I’m interviewing Sonny Rollins later today for a Philadelphia Inquirer feature to run on Sunday, September 20. So I’ve been trawling YouTube and loving this 1963 clip in particular, with Don Cherry on cornet, Henry Grimes on bass, Billy Higgins on drums. They’re playing Monk’s “52nd Street Theme,” which is rhythm changes in C. So, high bebop meets half of Ornette Coleman’s quartet, obliterating the hard-and-fast distinction between straightahead and avant-garde jazz. (More of this on the albums Our Man In Jazz and The Complete 1963 Paris Concert.)
Rollins’s solo follows Higgins’s unaccompanied turn (doesn’t he look like Andre 3000 from OutKast?). Listen to what Rollins plays over the tonic chord at 4:05. Unbelievable.
Rollins is almost always spoken of as the archetypal “thematic” improviser, the opposite of a licks player, and yet his early playing is full of meat-and-potatoes bop lines — in fact, if you’re going to learn bebop vocabulary there’s hardly a richer gold mine than albums like Sonny Rollins Plus 4. A long time ago I transcribed his solo on “Kiss and Run” for guitar, an experience that colors my outlook on music to this day.
2 Comments
Smiling Billy got an awful lot of music out of that minimal kit, didn't he? I love watching guys play parade grip bebop drums. When was this, David, 1962, 1963? That passage at 4.05 anticipates Trane c. 1964.
Yes, 1963 – I should have mentioned that, as the YouTube annotation gives the date. Thanks for the comment!