Sonny Rollins: 12 Essential Albums
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‘Freedom Suite’ (1958)
Rollins wrote “The Freedom Suite,” this LP’s sidelong centerpiece, in 1957 after he faced racial discrimination when trying to rent a New York apartment. “It was an attempt to introduce some kind of Black pride into the conversation of the time,” he later said of the roomy four-movement work, which again found him at the helm of a trio and left plenty of space for the vital contributions of the bassist Oscar Pettiford and Roach, two years before his own “Freedom Now Suite.”
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‘The Bridge’ (1962)
By 1959, Rollins was one of the most celebrated saxophonists in jazz, but he wasn’t meeting his own high standards. So he decided to take more than two years off from performing and recording, famously spending much of that time practicing on the Williamsburg Bridge, near the Lower East Side apartment he shared with his wife, Lucille. The album that commemorated his return made no radical break with the past, instead showcasing a warm, intimate sound built on the plush chording of the guitarist Jim Hall. Offsetting the relaxed mood was the title track, a Rollins original where he sailed over the brisk up-tempo swing of the bassist Bob Cranshaw and the drummer Ben Riley with marvelous agility.
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‘Sonny Meets Hawk!’ (1963)
Rollins vocally admired Coleman Hawkins, the master soloist who popularized the tenor in jazz. So when the chance came to record with his hero, after a live appearance at the 1963 Newport Jazz Festival, Rollins fretted over the challenge of, as he later put it, how to “still be natural and normal and myself while I still had this feeling of awe for him.” The answer, it turned out, was to cede traditionalism to Hawkins and turn in some of his most bracingly odd performances to date, such as on “Yesterdays,” where he answers his elder’s fluid musings with tense, choppy murmurs, or “Lover Man,” where he fixates on eerie upper-register squeaks.
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‘East Broadway Run Down’ (1967)
In the mid-60s, Rollins often dropped by a musicians’ loft at 89 East Broadway for hangouts punctuated by marathon jams. He commemorated the period on this admirably raw LP, where he teamed up with the bassist Jimmy Garrison and Elvin Jones, best known as the rhythm section in John Coltrane’s era-defining, then recently splintered quartet. The 20-minute-plus title track captures him in a mode of deep spontaneity, trading solos with the trumpeter Freddie Hubbard, basking in the unadorned throb of bass and drums, and eventually exploring pure free-time abstraction.
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‘Don’t Stop the Carnival’ (1978)
Rollins stayed busy in the studio during the ’70s, but his most memorable releases from the period were captured live. Recorded during a multiple-night stand at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco, “Don’t Stop the Carnival” shows how Rollins adapted his sound to the fusion era, employing electric guitar, keyboard and bass. It’s a treat to hear him unleash a volcanic flow on the title track, a rousing calypso; riff on funky backbeat tunes such as “Camel”; and take flight alongside two high-profile sidemen, the trumpeter Donald Byrd and the drummer Tony Williams, on the up-tempo Byrd swinger “President Hayes.”
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‘The Solo Album’ (1985)
While committed avant-gardists such as Anthony Braxton and Steve Lacy made a habit of unaccompanied saxophone performances, for Rollins, they were a rarity. That makes the only full solo record Rollins ever made into a fascinating outlier in his catalog. Excerpted from an hour-plus outdoor concert at the Museum of Modern Art’s Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden, the fully improvised album feels almost like a Sonny Rollins brain scan, in which, for example, an unrelenting run achieved through circular breathing gives way to a cheeky quote from “Pop! Goes the Weasel.” Some reviewers cried foul, calling the album essentially a backstage warm-up disguised as a concert, but as a document of Rollins’s process — a “jukebox of the unconscious,” as his biographer Aidan Levy put it — it’s essential.
