Sonny Rollins’s Endless Summer
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September and October will see the release of two new DVDs starring the tenor saxophone colossus Sonny Rollins. As with everything else in this mighty musician’s career, timing is everything, and these particular releases indicate something of a disconnect from what we’ve come to expect. Summer is the time you want to see and hear Mr. Rollins, which is why he usually gives his annual concerts in New York in the dog days of August. Thus, even though the two DVDs (both of which feature him playing live in Europe) are arriving in early fall, the best time to experience Mr. Rollins in person is Wednesday, when he plays Central Park’s Summer-Stage.
Over the last 30 years, Mr. Rollins has fine-tuned his music to the point where it’s an essential summer experience. He has perfected an instrumental and ensemble sound that’s so explosively joyful and euphoric that putting a roof over it would seem like an unnecessary step designed only to curtail its rapture. Saying that Sonny Rollins plays “outside” music doesn’t mean that it’s avant-garde (though he has played that, too); it means literally outdoors, honoring a tradition of jazz that goes back to the genre’s beginnings. Jazz didn’t only come from New Orleans brothels; it was always a highly social music heard at parks and picnic grounds, parades and social functions all over the Crescent City.
At least since the 1970s — the entire time I’ve been going to hear him perform — Mr. Rollins has presented his music less like a classical virtuoso in a concert hall or a jazz headliner in a nightclub than as a popular music maker. He has said that he’d rather play B.B. King’s, the pop music miniarena, than a club associated strictly with jazz. He is almost without question the greatest living jazz improviser, but he’s something else on top of that — an entertainer and larger-than-life cultural phenomenon made from the same mold as Harry Houdini or Enrico Caruso.
Audiences respond to a Sonny Rollins performance like to no other musician I’ve seen. He is a one-man circus: a strong man who can break chains merely by expanding his chest, a high-flying daredevil who can execute breathtaking stunts, a lion tamer, tightrope walker, and even a clown — that’s him shooting clay doves at a hundred paces while riding a horse, bareback and standing up, looking backward in a mirror or blindfolded. Throughout his career, Mr. Rollins has developed a marathon style of solo that’s at once endurance test and marksmanship competition; he can keep spinning brilliantly perfect choruses, one on top of another, for so long that he literally wears down listeners. If we rarely notice the other soloists in his band, it’s because he exhausts us: The trombone solos (from his nephew Clifton Anderson), the bass breaks (by one of the all-time masters of the instrument, Bob Cranshaw), and even the percussion fireworks (courtesy of Kimati Dinizulu) often seem like places for listeners to breathe.
The first of the new DVDs, “Jazz Icons: Sonny Rollins — Live in ’65 & ’68,” (Reelin’ in the Years Productions/Naxos of America, Inc), which was filmed in November 1965 in Copenhagen and September 1968 in an unknown European city, documents Mr. Rollins at a crucial stage in his development. Previously, he had played Harry Warren’s “There Will Never Be Another You” at two famous concerts that had yet to be released commercially, in Stockholm in 1959 and at New York’s Museum of Modern Art Sculpture Garden in June 1965.
Comparing the Copenhagen performances of 1965 with the earlier versions of these songs is revealing: The Copenhagen readings of “There Will Never Be Another You” and “Three Little Words,” played indoors, are much more tightly focused and less expansive than those recorded in the outdoor space at MoMA.
The reading of “St. Thomas” from Copenhagen in 1965 is also very different. Compared with the way Mr. Rollins plays his calypsos in the great outdoors, this is an amazingly intimate reading; the climax occurs not when Mr. Rollins parades his most exuberant notes at the top of his lungs, but when he plays a long segment that engages the brilliant Danish bassist Niels-Henning Ørsted Pedersen (who also appears in the 1968 show) in an extended, subtle dialogue. After the opening, “Another You,” and the calypso, he takes us through what might be described as a medley — he doesn’t necessarily stop for applause or even for air as he moves from four less-heard tunes in his discography, “I Can’t Get Started,” “Darn That Dream,” “Three Little Words,” and his own “Oleo,” a jazz standard only recorded on a handful of occasions.
The September 1968 concert adds a pianist, Kenny Drew, to the combination of Mr. Rollins and Pederson, and the outstanding drummer Tootie Heath replaces Alan Dawson from three years earlier. This 1968 show is a particularly valuable document to jazz history because Mr. Rollins was engaged, between 1966 and 1972, in the second of his infamous sabbaticals from performing. Only two other recordings of the saxophonist in this six-year period are known to exist. Both are from Denmark, earlier in September 1968, and neither has been officially released.
The second of the DVD releases, “Sonny Rollins in Vienne” (Doxy Records/Emarcy), captures the contemporary Sonny Rollins, age 75 (he’s 77 now), in picture-postcard color and high definition, performing in the open air in summertime. This is roughly the same Sonny you will see live when you catch him in person at Summer-Stage. The bonus here is that we get to see his contemporary band, including Messrs. Cranshaw and Anderson, with the remarkable Victor Lewis — by far the best percussionist to work with the Rollins touring band in recent years — on drums.
The contemporary Sonny is at once a thoughtful, creative artist and an unstoppable party animal, satisfying both the funsters and the terminally hip listeners who watch arty French flicks with their shades on. The trouble is that even your high-definition, 60-inch plasma TV isn’t quite enough. To really enjoy this DVD, in which Mr. Rollins reanimates two standard show tunes, two calypsos (including “Don’t Stop the Carnival”), and a fine recent original, you really need some kind of “Star Trek”-like hologram machine that can project a life-size, three-dimensional image into your backyard as you fire up the grill and your guests stand in Bermuda shorts sipping watermelon margaritas.
wfriedwald@nysun.com