Sonny Rollins’ Basement Tapes

SONNY ROLLINS More From the Vanguard (Blue Note)

The subject of the interaction between art and technology in music is a long and complicated one. Electricity has changed the properties of musical instruments, first with amplification, then with the invention of entirely new instruments — synthesizers. Musicians such as John Coltrane would most likely not have undertaken soloing at such extraordinary length were it not for the invention and successful marketing of the LP record. But what interests me most at the moment about art and technology is that jazz is supposed to be the most spontaneous, mood-of-the-moment of all musics, whose history is full of legendary tales of men who played miraculous solos, in that place, in that time, lost forever except in the memories of those who were there. But because of recording tape, music that Sonny Rollins made on November 3, 1957, more than eighteen years ago as I write, and that was presumed forgotten and lost, has emerged as what could very likely be the most exciting and satisfying jazz album of 1976. I'll be surprised if there's a better one. And it's a twofer.

Rollins, the master tenor saxophonist who, in the fifties, singlehandedly turned his instrument back V^from the trend toward coolness and

Joe Goldberg

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incipient anemia it had taken in the hands of white musicians following in the footstep of Lester Young-viaStan Getz and the Woody Herman "Brothers," made his debut as a leader in 1957 at New York's famed Village Vanguard, a wedge shaped basement club on Seventh Avenue. Blue Note recorded the first album ever taped there, A Night at the Village Vanguard, which was also Rollins'first live LP. He opened with a trumpet player, who was soon let go, and several different piano players came and went. By the day the album was to be made, Rollins was playing with nearly the irreducible minimum accompaniment, bassand drums. And he wasn't even set on that. In the afternoon performance — this was a Sunday — he used Donald Bailey and Pete La Roca, good players, but very much in the

style of the time. That night, he came out with two musicians as iconoclastic as himself — Elvin Jones, just beginning to work on the enveloping polyrhythms he would use to propel John Coltrane to ecstasy, and Wilbur Ware, a muchneglected bassist whose lines and harmonies were as simple, direct and unadorned as three-chord blues.

Rollins played standards and jazz classics with them with every tool in his formidable arsenal — humor, parody, sly quotation, stunning cascading runs, inexhaustible melodic invention, hard, diamondbright tone, superb technique, impudent swing. He soloed at great length and with a wealth of ideas. There is no point in running the album down track by track — my only quarrel with it is that long drum solos are not to my taste, and Elvin Jones takes quite a few of them — but Rollins is now quite probably the greatest improvising jazz musician alive in the world today, and he was very close to the top of his form that night. Presumably, these tracks were audited at the time and judged inferior to the ones included in A Night at the Vanguard, but there isn't much better jazz to be found anywhere than on Sonny Rollins" happily rediscovered basement tapes. A classic in the art of true improvisation, or spontaneous composition, and anyone who thinks this week's rock god is a jamming genius should listen to it.