![]() If the narrative line here is a bit more abstract than on the other tracks, it is no less compelling-Sonny at the top of his game. It represents Sonny Rollins at a certain point of creation." And then, in addition to a brief, album-closing dose of his perennial crowd- pleaser, “Don’t Stop the Carnival,” there is an eight-minute, stand-alone cadenza taken from a 2009 St. But I liked the groove and a lot of other things. On this one, I played something I might be the only one who likes. On one of them, everything was quite clean. ![]() ![]() I actually had two versions to choose from. I decided to because it captured me going in certain directions I felt needed to be put on record. “So I was wondering whether I should put it out again. He won a 2006 Grammy for his version of it on Without a Song: The 9/11 Concert, performing it in Boston five days after the terrorist attack on New York, which forced him to evacuate his apartment. You’ll be too late.” The nearly 24-minute rendering of Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II’s masterwork, “Why Was I Born,” is as moving as it is breathtaking-a monument to Rollins’s emotional powers. You can’t improvise and think at the same time. It was named after the sage whose Yoga Sutras, he said, “lay down everything you need to know” about a discipline and philosophy that “has helped me get through life and kept me trying to be a better human being.” Yoga also enhances the art of improvisation, he said, in helping you “reach your subconscious. It was sort of African style.” “Patanjali,” heard here in its recorded debut, is a piece Rollins worked on for quite some time. “Then the theme would come on.” The infectious “Biji,” introduced on the 1995 album, Sonny +3, was written “back in the days when guys had nicknames like Rahsaan and Famoudou. Keen, my father-in-law disappeared, and they’d go through adventures to find the guy in 15 minutes,” he says with a laugh. Noel Coward’s “Someday I’ll Find You” takes him back to his boyhood days, when it was the theme for the long-running radio show, Mr. The material reflects an artist who has become as enthralled by narrative lines as melodic. Meaningful bridges between past and present, they capture his essential Sonnyness while illuminating the new directions in which he is perpetually pointed. Read moreĪs one has come to expect from Rollins, the six songs on Volume 3 are no mere vehicles on which to hang sets of changes. It features a familiar core band including pianist Stephen Scott, trombonist Clifton Anderson, and Rollins's bassist of a half-century, Bob Cranshaw, with Bobby Broom and Peter Bernstein alternating on guitar Kobie Watkins, Perry Wilson, Steve Jordan, or Victor Lewis on drums and Kimati Dinizulu or Sammy Figueroa on percussion. ![]() 3-which is being distributed under the terms of a new agreement by Sony Music Masterworks through its revived jazz imprint, OKeh Records-was recorded between 20 in Saitama, Japan Toulouse, Marseille, and Marciac, France and St. All of the music on the second volume, released in 2011, was recorded in 2010, including highlights from Rollins’s 80th birthday concert, featuring his first-ever encounter with Ornette Coleman. It climaxed with a 2007 performance of “Some Enchanted Evening” by a trio for the ages featuring Roy Haynes and Christian McBride. 1, which came out in 2008, was largely drawn from superfan Carl Smith’s tapes, spanning nearly 30 years. With the expert help of longtime associate Richard Corsello, his engineer at Fantasy during the 1980s, that’s what Rollins has been doing with his remarkable Road Shows series, an ongoing collection of concert highlights being released on his own Doxy Records label. The next best thing is making some of those performances-ones “that present parts of me I want to have presented”-available on record to his fans. The best thing about performing for him, by far, is seeing how happy his playing makes all the excited people who turn out to see him. And that’s not just because in those situations this iconic tenor saxophonist is unencumbered by time restraints and issues in the control booth. The man often embraced as the greatest living improviser requires too much creative freedom to start playing, as he puts it, “when the red light comes on.” And his perfectionism makes it difficult, sometimes painfully so, to go through multiple takes in search of what he thinks is the least flawed one.īut in Rollins’s preferred element-on stage, in front of an adoring crowd, free to follow his every impulse and dazzle with his inventions-he is fully at home. Never mind that he’s recorded his full share of gems there-not only early, celebrated albums such as Saxophone Colossus and Way Out West, but also digital-era efforts such as Old Flames and This Is What I Do. It’s no state secret that Sonny Rollins has never been fond of the recording studio.
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