No. 200 Sonny Rollins III
Geoffrey Smith, presenter of Geoffrey Smith’s Jazz, on one of the greatest surviving jazz saxophonists
The 200th Jazz Starter column, and at Christmas too! The occasion demands something special, and to me that still means Sonny Rollins. Routinely hailed as the greatest living saxophonist/jazz musician/improviser, Rollins is our link with the giants of the golden age. From his earliest days, he was accepted as one of the immortal company blazing a trail to the future. Miles Davis observed that some contemporaries even thought of him as on the same plane as bebop legend Charlie Parker. In Davis’s words, ‘I knew one thing: he was close’.
Now sadly prevented from performing by ill health, Rollins still casts his unique spell on disc. His first Jazz Starter (Oct 2001) was about Saxophone Colossus, the classic 1956 album he still regards as one of his best. In May 2006, his Jazz Starter II featured Without a Song: The 9/11 Concert, Rollins’s majestic, life-affirming response to those terrible events, given just a few days after they occurred. And it also epitomises the tenorist’s preference, in his later years, for live performance over studio work.
But some of his most intriguing playing came in the late 1950s, a period of exploration and transition which culminated in his famous two-year sabbatical, when he withdrew from performance to practise and study, before returning to fresh acclaim in
1961. The four-cd Properbox compilation Sonny Rollins: The Contemporary Leader traces his quest through a fascinating series of encounters, from the trio with Oscar Pettiford and Max Roach which produced Rollins’s politically pointed ‘Freedom Suite’, to a big band, to sessions with West Coast luminaries and the Modern Jazz Quartet, to Rollins on the road, stretching out in Europe.
Throughout, he’s on top form, a paragon of swinging power and invention, hurtling through tempos at jaw-dropping speeds, conjuring ballad meditations at once tender and sardonic, turning improvised shapes into discovered compositions. And the set ends with the tenorist’s post-retreat album The Bridge, displaying a new serenity as well as the creative fire that marks all his work.