After the Mike Nock Trio’s beautiful short set Sonny Rollins plunged lurching into the light, bent forward like the marooned Ben Gunn emerging from the jungle to startle young Jim Hawkins in Treasure Island. Except that he wore shades and carried a saxophone. His hair was a frail outsized dandelion as the light filled it. He wore a loose white smock. I was almost shocked, or at least nearly as startled as Jim Hawkins. Startled because of a momentary resemblance to the late Joe Lane. Shocked because, yes, of course, he was old. I saw him at Ronnie Scott’s old place in the mid 1960s. More of that later.
Sonny Rollins began playing turned away toward his band. The athletic body of old had broadened and shrunk downward. The boxy torso seemed to have moved his legs further apart so that his movements had a stumping quality. But he had straightened up to play. He played It’s Wonderful (“They say that falling in love is wonderful”). His sound was powerful and moving, as it always was when he played ballads, but the band’s sound seemed to swim about a bit in the ambience. There was quite a spread of them across the stage: Clifton Anderson on trombone, guitarist Bobby Broom, the great Bob Cranshaw (these days playing electric bass due to back troubles), Kobie Watkins’s drum kit and the array of Kimati Dinizulu’s percussion.
Where elements of near chaos were deliberate in Ornette Coleman’s performance, this was more straight ahead and a lack of focus was initially troubling. Anderson and Rollins began playing overlapping lines and the sound people seemed perhaps unclear as to whether they should be given equal weight. Lack of focus made Anderson’s trombone sound more like a French horn at times. But this was the Concert Hall, and this was where I sat. For others the sound was excellent from the beginning. For me it steadily improved.
Each time Rollins repeated the beginning of the tune it was couched in such a complex of rickety staccato arpeggios that it sounded a bit like Anthony Braxton. These sometimes became astounding cadenzas and time stood still as a complex sculpture seemed to form itself in the air against the band’s energy. In an antic moment I visualized the iron Margel Hinder sculpture that has been moved around Sydney for decades (recently it was in the foyer of UTS, but I understand it is now somewhere nearby). Sustained notes followed, swelling with alarming force, pushing the band as of old.
Everybody soloed. Not every solo was great. The piece went on for a long time. If I hadn’t known the tune before, I certainly did now. Many will want to kill me when I say that the earlier part of the concert had its tedious aspects. The band, and particularly Rollins, were playing themselves into focus. The repetitions of the tunes between and during solos became annoying. Kenny Dorham used often to return to the tune at some point in his solos, but this was overload of a good thing. Even Noel Coward’s lovely Some Day I’ll Find You and Ellington’s beautiful In A Sentimental Mood were played several times too often. Anderson incidentally went too early into the bridge of the latter. Who cares? But he looked as if he had trodden on his own foot, which was human and endearing. His playing began to appeal to me more and more as the sound became more focused. He is a lovely player. I had forgotten him. I have at least one album on which he plays with Rollins in the late 1980s : I Love Jazz with a plate from Matisse’s Jazz series on the cover.
Focus and force finally arrived with a vengeance on St Thomas, which was played rather more slowly than in its first appearance on the album Saxophone Colossus in 1956. Suddenly I became aware that Rollins’s sound and control had been getting stronger and stronger. At his age it had taken this time to really warm up. His solo was long and who would have cared if he had played it for an hour? Razor sharp complexity and bluesy impetus alternated. Long lines were woven in that welter that is Sonny’s own: 16th and 32nd notes crowded with asymmetrical clusters, woofling, barking, skating around the edge of the time so that the other musicians’ heads twisted about and their faces were split by grins as they waited for the resolution, as if they were following a fugue. That little musician’s ecstasy.
The troll or pilgrim who had stumped about, the Old Man Of the sea who had arrived bearing a strange sceptre that was a tenor saxophone had gone. He was no longer an old man. He was not any age. Here was the master.
This was truly inspiring. For at least half an hour (they had been playing for two) it was like that. They played the driving riff tune Sonny Please from the new album of that name, and Sonny was roaring. Repetitions of the riff now had a propulsive effect, as in a jam session. Watkins, a dynamic drummer of intense smashing energy had seemed fusion oriented, but on tunes like this he showed how effective he could be with certain aspects of swing. They played Half As Much (“If you only loved me half as much as I love you”, a country song that was a hit for Rosemary Clooney when I was eleven (1951), and although this was also repeated too often Sonny’s soulful gospel treatment was almost as moving as his version of The Tennessee Waltz from the late 1980s album mentioned above.
