce a recording, most musicians would have played a relatively safe evening's worth of music. This trio, however, is anything but cautious — their work is an endless series of musical challenges and commensurate responses. The tunes are indeed warhorses; but compare earlier versions of those which Sonny has previously recorded ("What is This Thing Called Love?" with Brown-Roach, "I'll Remember April" with Clifford and Max and Kenny Dorham, "Woody' n You" with Roach's quintet) for an insight into the uncommon approach of this group.
Other factors surely contributed to the success of these recordings. Sonny, who is notoriously uncomfortable in recording studios, was captured in live performance for the first time; it was also the first location recording at the Vanguard. The nightclub atmosphere certainly contributes to the rough-and-tumble mood; but whatever the ultimate cause, the musical effect is often overwhelming. When these men mesh, the end product is music of enormous strength and beauty. After years of living with and listening to the earlier Vanguard album, I still find performances like "Old Devil Moon" and "Striver's Row" (to cite only my two favorites) overwhelming experiences, and after several listenings I begin to get a similar feeling from much of the music here.
"Woody'n You" from this album is a fine example of the trio at its best. Rollins begins his solo stealthily by inspecting the introductory vamp for a chorus, then proceeds to expand his melodic vision. He jumps freely between both ends of the tenor's range, receiving excellent support from Wilbur and Elvin. The bass solo and fours are meaty, and the journey back to the theme suggests a riffing big band.
One needn't blow-by-blow this music to death, however, there is much for the listener to extract for his or herself, and some excellent analyses of Rollins already in print. Those not familiar with Gunther Schuller's "Sonny Rollins and the Challenge of Thematic Improvisation" (in the aforementioned Jazz Panorama) or "Sonny Rollins Spontaneous Orchestration" (in Martin Williams' The Jazz Tradition) are urged to check out these essential studies.
Let me simply note three general points about the Rollins style. First, Sonny's methods are various and ever-shifting, Long strings of eighth notes give way to gentle tuggings at the original melodic shape. Staccato honks and growls follow rhythmically precise pirouettes around simple melodic phrases or complex linear developments. Whirlwind fanfares are jammed amidst straightforward theme statements. Pet licks which other players rarely alter get examined and thematically transformed over entire choruses. All of this and more takes place during these performances.
Second, there is much humor here, for Sonny is one of the supreme musical wits. This talent has unfortunately been misunderstood by more sober-minded critics and musicians. "Because of the humor in my music, people have accused me of not really playing, of just playing around," Sonny has lamented, "In fact John (Coltrane) told me that about 'Tenor Madness' (a 1956 tenor battle between the two giants); he said 'Aw, man, you were just playing with me."' Yet Sonny's humor is anything but frivolous, No better example exists than "Can't Get Started" on A Night at the Village Vanguard, during which Sonny calls the entire ballad tradition into question by alternating straight and serious romantic lines with bellicose, slapstick quotes; the process is not unrelated to the later and more extreme ballad work of Albert Ayler.
Sonny's fondness for humorous references also pervades the present tracks, with allusions made to such disparate material as "Manhattan," "Pop Goes the Weasel," "You Are Too Beautiful." "Love in Bloom" and "The Star Spangled Banner." The citations can take more subtle and serious forms as well, like the suggestion of a Charlie Parker solo from "Bird of Paradise" at the opening of "All the Things You Are"; or Elvin's drum intro to "Four," a far cry from the Art Blakey preface on Mlles' recording yet clearly with that original in mind.
Finally, perhaps the strongest sensation generated by Rollins and the entire trio is one of incredible rhythmic power, Sonny's broken-field running out of endless ideas. Ware's throbbing and Jones' thrashing create quite a juggernaut; and the three continually achieve such ecstatic moments as the beginning of the third solo chorus on "Night in Tunisia," where the percussive stresses of all the instruments seem to merge into one voice. For a lesson in the building and releasing of rhythmic tension, hear the first version of "Get Happy," then consult the alternate take for a totally different tempo and approach. Like everything else in the album, both are bursting with emotion and both swing like mad. This absolute intensity is the direct result of Rollins' daring, his burgeoning improvisational powers, the trio format and the "right" bassist and drummer.
I can hear Sonny now, laughing about the fuss people are bound to make over this album and putting down almost all of his past work: "There aren't many of my recordings that I like... My wife hates any kind of reissue; she thinks it's the worst thing that could happen to someone." But while November 3, 1957 may indeed have been just one night in the life of Theodore Walter Rollins, it was a special night which saw an exceptional gathering of forces. All those who love Rollins' music will agree that it is good to have these ten tracks around. for they represent the best "new" Rollins recordings in a decade.
Sonny's return to performing in 1972 after several years of sabbatical, and his desire (expressed one year later) to "play as much as I can," is equally gratifying. There is much monumental on nights that few of his albums can touch. I recall a 1963 evening when Sonny and his band of the time (Don Cherry, Henry Grimes and Billy Higgins) tore up a St Louis club called Gino's; more recently, in February 1975, Rollins was back at the Village Vanguard pouring out more brilliant solos. Those of us who consider ourselves Rollins fans will never stop listening, because we have learned that this self-effacing giant can reach such rare and beautiful heights in any given performance. Like the music in this album, from 1957. Or maybe tonight.
BOB BLUMENTHAL
