Product Description
-------------------
The saxophone colossus delivers a stellar new album of
live performances from 2010. Joining songs recorded in Japan with
Sonny's working band are four recorded at his 80th-birthday show
at the Beacon in NY: I Can't Get Started and Rain Check with Roy
Hargrove; In a Sentimental Mood with Jim Hall, and the 20-minute
Sonnymoon for Two , his first-ever public performance with
Ornette Coleman (it's amazing)!
From the Artist
---------------
"I believe that jazz is the music which best expresses
the stirrings of the human soul," says Rollins. "I feel
tremendously privileged to have succeeded to some extent in a
music that includes the likes of Louis Armstrong and s
Waller--all of these guys who I thought were such tremendous
people putting out all of this positive music," Rollins says. "It
was all that I could ever dream--to be involved in this."
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About the Artist
----------------
Sonny Rollins knows how to throw a party. His
80th-birthday celebration at New York's Beacon Theatre on
September 10, 2010 was the jazz event of the year, and the
release of Road Shows, vol. 2 allows everybody to share in the
already-legendary proceedings.
Sounding as robust and inventive as ever, the tenor saxophone
titan joins forces with an unprecedented array of friends old and
new, including Jim Hall, Roy Haynes, Christian McBride, Roy
Hargrove, and, most unexpectedly, alto sax revolutionary Ornette
Coleman. The festivities add another illustrious chapter to the
career of jazz's most prodigious improviser.
For Rollins, the palpable affection and respect of his peers was
the evening's most profound gift. "I was extraordinarily happy
that my colleagues agreed to come and join me for this birthday
celebration," says Rollins, whose delight is evident as he
energetically doubles as the concert's emcee. "It was really a
great honor that all these guys came. I was quite touched that
everybody seemed anxious to do it."
On an evening marked by one musical high point after another, the
encounter that set fans buzzing for months was the dramatic
arrival of Ornette Coleman, who was also in the midst of
celebrating his 80th year. While they had never before shared a
stage together, Rollins notes that he and Coleman once practiced
together on the beach in Malibu back in the mid-1950s when he
came out to Los Angeles with the Max Roach-Clifford Brown
Quintet.
He didn't know whether or not Coleman was going to perform at the
Beacon until the last minute, so there was no rehearsal before he
introduced the harmolodic innovator in the middle of an already
riveting performance of Rollins's blues "Sonnymoon for Two" with
the ageless trap master Roy Haynes and bass virtuoso Christian
McBride (reprising the pianoless trio format defined by Rollins
more than five decades ago). At almost 22 minutes long,
"Sonnymoon" is the album's centerpiece, less a cutting contest
than an inspired parallel conversation between jazz's most
surgically acute dissectors of time.
It was a piece Rollins selected with Coleman in mind, "something
that would be open enough to lead to free conversation, and could
go any place, rather than something like `I'm in the Mood for
Love,' with much more set harmonic patterns," Rollins says. "The
blues would be wide enough for Ornette to do whatever he wanted.
It was all spontaneous. It was exciting to play with him again so
many years later, a nice circular situation."
Coleman's indomitable presence on the stage was only one of the
evening's completed circles. McBride and Haynes performed with
Rollins at the 2007 Carnegie Hall concert marking his golden
anniversary as a bandleader, an epochal event documented on the
concluding track of Road Shows, vol. 1.
Guitarist Jim Hall's participation at the Beacon concert harks
back to his crucial role on The Bridge, the 1962 album that
announced Rollins's thrilling return to the scene after his first
famous hiatus. They've been close ever since, and Rollins was so
intent on featuring him on Road Shows that he includes Hall's
sublime rendition of "In a Sentimental Mood," a piece on which
Rollins sits out.
"I love playing with Jim and I really wanted to get him in
there," says Rollins, who notes that a technical glitch on their
version of "If Ever I Would Leave You" prevented him from
including the performance on the album. "We go back a long way,
and I have an affinity for his interpretations. It's always
exhilarating playing with Jim."
A more recent Rollins associate, trumpeter Roy Hargrove, joins
the saxophonist for riveting performances of Billy Strayhorn's
classic "Rain Check" and the beloved standard "I Can't Get
Started." They're accompanied by Rollins's working band featuring
guitar star Russell Malone, rising young drummer Kobie Watkins,
versatile percussionist Sammy Figueroa, and Bob Cranshaw, the
redoubtable bassist who's been a dependably swinging Rollins
mainstay since the early 1960s.
While Rollins first recorded "Rain Check" in 1957, he first heard
the original Duke Ellington shortly after it was
recorded in the early 1940s. "It's a very important song in jazz
history, something that I thought Roy could display his wares
on," Rollins says. "We didn't have a lot of time to rehearse, and
I thought `Rain Check' was perfect for letting these guys show
who they are."
Rollins spotted Hargrove as an immensely gifted young player
nearly two decades ago, and they bonded on a shared love of the
American Songbook. It's an ongoing passion reflected by their
mutual caress of Vernon Duke's soaring melodic line on "I Can't
Get Started."
"When I first heard Roy and recorded with him back in 1990s I was
amazed at his knowledge of jazz repertoire," Rollins says. "I had
some older fellows in the band that didn't know some of the
standards that Roy and I chose. It's one thing that makes him so
special. When he's playing `I Can't Get Started,' you're hearing
him today and a history of the music."