After the resounding ovation, everybody rising spontaneously but Kerrie O’Brien leaping up first, and then an encore, we thought there was surely no more and wended our way out. By the time we reached the far wall they had come back and were playing again, and from here the sound was perfect. Sonny’s tone no longer had any hint of that remote mike effect. It was natural and direct. He was playing stronger and stronger. This was hard, riding jazz in which the mainstream the traditional and the avant-garde were all one, and it held a capacity Concert hall audience in an ecstatic state. John Shand was given miserable space to review it. Yet the concert had been sold out for two weeks.
When I saw Sonny Rollins downstairs at Ronnie Scott’s old place in the mid 1960s he looked as trim and powerful as Lote Tuqiri is now, whom he even resembled slightly with that Red Indian nose. His hair was short. He played like a typhoon, sometimes leaving the stage to hear his sound in different corners of the room. He went up and played in the street at one point, then poured his torrent of solid, rounded torpedo-like notes, some curved like leaping dolphins, back down the stairs.
I think it was Humphrey Lyttelton who wrote an article about him and told how Ronnie and possibly Bennie Green had gone down into the club in the early hours and in the dimness saw Sonny Rollins, wearing a beret, studying himself in a mirror and saying, “I am Pierre the Frenchman.”
Rollins was at an incredible peak at that time, often moving into New Thing regions with magisterial authority on such 1960s masterpieces as East Broadway Run Down, Our Man In Jazz and the often strange and extraordinary meeting with Coleman Hawkins. Everything had culminated: the singular take on bop, the freedom, the rarely equalled synthesis of sheer sonic play and linear development. The great guitarist Jim Hall who was with him in the early sixties said that he was so strong he could make the band come to a standstill with his playing. The irresistible jet stream of ideas that characterized the 1950s master works was still on hand, accessed without effort. And who can forget in that regard the version of Surry With The Fringe On Top from Newk’s Time , a dazzling invention in which collage pieces of the tune popped up deftly when you least expected them; the grave omnivorous low tones that underlay the running lines, creating a drone that you could hear even when it wasn’t there (he created his own accompaniment)?
But in the sixties he would sometimes shatter it all into cubist fragments fashioned from falsetto wisps, barks, fog horn drones and hollow crooning: little cells as brief as Webern played often fiercely but placed with an almost geometric deliberation against the tide of the rhythm section.
He played like this on Humphrey Littleton’s BBC TV jazz show, in the mid 1960s, taking the show’s theme and playing it upside down, back-to-front, reassembling it like serial music and then going right out and staying there for the show’s duration. At one point the British rhythm section did indeed stop. Actually I don’t think they ever started again. The producer kept yelling onto Lyttleton’s earphones, urging him to announce another tune. Humphrey said, “I’m not going to stop Sonny Rollins!” Humph, in case you are unaware, was a very fine British trad jazz trumpeter. Also a very nice writer indeed.
All over London for at least a week musicians talked about and argued over Sonny’s appearance on Humph’s show. You don’t see television like that very often.
When I reviewed the unforgettable Ornette Coleman concert on this website I said that we would never see Sonny Rollins now (actually I think it is worth re-reading what I said about Rollins). Three days later his forthcoming visit was announced. I thought at the time, well, I guess I’ve really seen Sonny Rollins anyway. Not quite. At this point I should mention the lovely interview with Rollins that Kerry O’Brien conducted on the following Monday’s 7.30 Report.
We should not forget that Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane were not the only tenor saxophone masters of the 1950s ands sixties. There was also Stan Getz, Zoot Sims, Joe Henderson, Warne Marsh, Bill Perkins, Hank Mobley, Dexter Gordon, Johnny Griffin, Al Cohn, Wayne Shorter, Bob Cooper, Charles Munro and many others. Coleman Hawkins and Ben Webster were still playing, and Lester Young played until his death in the late 1950s. It is a great tradition, and you will hear its continuance at Wangaratta in the playing of Joe Lovano and David Murray.