Sonny Rollins

And so it was the active improvising that felt so freeing to me.

And then eventually I connected the dots like, oh, I'm doing, you know, a worse version of what I've heard, you know, Sonny Rollins do on this CD that my parents listen to.

Things like that.

And so it was really when I picked it up that I got really into it.

One page.

Yeah, one page paper, but on a hundred different saxophonists, like important people, you know, in the history of the saxophone.

So there's really so many to mention, but I think on tenor, Sonny Rollins looms large for me.

I was fortunate to meet him and interview him and just get some wisdom from him firsthand, which was very special and very life-changing for me.

to the casual listener prestige is remembered for hastily assembled sessions with little rehearsal time and quick head arrangements the recordings demonstrate something more nuanced however it should come as no surprise that the depth and versatility of the prestige visual language was equalled by the music in fact the stylistic range was far more expansive than most independent labels of the era for every jammin in hi-fi with gene ammons there was a luminous jango by the modern jazz quartet jackie mclean's visceral emotionally complex outburst Curtis Fuller's careening Vance No. 5, or something truly outré like Ghost Story by Teo Massero and the Prestige Jazz Quartet.

What's more, Sonny Rollins' entire output in 1955 and 1956 and the marathon sessions documenting Miles Davis' working band, the first great quintet, are prestige recordings that in many ways define jazz in the popular imagination.

As David Rosenthal observed, for many listeners, hard bop and jazz are still virtually synonymous.

When most fans think of jazz, they think of hard bop's mixture of street attitudes and a kind of hard-boiled melancholy.

you know

well Duke Ellington later on but you know the dancing with jazz and the big band jazz you know but he had soloists who would do stuff but then later on jazz got to be a little more quartets and this and that, you know, bebop, that got invented, all those other things started happening, you know, and soloists became very important on certain songs, you know, different things, they would interpret their feelings about whatever it was, and when they hit it, you know, like, you know, Sonny Rollins is my all-time favorite, Sonny Rollins, I love Sonny, you know, he's like, He hits it.

His album Way Out West, that

album.

I'm going to continue now with some great woodwind and brass playing.

Firstly from Freddie Hubbard, then Sonny Rollins.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Some incredibly accomplished music there from the 50s and 60s.

Freddie Hubbard first from Blue Spirits in 1968 and The Melting Pot, followed by Sonny Rollins with the track No More from Sonny Rollins with the Modern Jazz Quartet back in 1953.

Onwards we go there with a couple of great jazz vocals, firstly from Diana Krall, then Norah Jones.

There weren't too many Grant Green records that I was aware of because Blue Note wasn't doing the reissues yet, but that was one of my favorites.

Here's Sonny Rollins' It Could Happen to You.

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the artful saxophone of Sonny Rollins, along with Henry Grimes' bass, Pete LaRocca drums, live in Zurich in 1959.

It could happen to you.

And it has happened, another episode of Jazz Spectrum.

I didn't want to just follow through with what other people were doing in terms of streaming, which I think is wonderful, but it wasn't something that really interested me, primarily because jazz is a live art form.

Honestly, I wouldn't even be able to name them.

Sonny Rollins is one that I really love listening to.

Never

even heard of that guy.

I know that you're speaking gibberish now.

Sonny Rollins.

I mean, just if I like I've always listened to him and I always think to myself, like if I was a saxophone player, like that'd be.

I'd be, I'd want to sound like Sonny plus myself, obviously, but like that Sonny style is just, oh man, it's, there's a level of playfulness that he has that it's just, it's, I listened to it.