In keeping with the road rubric, the album opens and closes with
tracks recorded in Japan about a month after the Beacon concert.
A nearly 15-minute up-tempo romp through Irving Berlin's "They
Say It's Wonderful" serves as a rousing overture for the birthday
tracks, and offers yet another example of his capacious gift for
turning familiar standards into vehicles for enthralling
improvisation.
"That's a great song to improvise on," Rollins says. "Johnny
Hartman and John Coltrane played it as a ballad, but it's a great
up-tempo song. The band really had a good groove on that one.
That's a tight rhythm section! I think finding drummers is part
of my legacy. It's very important for the drummer I play with to
have a certain feel, and Kobie has a beat I feel I can improvise
on. I accumulated some good karma by getting guys like Bob,
Kobie, Sammy, and Russell Malone, who loves ballads and knows a
lot of jazz standards."
The album closes with a brief run through Rollins's famous
calypso "St. Thomas," a piece he uses as a sign-off, perhaps
following the old show business maxim to always leave the
audience wanting more.
With the 2005 creation of his own label, Doxy, Rollins seems
prepared to provide his legions of fans with a steady stream of
new music. Doxy's first CD release, the 2006 studio
Sonny, Please, earned a Grammy nomination for Rollins. In 2008,
Doxy issued In Vienne, a DVD of a 2006 European festival
performance, and Road Shows, vol. 1, a treasure trove of live
tracks culled from an international archive compiled by Carl
Smith and Rollins's own personal soundboard tapes dating back to
1980. By that time he had long established himself as one of the
music's most influential and charismatic performers, a giant who
willingly wears the title of jazz's greatest living improviser.
Walter Theodore Rollins was born in Harlem, New York on September
7, 1930, of parents native to the Virgin Islands. His older
brother Valdemar and sister Gloria were also musically inclined
but only Sonny veered away from classical music after his uncle,
a professional saxophonist, introduced him to jazz and blues.
He gravitated to the tenor saxophone in high school, inspired in
particular by Coleman Hawkins. By the time he was out of school,
Rollins was already working with cutting-edge modernists such as
Bud Powell, s Navarro, and Roy Haynes. In 1951 he debuted as a
leader on Prestige; his affiliation with that label also produced
classics such as Saxophone Colossus, Worktime, and Tenor Madness
(with John Coltrane).
In early 1956, until he went out on his own permanently as a
leader in the summer of 1957, Rollins played in the Max
Roach-Clifford Brown Quintet, one of the most definitive (and
tragically short-lived) hard-bop ensembles of its day. Often with
his own pianoless trio, Rollins then entered a tremendously
fertile period during which he recorded major works such as A
Night at the Village Vanguard, Way Out West, and Freedom Suite.
In 1959, Rollins took the first of his legendary sabbaticals.
Living on Manhattan's Lower East Side, he was often spotted on
the nearby Williamsburg Bridge, deep in a rigorous practice
regimen. "I wanted to work on my horn, I wanted to study more
harmony," he told Stanley Crouch in The New Yorker.
When Rollins returned to performing in 1961, he recorded The
Bridge with Jim Hall and Bob Cranshaw, led a quartet with
trumpeter Don Cherry and drummer Billy Higgins, and recorded with
his idol Coleman Hawkins. He also received a Grammy nomination
for his score for the popular film Alfie. At decade's end he
undertook one final hiatus, studying Zen Buddhism in Japan and
yoga in India. While living in an ashram, he considered leaving
music permanently in order to pursue spiritual studies, but a
teacher persuaded him that music was his spiritual path, and an
uplifting force for good.
In 1972, with the encouragement and support of his wife Lucille,
who had become his business manager, Rollins returned to
performing and , signing with Milestone and releasing
Next Album. (Working at first with Orrin Keepnews, Sonny was by
the early '80s producing his own Milestone sessions with
Lucille.)
His lengthy association with the Berkeley-based label produced
two dozen albums in various settings--from his working groups to
all-star ensembles (Tommy Flanagan, Jack DeJohnette, Stanley
Clarke, Tony Williams, George Duke); from a solo recital to tour
s with the Milestone Jazzstars (Ron Carter, McCoy
Tyner); in the studio and on the concert stage (Montreux, San
Francisco, New York, Boston). Sonny was also the subject of a
mid-'80s documentary by Robert Mugge entitled Saxophone Colossus;
part of its soundtrack is available as G-Man.
He won his first performance Grammy for This Is What I Do (2000),
and his second for 2004's Without a Song (The 9/11 Concert), in
the Best Jazz Instrumental Solo category (for "Why Was I Born").
Sonny, Please was nominated for a best jazz album Grammy in 2006.
In addition, Sonny received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the
National Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2004.
In June 2006 Rollins was inducted into the Academy of Achievement
at the International Achievement Summit in Los Angeles, and in
May 2007 was a recipient of the Polar Music Prize, presented in
Stockholm. In November 2009 he became the third American (after
Frank Sinatra and Jessye Norman to be awarded the Austrian Cross
for Science and Art, First Class; and in August 2010 he was named
the Edward MacDowell Medalist, the first jazz composer to be so
honored.
More recently, Rollins was presented with the National Medal of
Arts at a White House ceremony, and the Jazz Journalists
Association named him 2011 Musician of the Year and Tenor
Saxophonist of the Year.
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