Sonny Rollins - Freedom Weaver

  Copyright ® Steven Cerra, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

“Freedom Weaver: The 1959 European Tour Recordings is the first official release of the ‘Saxophone Colossus’ Sonny Rollins’ European tour in 1959 with bassist Henry Grimes, and drummers Pete La Roca, Kenny Clarke and Joe Harris. Available previously only as a bootleg release, this is the first official release in cooperation with Sonny Rollins and is the first release on vinyl (a Record Store Day exclusive) as a limited-edition 180-gram 4-LP box set, and deluxe 3-CD set. Freedom Weaver includes an elaborate 56-page booklet with rare photos by Ed van der Elsken, Jean-Pierre Leloir, Bob Parent and many others; lead liners by jazz scholar Bob Blumenthal, and new interviews with Rollins himself, Branford Marsalis, James Carter, Joe Lovano, James Brandon Lewis and Peter Brötzmann.”

- From The Resonance Records website 

Well, I’m sure I’m not the first to exclaim that Zev Feldman, the Jazz Detective, has certainly outdone himself with his work on Sonny Rollins - Freedom Weaver: The 1959 European Tour Recordings [Resonance HCD 2065], so let me join the chorus of those who have extolled the release of this masterpiece while adding if you are a fan of the “classic period” of Sonny’s playing, run don’t walk to the nearer purveyor of such items and buy a copy - NOW!

I guarantee you won’t be disappointed.

The lead in annotation by the Resonance Records media relations department describes all the goodies on offer in this three CD set, so I won’t repeat the details here.

But I will add some personal observations before sharing information from the booklet that accompanies this set by Grammy-award winning writer Bob Blumenthal that will give you the back story and place this music within the broader context of Sonny’s storied career.

Zev’s continuing service to the Jazz community in unearthing rare recordings by Jazz masters from the second half of the 20th century allows the Jazz fan to go beyond the limitations imposed by the recording companies who had these stellar musicians under contract.

And while Zev and his associates are scrupulous in paying the appropriate fees and royalties to all concerned as well as honoring all the contractual obligations that were in existence when this music was made, the bottom line for us Jazz fans is that we get more recorded music to enjoy.

Put another way, whether its Wes Montgomery or Bill Evans or Cannonball Adderley, among many others, all of whom have passed [with the exception of Sonny], Zev’s releases honor their memory while at the same time adding to their discography.

The greatest percentage of Zev’s new found releases involve material that is recorded in performance [aka “live”] and as any musician will tell you, on any given night, the music can range from pedestrian to sublime depending on a variety of factors. After all, we are dealing with human beings creating improvisations on the spot and there is always an element of uncertainty in the quality of these outcomes.

To my ears, what is amazing about Sonny’s playing on Freedom Weaver is how consistently productive it is at the highest levels of creativity. “Drop the needle” anywhere and out comes Sonny Rollins at his very best in terms of tone, time, tune/song selection, chord substitutions, improvised lines, tempo, and trades with the drummer/s.

The sustained level of performance involving all these factors on all the tracks on these recordings is simply magical - the Jazz equivalent of hitting a home run.

What we have here is a magnificent collection of recorded Jazz by an iconic Jazz master, outstanding in its scope, its originality and its vision.

Bob Blumenthal offers a chronological overview of where this music fits in Sonny’s storied career and his own analysis of their significance in the following excerpts from the booklet notes that accompany the 3 CD set.

 Copyright ® Bob Blumenthal, copyright protected; all rights reserved.

ROLLINS IN EUROPE '59

“THERE ARE SEVERAL REASONS TO CELEBRATE THIS COLLECTION. It brings together in one place, with greatly improved sound and the approval of Sonny Rollins, music of the tenor saxophonist that has previously only been available in unauthorized bootlegs. It provides, in uncommon detail, a sense of what a European tour entailed for emerging jazz stars in the late 1950s. And, pending further discoveries (should they exist, producer Zev Feldman will no doubt be the one to uncover them), the final audio documentation of perhaps the most significant period in the development of one of the twentieth century's definitive musicians.

All artists blessed with both genius and longevity inevitably find their creations divided into periods. (Think Shakespeare, Beethoven, Picasso.) Sonny Rollins has made it easier than most to define and demarcate such spans by interrupting his career with significant removals from public performance. These sabbaticals, as they have come to be called, punctuate chapters in his ongoing evolution. Period One, documented by recordings made between 1948 and 1954, defined Rollins as a new jazz star. While he released several titles under his own name during these years, his most significant performances found him under the leadership of such fountainheads of modernism as Bud Powell (when Rollins was just shy of his 19th birthday); Thelonious Monk (who returned the favor by accompanying Rollins on the saxophonist's final 1954 session); and, on several occasions, one of which also included Charlie Parker, Miles Davis. The presence of the young saxophonist alongside such giants, not to mention the endorsement they provided by giving him a recording platform, made the jazz world in general, and his tenor sax contemporaries in particular, take notice. Sonny Rollins was already an emerging influence; but he was also a heroin addict who was determined to free himself from his drug dependency. Early in 1955 he checked himself into the federal drug facility in Lexington, Kentucky, effectively ending the initial phase of his career.

