CD, стоящие на полке рядом : Jazz (Saxophone - Bop)      

Around the ten-minute mark of the title track, things get very interesting indeed — moody and spooky as Jimmy Garrison hangs on a single note, making his bass throb along while Elvin Jones widens the space and fires drum and cymbal hits in all directions. Coming off bass and drum solos that never seem to fit anywhere in the piece, it's a supreme moment of tension-building, one that gets repeated after Rollins and trumpeter Freddie Hubbard restate the theme in unison. This is the sound of Rollins' group working in unity. For much of "East Broadway Run Down," though, the rhythm section is off doing their thing, usually together, while Rollins meanders about in limbo, seemingly trying to figure out what it is that he should be doing. That Rollins was having an off day for this recording is a suspicion that's strengthened by Hubbard's part — where Rollins is wandering, Hubbard is charging ahead, focused and tight, fitting with the rhythm section, keeping the tension up. The remainder of the album is more on the mark, with "Blessing in Disguise" being quite enjoyable — it starts out in a cheerfully traditional vein and gradually, subtly, starts to slide off into an improvisational area only to come back again to the traditional, and so back and forth. Rollins floats his sax line around the melody with only occasional excursions toward the outer regions. "We Kiss in a Shadow," though, is charmingly straightforward, a ballad rendering supported by Jones and Garrison locking together on a nice rhythm construction that lets Rollins float around the melody.

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Sonny Rollins combines immense authority and almost as immense unpredictability. The authority is instantly evident in his playing. His attack, his sound, his time.

"He doesn't worry about time," Freddie Hubbard observes. "He doesn't have to. I remember when I was playing with him, we'd sometimes start at a racetrack tempo. And then he'd double that. Oh, he's mastered the time thing.

The authority carries over to Rollins's unpredictability. When, for example, he decides to move around the room while he's playing, he does it with magisterial conviction. And always, he's acutely aware of everything that's happening. One night, he was walking around the Village Vanguard, he stopped and plunged into a stunning cadenza, his eyes closed. I had just come in and was standing by the door watching his total immersion in the music. Eyes still closed, he moved a few feet, still playing. Suddenly, he took his horn out of his mouth, opened his eyes, said, "Hello, Nat," and then resumed playing. I still haven't figured out how he knew I was there.

"It seems to me," said Freddie Hubbard in talking about this record, "that Sonny plays different every time I hear him. He never stays in one thing. East Broadway Run Down started as a blues, but soon, all three of us were moving: out of the chords. It was beautiful, not having a piano, because that way we were not only freer harmonically but we were also not confined by the usual twelve bar structure."

The number begins to cook-to use a phrase now somewhat In disuse-from the start. The Jones-Garrison rhythm team sounds strong and flexible enough to sustain several big: bands simultaneously. Up front. Sonny illustrates his extraordinary plasticity of line. And also, of course, his complete command over the horn. Freddie Hubbard. who has also become a consistently authoritative jazzman, plays with crisp inventiveness and an organic improvisatory sense that makes the design of his solo, in retrospect, appear to have been carefully plotted.

I asked Freddie what it feels like to have Elvin Jones behind you on a free-wheeling number like this. 'The way Elvin plays time," Freddie said, "is forceful but he doesn't intrude. Furthermore, Elvin is able to add things around what you play. He's able to fill in so much space-with his hands, with his feet-and fit it all in. It's an exhilarating experience."

Authority also characterizes the work of Jimmy Garrison who is Anally being recognized for the superior musician he is. Listen here to the way he builds his solo. And to his sound. At times Garrison makes his bass sound like an oversize guitar. Also fascinating is his time. Until Sonny re-enters. Garrison's beat is never explicit but the strength of the implicit pulsation is unmistakable.

As the trialogue continues, Elvin suddenly bursts into a buoyantly complex drum solo in which he occasionally sounds as if he had at least four hands and four feet. It's a masterful essay in how to build layers of cross-accents and shifting textures into a percussion totality. And then, a hypnotic heartbeat courses through Jones's waves of cymbal sounds. It is as if we have come back to the root of all music.

Sonny emerges once more, followed by Hubbard, with that heart beat still pounding. And that new sound? That eerie sound which rides the waves for a moment and returns after further dialogue between Hubbard and Rollins? Sonny has taken the mouthpiece off his horn, and is blowing through that. A jazz banshee. With the horn momentarily intact again, the piece moves to a series of endings until there is an unprecedented dialogue between Sonny-pyramiding overtones from the mouthpiece alone-and the remarkable Garrison. And then back home.

Blessing in Disguise, Sonny's tune, and We Kiss in a Shadow are without Hubbard. In them, in addition to Sonny's customary skill at thematic variations, there is the matter of the Rollins tone. "Some of the quality of that tone," Freddie Hubbard explains, "is due to the strength of his body. He knows how to get the right amount of air into his horn and he has the strength to keep it coming and to control it. He always had a deep sound, and he learned how to perfect that depth of sound all over the instrument, from top to bottom. Many tenor players, when they play deep in the lower register, sound as if they're growling. Not Sonny."

A striking element in Blessing in Disguise is Jimmy Garrison's solo, which points to how lyrical an advanced bass solo can be. Consider how much the possibilities of that instrument have expanded since Jimmy Blanton. And the possibilities keep widening with Garrison as one of the key liberators. But it's not only as a soloist that Garrison is commanding. Listen to the beat he sets behind Sonny in the last section of the tune.

As he has done so often before, Sonny has found in We Kiss in a Shadow a song that is hardly ever played by jazzmen but that turns into a thoroughly apt medium for his pungent, supple lyrical bent. The song is from The King and I (1951), but Sonny so brings it into his own context, his own sensibility, that it becomes an extension of him. And that, of course, is part of what jazz is about.

What makes Sonny's music so continually fascinating is that when one speaks of "an extension of him," the personality involved is protean. From the root of the man there are many Sonny Rollinses, and you never know which combination of them you're going to hear on any given night or at any given record date. As is challengingly evident here.

-Nat Hentoff (Original 1966 liner notes from East Broadway Run Down, AS-9121)