After the Mike Nock Trio’s beautiful short set Sonny Rollins plunged lurching into the light, bent forward like the marooned Ben Gunn emerging from the jungle to startle young Jim Hawkins in Treasure Island. Except that he wore shades and carried a saxophone. His hair was a frail outsized dandelion as the light filled it. He wore a loose white smock. I was almost shocked, or at least nearly as startled as Jim Hawkins. Startled because of a momentary resemblance to the late Joe Lane. Shocked because, yes, of course, he was old. I saw him at Ronnie Scott’s old place in the mid 1960s. More of that later.
Sonny Rollins began playing turned away toward his band. The athletic body of old had broadened and shrunk downward. The boxy torso seemed to have moved his legs further apart so that his movements had a stumping quality. But he had straightened up to play. He played It’s Wonderful (“They say that falling in love is wonderful”). His sound was powerful and moving, as it always was when he played ballads, but the band’s sound seemed to swim about a bit in the ambience. There was quite a spread of them across the stage: Clifton Anderson on trombone, guitarist Bobby Broom, the great Bob Cranshaw (these days playing electric bass due to back troubles), Kobie Watkins’s drum kit and the array of Kimati Dinizulu’s percussion.
Where elements of near chaos were deliberate in Ornette Coleman’s performance, this was more straight ahead and a lack of focus was initially troubling. Anderson and Rollins began playing overlapping lines and the sound people seemed perhaps unclear as to whether they should be given equal weight. Lack of focus made Anderson’s trombone sound more like a French horn at times. But this was the Concert Hall, and this was where I sat. For others the sound was excellent from the beginning. For me it steadily improved.
Each time Rollins repeated the beginning of the tune it was couched in such a complex of rickety staccato arpeggios that it sounded a bit like Anthony Braxton. These sometimes became astounding cadenzas and time stood still as a complex sculpture seemed to form itself in the air against the band’s energy. In an antic moment I visualized the iron Margel Hinder sculpture that has been moved around Sydney for decades (recently it was in the foyer of UTS, but I understand it is now somewhere nearby). Sustained notes followed, swelling with alarming force, pushing the band as of old.
Everybody soloed. Not every solo was great. The piece went on for a long time. If I hadn’t known the tune before, I certainly did now. Many will want to kill me when I say that the earlier part of the concert had its tedious aspects. The band, and particularly Rollins, were playing themselves into focus. The repetitions of the tunes between and during solos became annoying. Kenny Dorham used often to return to the tune at some point in his solos, but this was overload of a good thing. Even Noel Coward’s lovely Some Day I’ll Find You and Ellington’s beautiful In A Sentimental Mood were played several times too often. Anderson incidentally went too early into the bridge of the latter. Who cares? But he looked as if he had trodden on his own foot, which was human and endearing. His playing began to appeal to me more and more as the sound became more focused. He is a lovely player. I had forgotten him. I have at least one album on which he plays with Rollins in the late 1980s : I Love Jazz with a plate from Matisse’s Jazz series on the cover.
Focus and force finally arrived with a vengeance on St Thomas, which was played rather more slowly than in its first appearance on the album Saxophone Colossus in 1956. Suddenly I became aware that Rollins’s sound and control had been getting stronger and stronger. At his age it had taken this time to really warm up. His solo was long and who would have cared if he had played it for an hour? Razor sharp complexity and bluesy impetus alternated. Long lines were woven in that welter that is Sonny’s own: 16th and 32nd notes crowded with asymmetrical clusters, woofling, barking, skating around the edge of the time so that the other musicians’ heads twisted about and their faces were split by grins as they waited for the resolution, as if they were following a fugue. That little musician’s ecstasy.
The troll or pilgrim who had stumped about, the Old Man Of the sea who had arrived bearing a strange sceptre that was a tenor saxophone had gone. He was no longer an old man. He was not any age. Here was the master.
This was truly inspiring. For at least half an hour (they had been playing for two) it was like that. They played the driving riff tune Sonny Please from the new album of that name, and Sonny was roaring. Repetitions of the riff now had a propulsive effect, as in a jam session. Watkins, a dynamic drummer of intense smashing energy had seemed fusion oriented, but on tunes like this he showed how effective he could be with certain aspects of swing. They played Half As Much (“If you only loved me half as much as I love you”, a country song that was a hit for Rosemary Clooney when I was eleven (1951), and although this was also repeated too often Sonny’s soulful gospel treatment was almost as moving as his version of The Tennessee Waltz from the late 1980s album mentioned above.
Read the full review on the SIMA website.
