Sonny Rollins
With a show tune in my heart....
I like melody, and people I think have an affinity for melody. It strikes someplace in the brain, in the cortex. It stays there and people remember it. It’s a way of associating memories of life’s events and so on. The American songbook was primarily melodies.
- Sonny Rollins
Like his early hero Art Tatum, Sonny Rollins loved and played a lot of tunes from the “Great American Songbook” - popular and enduring songs from the 1920s to the 1960s created for Broadway theatre, musical theatre, and Hollywood musical film. He was a student of the composers in this songbook. For example, he was a big fan of Jerome Kern, who composed two wonderful scores for Fred Astaire movies: Roberta (1935) and Swing Time (1936). I also think one of the main reasons I was drawn to Rollins in the late 1980s was because he dusted off and recorded obscure tunes from the Great American Songbook that I had heard and loved while watching the old movies as a kid - songs like Dancing in the Dark.
In about 1989, I heard a song that caught my attention playing on KRML, the jazz station in Carmel, California. It was the song featured above - Allison, from Sonny Rollins’ album Dancing in the Dark. The radio station had been playing a lot of Sonny Rollins to promote an upcoming show in San Francisco. I bought my ticket and went to the show with my buddy Luis. And lord have mercy, along with Sun Ra’s shows, that show was one of the best live jazz shows we had ever seen. He was the consummate showman. Before that night, other than his playing on the Alfie soundtrack and his Contemporary Records classic Way Out West, I knew very little about Sonny Rollins. After that night, I was a Sonny Rollins convert.
In a 2020 article in the New York Times, I read that as a result of pulmonary fibrosis, the 89-year-old Sonny Rollins played his last concert in 2012, and in 2014, he stopped playing saxophone altogether. When I read that, it brought a pain to my heart. In 2003, my dad passed away from pulmonary fibrosis, and it’s a tough way to go. For Rollins, a man who started playing tenor saxophone in 1946 at the age of 16, to now no longer be able to play seems a particularly difficult journey.
When considering what to write about the great Sonny Rollins, the question is always - where do you start: before or after his time on the Williamsburg Bridge; before or after he visited Jamaica for the first time and spent several months studying yoga, meditation, and Eastern philosophies at an ashram in Powai, India; or even start with the Rolling Stones’ Tattoo You. But as great as all those periods are, I actually think some of Sonny Rollins’ best work was recorded after 1987, starting with his album Dancing In The Dark. These later recordings all delivered classic Great American Songbook tunes played within the electric beat jazz context. Incidentally, much of this later work was performed with trombone player Clifton Anderson, Rollins’ nephew.
Clifton Anderson attended the High School of Music and Art in New York and graduated from the Manhattan School of Music in 1978. He joined his uncle in 1984 and together they recorded many fine albums. Anderson also played on Muhal Richard Abrams’ 1989 classic Hearinga Suite, recorded on the Blank Saint label. Since this is such a great album, I have to play a song from it. So here is Oldfotalk:
For me, and perhaps sadly for some of the Rollins purists out there, our journey must start in 1987, when Rollins released the powerhouse Dancing In The Dark on the Milestone label.
This is really the album that put me in touch with Rollins. I’ve never had the chance to interview Rollins, but if I did I’d ask him if the album’s title was a nod to the 1953 movie The Band Wagon, which featured the song Dancing In The Dark, a ballet number in Central Park, danced by Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse:
On the album cover, Rollins looks dressed for the occasion….
Dancing In The Dark contains two Great American Songbook classic songs from movie musicals (Dancing In The Dark most famously from The Band Wagon, as mentioned above, and I’ll String Along With You from the 1934 Twenty Million Sweethearts sung by Dick Powell and Ginger Rogers) and one contemporary song, Just Once, the 1981 pop hit by James Ingram - a’la Miles Davis’ release of Cyndi Lauper’s Time After Time on his 1985 You’re Under Arrest album. Rollins’ Dancing In The Dark seems to me a signal that he was opening up his heart to the old American show tunes he heard as a kid growing up in Sugar Hill Harlem.
In 1989, Rollins followed up Dancing In The Dark with Falling in Love with Jazz, another album full of American classic show tunes focused on love. Five of the seven tunes are covers with only two Rollins originals.
From that album, here is another Great American Songbook classic by Sammy Cahn, I Should Care, which first appeared in the 1945 MGM film Thrill of a Romance:
For this wonderful tune, Rollins is joined by Branford Marsalis on tenor sax and his old bandmate Tommy Flanagan on piano.
And again, in 1993, Rollins recorded Old Flames, which featured Great American Songbook show tunes on six of the eight tracks. The other two are Ellington’s Prelude to a Kiss and a swinging Rollins original.
His playing on this album is at times deep. I find this an underrated album, which again features the great Tommy Flanagan on piano. Here is Rollins’ spirited original from the album, Times Slimes - I’d like to know the story behind that title:
In 1998, Rollins broke from the Great American Songbook trend with Global Warming on the Milestone label. All but one of the six tracks are originals.
This is a great album that I think stands up well against anything he put out in the early stages of his career. I like his original Echo-Side Blues from that album:
Although Global Warming is primarily original compositions, Rollins curiously includes a nice version of Change Partners, a popular song written by Irving Berlin for the 1938 Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers RKO film Carefree.
Again, I find Rollins’ use of somewhat obscure and seldom-heard American show tunes within the jazz idiom very refreshing.
I think with Global Warming, Rollins is playing perhaps at his very best. I know the die-hard, early Rollins fans may think I’m crazy, fair enough, but I put this period right up there with Alfie and the Impulse! sides.
In 2000, Rollins recorded one of my favorite albums, This Is What I Do, for which he won the 2001 Grammy for Best Jazz Instrumental Album.
From that album, here is The Moon of Manakoora:
The Moon of Manakoora is again that obscure popular song written by Frank Loesser (lyrics) and Alfred Newman (music) for the 1937 Paramount film The Hurricane, sung by Dorothy Lamour.
Sonny Rollins, like Sun Ra, is best seen and heard live. To get a feel for his live shows, here is Without a Song: The 9/11 Concert, recorded live in 2001 and released by Milestone in the summer of 2005.
When you have some time, just play this whole record and marvel at the beauty of the Saxophone Colossus. Once again, he stays true to his formula with four of the five tunes from the Great American Songbook.
Here’s one more for the road. Rollins told this story about his Rolling Stones gig: “Mick Jagger, I don’t think he understood what I was doing, and I didn’t understand what he was doing. My wife was the one that persuaded me to do that recording. I said: ‘Man, the Rolling Stones. I don’t want to do any record with the Rolling Stones.’ I’d considered them - and it’s faulty - not on the level of jazz. But my wife said, ‘No, no, you must do it.’ So I said, ‘Ok, let me see if I can relate to what they are doing; let me see if I can make it sound as good as possible.”
Here is Rollins playing tenor on the Stones’ Waiting on a Friend:
Whenever I hear this song, I always think of Sonny Rollins, with his horn close by his side, relaxing somewhere in Woodstock, New York, and it makes my heart soar like a hawk. So I say, “Here’s to you, Sonny!”
Next week on that Big River called Jazz, we’ll dig our paddles in and explore some of the waters of Chuck Nessa’s legendary Nessa Record label.
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Also, find my playlist on Spotify: From Fred Astaire to Sun Ra.
Feel free to contact me at any time to talk shop. I welcome and encourage that.
Until then, keep on walking….
Thanks again! I don’t think I’ve listened to much Rollins recorded after the 70s. I last saw him at the Village Vanguard in 77 or so… You’ve opened up a lot for me to listen to now. I’m grateful.