Sonny Rollins - Rollin' With Rollins [Recorded 1953-1956] (2012)

×

Sonny Rollins - Rollin' With Rollins [Recorded 1953-1956] (2012)

Close

The Jazz Club series is an attractive addition to the Verve catalogue. With it's modern design and popular choice of repertoire, the Jazz Club is not only opened for Jazz fans, but for everyone that loves good music.
Sonny Rollins will go down in history as not only the single most enduring tenor saxophonist of the bebop and hard bop eras, but also as one of the greatest jazz saxophonists of all time. His fluid and harmonically innovative ideas, effortless manner, and easily identifiable and accessible sound have influenced generations of players. In addition, these skills have fueled the notion that mainstream jazz can be widely enjoyed, recognized, and proliferated. Rollins served early apprenticeships with Babs Gonzalez, J.J. Johnson, Bud Powell, Miles Davis, and Max Roach & Clifford Brown. His co-billing on a 1953 date with the Modern Jazz Quartet, and his recordings with Thelonious Monk, served to clue in the jazz establishment that a bright young star was in their midst who was not only a fine and remarkable soloist, but a supreme stylist. By the time 1956's classic Saxophone Colossus was issued, he was heralded as jazz's top tenorist. (The album was selected in 2017 for preservation in the National Recording Registry by the Library of Congress for being "culturally, historically, or artistically significant."). A year later when issuing the equally compelling Way Out West, and A Night at the Village Vanguard (two pioneering pianoless trio dates), he was regarded by critics in a class of his own – a reputation he never relinquished. At the same time, Rollins also established himself as a noted composer. Several of his tunes - "St. Thomas," "Oleo," "Doxy," "Pent-Up House," and "Airegin" - have become jazz standards. Rollins' two "retirements" - the first from the summer of 1959 through the end of 1961, when he practiced his horn on the Williamsburg Bridge, resulting in 1962's comeback album The Bridge - and the second from 1969-1971, when he went on a spiritual sojourn in Jamaica and India - only enhanced his abilities and reputation. In between, he issued three more influential albums: the soundtrack to the film Alfie, Sonny Rollins on Impulse!, and East Broadway Run Down. After returning the second time, the saxophonist had changed his style of play and, to a degree, his tone, which had become much more physical, soulful, and urgent, resulting in albums that reflected the influence of funk, pop, and R&B in his music as it met hard post-bop jazz - as evidenced by the live date Don't Stop the Carnival in 1978. As one of jazz's elder statesmen in the '90s and early 21st centuries, he held an unbreakable connection between the music's historical lineage and modernity. Rollins continued to set the creative bar high: He won Grammys for 2000's This Is What I Do and 2005's Without a Song: The 9/11 Concert, and a Lifetime Achievement Award. Rollins is such a cultural icon that he made an appearance on The Simpsons. He stopped performing in public in 2012 due to respiratory issues and was eventually forced to stop playing altogether.