Rollins's return to performing and recording at the end of 1955 launched Period Two, a four-year stretch in which he became a working bandleader, a star (at least within the context of the jazz community) and one of if not the leading figure in the next phase of the music's evolution. This chapter in his history includes two distinct phases, defined roughly though not precisely by his move from sideman to bandleader. He had reappeared as Harold Land's replacement in the successful Clifford Brown/Max Roach Quintet, continued to work under Roach's leadership after Brown's death through the first half of 1957, and then briefly joined Miles Davis before striking out on his own. What gave his profile its greatest boost during this span were the recordings he made under his already existing contract with Prestige Records. The twelve-inch long-playing album had just emerged as a recording format, and independent jazz labels like Prestige took advantage by generating product at a rapid pace. Within a period of barely seven months between December 1955 and June 1956, Rollins recorded four albums now considered monumental statements: Worktime, Sonny Rollins + 4, Tenor Madness and Saxophone Colossus. These collections, all of which feature the quartet or quintet format, provide both brilliant music and an accurate sense of the ensemble environment in which Rollins found himself as a working musician.

Once his Prestige contract expired, Rollins became determined to move forward without attachment to a single record company. Some have come to call these the saxophonist's freelance years; yet a change in his approach far more important than any tied to record contracts was taking place. No Rollins performances from Period One had captured greater attention than those from June 1954 under the leadership of Miles Davis. The three compositions that Rollins had contributed to the session — "Airegin," "Oleo" and "Doxy" — had quickly become jazz standards; but equally influential were the stretches in the Davis and Rollins solo choruses where pianist Horace Silver dropped out and the horns were free to "stroll" without chordal support. Rollins included similar interludes in his great Prestige albums from 1956; but it was not until the spring of 1957, near the end of his tenure with Max Roach, that he attempted an entire session with just bass and drums in support. The resulting Contemporary Records album Way Out West, promoted as an all-star conclave of Rollins and perennial poll winners Ray Brown and Shelly Manne, became an instant classic, but it was no fluke. Rollins reveled in the harmonic freedom afforded by the absence of a comping piano or guitar, and in the months that followed produced two additional trio masterpieces, A Night at the Village Vanguard on Blue Note (primarily with Wilbur Ware and Elvin Jones) and Freedom Suite on Riverside (with Oscar Pettiford and Max Roach). This unintended triptych, even more extraordinary than the Prestige classics of 1956, defined what came to be Rollins's preferred working format, the one he chose to employ when he made his first European tour in February and March of 1959.

Rollins has explained that one needs the right bassist and the right drummer to make trio playing succeed. The accompanists on his three classic trio albums definitely met that requirement, and while he had growing doubts concerning the partners he brought along to Europe, listeners more forgiving than the intensely self-critical Rollins might feel that bassist Henry Grimes and drummer Pete La Roca also were correct choices. Grimes had quickly established himself as a rising bass star, one who sounded equally at home in support of Benny Goodman and Thelonious Monk. Substantial work with both Lee Konitz and Gerry Mulligan, each of whom also tended to work without chording instruments in support, and half of a Rollins album where the ensemble was completed by the underrated drummer Specs Wright (Sonny Rollins and the Big Brass: Sonny Rollins Trio on Metrojazz) provide ample evidence of his ability to excel in the strolling format. La Roca had made his recording debut on one track of A Night at the Village Vanguard, recorded with a different rhythm section at the matinee before Ware and Jones had arrived; and while his recording career had yet to take off, by the end of 1959 La Roca had emerged as one of the leading young percussionists of the period.

Saxophone Colossus: The Life and Music of Sonny Rollins, Aidan Levy's exceptional and comprehensive recent biography, details the exhausting nature of undertaking a tour of Europe without broad popularity and the support of a promoter like Norman Granz or George Wein. Between February 21 and March 18, Rollins performed in the Netherlands, France, Sweden, Switzerland, Germany and Belgium, including three separate stops in Paris. Venues included theaters, clubs, concert halls, television and radio studios. The pace was grueling to say the least, and Rollins's demanding standards led to disagreements and occasional physical confrontations with both members of his band. The tensions between Rollins and La Roca grew so severe that the drummer was sent home midway through the tour. Yet audiences were enthralled by the trio and the bootleg recordings that emerged became part of the growing Rollins legend. The titles with La Roca appear here for the first time in chronological order.

