Читать книгу The Mojo Collection - Various Mojo Magazine - Страница 14

Record label: Prestige

Produced: Bob Weinstock and Rudy Van Gelder

Recorded: Van Gelder’s Recording Studio, Hackensack, New Jersey; June 22, 1956

Released: Autumn 1956

Chart peaks: None (UK) None (US)

Personnel: Sonny Rollins (ts); Tommy Flanagan (p); Doug Watkins (b); Max Roach (d)

Track listing: You Don’t Know What Love Is; St Thomas; Strode Road; Moritat; Blue 7

Running time: 39.31

Current CD: Concord 1881052

Further listening: Way Out West (1957); Live At The Village Vanguard (1959)

Further reading: Sonny Rollins: The Cutting Edge (Richard Palmer, 1998); Open Sky (Eric Nisenson, 2000); www.sonnyrollins.com

Download: iTunes

Sonny Rollins vied with John Coltrane for the title of top tenor saxophonist of his generation, including one meeting on record (released as the title track of Rollins’ Tenor Madness) only a month before this classic session was recorded. The two were highly individual stylists, and both are widely regarded as the ultimate exemplars of their instrument in jazz.

‘I wasn’t like the guy who started out, played for years and years, found a style, and then somebody heard him and got him a record date and everybody liked him,’ he insisted. ‘That’s not my story. My story is that from the time I was a teenager, I was on records with great musicians.’

In common with most of his peers on that scene, he began using heroin in 1948, and was jailed for a time in 1950 and again in 1952. He eventually kicked the habit in 1955, and resumed his career at a new level.

The previous years had allowed him to develop his ideas and musical understanding, work through some of his technical deficiencies, and take in invaluable lessons from musicians of the highest calibre (including Charlie Parker and Miles Davis). The shedding of his dependency on heroin can be seen as the final step in that process, leaving him ready to make the ascent to the next level of personal and artistic maturity.

He is notoriously self-critical of his playing, especially on record, but those recordings – from all points of his long career – contain some of the most brilliant and imperishable jazz ever committed to tape, and none more so than Saxophone Colossus.

The album’s best known cut is St Thomas, an infectious calypso based on a traditional melody which became the most celebrated of his Caribbean-derived tunes, and has remained a trademark in his repertoire ever since.

Rollins approached all of the tunes through a coherent development of melodic fragments into spontaneous but logically extended improvised choruses. He employed a sophisticated degree of architectural development which was not simply a variation on the accepted bebop model of improvising on the harmonic material (chord changes) of the tune (a process often known as ‘running the changes’), but an alternative approach, employing a variety of patterns and devices, and much variation of rhythm, shape and texture.

The results impressed the critics, but Saxophone Colossus was also the record which really established Rollins as a major jazz name with the public, and remains an undisputed classic.