Doc's Jazz Music Reviews

The Incredible Sonny Rollins

Sonny was quoted recently and he said that he was still chasing the lost chord, still trying to get the music out that he is hearing inside. Last night at the Four Seasons Performing Arts Centre here in Toronto I think the chase was still on. Words are hard to find to express how impressed I was with this jazz virtuoso's performance. The man is bad, he is the jazz saxman.

When I think of the fact that Sonny played with Miles on Milestones, my adulation only increases. To be able to play this level of music 50 years later is amazing.

The highlight of the show if I must choose one had to be when he played his best-known composition "St. Thomas", a Caribbean calypso based tune sung to him by his mother in his childhood. You could feel a kind of emotive transference when he played and yes, Sonny can still move a little bit too.

I can't remember the names of his sidemen but I am sure this happens to others who attend Sonny Rollins concerts. (see comment on previous post) I think at this point it would be fair to say that the focus of the concerts are to pay homage first to a great musician, and then to enjoy the music currently still coming out of this man. The sidemen are good but nothing they did would elicit anything new except for some brief interactions between them and Sonny.

I got slammed trying to take pictures last night but there are some recent videos as well as a few vintage ones in this post.



Here is a portion of a review from back in 1984 that ran in the Times:

SONNY ROLLINS AND BAND
By JON PARELES

WHEN Sonny Rollins plays the way he did Saturday at Avery Fisher Hall, he reaffirms his place in the jazz pantheon as the modern tenor saxophonist against whom all others can be measured. His solos were stunning for their harmonic and rhythmic invention and, most of all, for their range of feeling.

Mr. Rollins plays standards with gleeful ambivalence, simultaneously honoring and mocking their sentiments. He turned ''My One and Only Love'' into a fluctuating mixture of romance and irony - shifting his inflections phrase by phrase, even note by note, so that tender passages of melody and delicate variations brushed up against sardonic asides and gruff dismissals.

In a modal blues, after staking out the basic riffs, Mr. Rollins suddenly cut loose with a breakneck improvisation - double time and triple time - that zoomed in and out of new harmonic territory, established on the spot. And in an easygoing rhumba, he cheerfully bent and stretched the melody as if it were taffy...

Here is a very extensive article and review of Sonny Rollins

Click Here

Enjoy the videos. If anyone remembers the names of the sidemen at last nights show let me know - I would like to give them some credit. Till next time, Jim