The opening track, "St. Thomas," finds the trio at the Nalen club in Stockholm on March 2, after earlier stops in the Netherlands and France. It is one of the strongest performances by the trio, with an elevated level of deep listening and responsiveness among the three musicians. The six tracks that follow, also from Stockholm, are taken from a March 4 radio broadcast and include spoken introductions by Rollins. They offer a sense of how sets were programmed over the course of the tour, mixing titles familiar from earlier Rollins recordings with those not already associated with the saxophonist (the first documented performance of Rollins playing "There Will Never Be Another You" and his only documented version of "Stay Sweet as You Are"). We hear the first of four takes of what appears to have been a tour favorite, "I've Told Ev'ry Little Star," a performance distinguished by Rollins stating the concluding punctuation of the main melodic phrase off-mic, as if delivered from the wings. "How High the Moon," heard on his most recent album Sonny Rollins and the Contemporary Leaders in the less common trio configuration of tenor sax, bass (Leroy Vinnegar) and guitar (Barney Kessel), receives an extended exploration in the more usual Rollins trio format. There is also the longer of two renditions of "Paul's Pal," one the most lyrical titles in the Rollins songbook.

A day later the trio was in Zurich for another radio broadcast. The five titles include "It Could Happen to You," which had appeared as Rollins's first unaccompanied saxophone recording on his Riverside album The Sounds of Sonny. While the relative brevity of the final three titles suggest the constraints of a broadcast performance, the trio hardly sounds inhibited. Three tracks from Laren, Holland on March 7, include another title not documented elsewhere by Rollins, the ballad "A Weaver of Dreams," while the four tracks from Frankfurt on March 9 include another Rollins one-off, "Cocktails for Two," a fourth and final version of "I've Told Ev'ry Little Star," and two titles that hark back to his recordings with Monk and Roach. Tensions that make the music crackle with energy proved insurmountable on a personal level, and La Roca departed the tour on the following day.

We get a sense that trouble had been brewing from the radio/television performance recorded in Stockholm on March 4, the same date as tracks two through seven of this collection's first disc. For this mini-set, La Roca was replaced by Joe Harris, best known for his years with Dizzy Gillespie's first big band. The teenage Rollins had known Harris, a Harlem neighbor who impressed with both his drumming and his example of a musician whose creativity had not been touched by drugs. While clearly a modernist, Harris had not been shaped by the more assertive examples of Art Blakey, Philly Joe and Elvin Jones. His presence gives the music a more contained though still loose feeling, and Rollins responds by slightly trimming his own in-the-moment responses, as can be heard most clearly in comparing this trio's "Paul's Pal" with the longer version recorded with La Roca on the same day. Also worth noting are the unaccompanied passages in "Love Letters," another standard that Rollins first visited while a member of the Roach quintet.

On a personal level, Levy's biography indicates that the happiest days of the tour occurred in France, especially two extended club bookings in Paris. Rollins enjoyed the city's lifestyle and the opportunity to share time with tenor giants Don Byas, Lucky Thompson and especially Lester Young. (Young would return to New York and die on March 15, while Rollins was concluding the final week of the tour.) No recordings have emerged from Rollins's time in the City of Lights, but we do have three extended performances from a March 11 theater concert in Aix-en-Provence. The drummer here is Kenny Clarke, Harris's predecessor in the Gillespie big band and the seminal modern drummer. Rollins and Clarke had recorded together before, most notably on the aforementioned Miles Davis strolling session that included "But Not for Me"; but this encounter of Newk and Klook (as they were respectively known) was a more extended meeting of two giants, with Grimes more than holding his own in support. Rollins was never inclined to show restraint, and hardly neglects his more recent history (quoting "Freedom Suite" at one point during "But Not for Me"); yet especially during the fours, there is a sense of respect for Clarke's presence and a determination to ensure that the drummer receive ample space to exhibit his own brilliance. In addition to the Gershwin standard and "Woody 'n' You," which Rollins had recorded in a brilliant version with Roach and Kenny Dorham, there is the only extant example of him playing Tadd Dameron's "Lady Bird."

Rollins began the tour dissatisfied with both the quality of his playing and what he considered the unjustified praise it had attracted. He was not one of the creators, he insisted in the Stockholm interview included on disc two, just someone at the experimental stage. There were a few more gigs once he returned to the US, including a West-Coast tour where the band became a quartet with the addition of the then-unknown trumpeter Freddie Hubbard. By the time of the Playboy Jazz Festival in September, Rollins had made a decision to withdraw. He played with Bob Cranshaw for the first time at that event, and was so impressed with the bassist that he told him that he wanted to collaborate again after he took a break. Cranshaw would wait for two years, during which Rollins did most of his playing on New York City's Williamsburg Bridge, to receive a call to participate in what would become Period Three of the Sonny Rollins odyssey.”

BOB BLUMENTHAL