There’s a famous picture of tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins standing side by side with one of his heroes, the late Dexter Gordon. “Long Tall Dexter” was famous for his 6-foot-5-inch frame, but it’s still startling to see how he towers over Mr. Rollins – you’d expect to see Sonny Rollins standing taller than anyone else. Everything else about Mr. Rollins is colossal, from his tone on the tenor to the length of his solos to his meteor-like impact on jazz history; one of Mr. Rollins’s earliest albums was called “Saxophone Colossus” and that title has stuck ever since.

Mr. Rollins’s latest album, “Without a Song: The 9/11 Concert” (Milestone 93422) is his superlative response to a colossal event: It was taped live in Boston on September 15, 2001. Not released until this year, “Without a Song” was worth the wait and will go down as the best jazz album of 2005.

Mr. Rollins lived six blocks north of the World Trade Center, and he was downtown on the morning of Tuesday, September 11, 2001. He heard the planes strike the towers, then spent a horrific night without electricity or a phone. He was evacuated by the National Guard the next day; on Friday, at the urging of his wife, Lucille, he decided to drive to Boston for a prebooked concert. And on Saturday Mr. Rollins and his quintet (his nephew, Clifton Anderson, on trombone; Stephen Scott, piano; Bob Cranshaw, electric bass; Perry Wilson, drums; Kimati Dinizulu, additional percussion) performed at the Berklee Performance Center.

If the Rollins concerts I have attended are any indication, the band probably played for at least 120 minutes that night, of which 73 (five songs and several brief spoken introductions) are included on this new CD. The selections include four standards: Vincent Youmans’s “Without a Song,” Richard Rodgers’s “Where or When,” Jerome Kerns’s “Why Was I Born?” and Eric Maschwitz’s “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square.” The fifth song is Mr. Rollins’s latest calypso composition, “Global Warming.”

Youmans wrote “Without a Song” for a 1929 Broadway flop called “Great Day,” which was one of the first shows to feature both black and white performers. “Without a Song” was one of many Tin Pan Alley concoctions of the preswing era that were directly inspired by black religious music, and like the well known “Ol’ Man River,” it was performed by a variety of black icons over the decades, from Paul Robeson and Billy Eckstine to the Isley Brothers. Mr. Rollins himself recorded it in 1962.

“It’s very appropriate at this time,” Mr. Rollins says in his introductory remarks. “Of course it’s appropriate in my life every day. But I think everybody feels this way.” Mr. Rollins is referring to the spiritual allusions of Edward Eliscu’s lyrics, which tell of how God’s children can deal with “trouble and woe” as long as music is strong in our collective soul, and “as long as I know the Jordan will roll.” But he is also referring to the events of four days earlier.

It’s tempting to report that Mr. Rollins played with renewed energy and dedication on September 15, 2001, and I would feel churlish claiming he was not inspired to send a message of hope four days after the destruction at his doorstep. But what makes the CD remarkable is the simple fact that it is one of the rare recent Rollins recordings on par with what he consistently achieves in live performance.

For the recorded Rollins to catch up with the live Rollins, a few niceties have to be sacrificed, such as the convenience of brief, radio-friendly tracks. The shortest song here is over 10 minutes long. The influence of Mr. Rollins and John Coltrane in inspiring marathon improvisations is not entirely to the good – very few players are worthy of being listened to at such lengths – yet Mr. Rollins can sustain interest through an ultra long solo like no one else currently playing.

In the final part of his 16-minute calypso number, Mr. Rollins, who has already done everything that can be done with this brief, catchy, descending melody, reaches a grand climax. He bottoms out with some foghorn-like sounds in the lower register of his horn (below D natural), making his tenor sound like a baritone, and then snaps back into the regular rhythmic pattern more convincingly than ever.

His playing on the 16-minute title track (in which he briefly quotes another 1920s pop standard, “My Lucky Day,” as well as Stephen Foster’s “Oh Susanna”) is similarly inspired, brilliant, and unrelenting. As with all of Mr. Rollins’s concerts, he exhausts his listeners more than his own boundless musical resources. After hearing the tenorist play one of his intense statements, I, for one, find it hard to even think about the solos of any of his sidemen – excepting Bob Cranshaw, who has served as the linchpin of Mr. Rollins’s rhythm sections for 40 years.

In another spoken intro, he tells the Bostonians, “Music is one of the beautiful things of life, so we have to keep the music alive some kind of way. Maybe music can help.” But he had already said as much with his tenor.

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Mr. Rollins’s “Without a Song” may well be the best new release of 2005, but the year’s biggest buzz has surrounded two releases of historically important concerts. Indeed, both the recording of Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker at Town Hall on June 22, 1945 (Uptown Jazz UPCD-27.51), and that of the Thelonious Monk Quartet with John Coltrane at Carnegie Hall in 1957 (Blue Note/Thelonious 35173) were so significant that few jazz fans could believe they even existed.

As for contemporary artists, nearly all the albums that made it onto my best of the year list were by pianists. Blue Note Records, which released the Monk discovery, also released albums by the two most imposing younger players working today: Bill Charlap’s “Bill Charlap Plays George Gershwin: The American Soul” (Blue Note 60669) and Jason Moran’s “Same Mother” (Blue Note/EMI 71780). Where the former takes the traditional and makes it fresh and exciting, the latter takes the abstract and the fringe and makes it seem warm and familiar. The best major-label debut of 2005 was also by a young pianist, the 26-year-old Robert Glasper, who on “Canvas” (Blue Note 77130) shows equal regard for both tradition and innovation.

The two most ambitious and successful larger-ensemble albums of the year were Fred Hersch’s “Leaves of Grass” (Palmetto 2107), which sings Walt Whitman’s body electric with eight musicians and two singers, and “Not in Our Name” (Verve 000494902) by Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra. The former is an update of (and improvement upon) 1950s jazz-and-poetry, and the latter continues the spirit of 1960s protest music.

The two new jazz vocal albums that afforded me the most pleasure this year were both by pianist-singers. “But Beautiful: The Best of Shirley Horn on Verve” (4068), not only samples the best of the late great lady’s recent recordings, but offers a tantalizing slice of a yet unreleased live session from Le Jazz Au Bar. Freddy Cole’s “This Love of Mine” (Highnote HCD 7140) is an uncompromised delight, evoking the late night atmosphere of his brother Nat King Cole’s “After Midnight” and Frank Sinatra’s “Wee Small Hours.”

wfriedwald@nysun.com