Rollins & Monk

Two archival live releases, recorded a decade apart

I haven’t offered one in a few weeks, so let’s start with a…

Montana update! We lived in our last place for 24 years. Yes, really. And at no point in that time did we have bookshelves. What we had were stacks of books, all along one wall of the “office” (the room with the desktop computer and the cabinet full of unsold Burning Ambulance Music CDs) and by the time we moved, those stacks were roughly waist-high, maybe even chest-high on me, and I’m 6’2”.

I counted the books as we boxed them — there were almost 800. But in the new place, we have two, soon to be three, Kallax shelving units from Ikea, and we spent most of this past Sunday filling them with books. We’re roughly halfway through the 28 boxes, and I think when the third shelving unit arrives later this month (a replacement for one that was damaged in transit), we’ll find space for the rest with no problem. I am very excited by this.

The weather’s getting warmer, so I reviewed a bunch of Nigerian music for Shfl, including albums by Fela Kuti, Tony Allen, and King Sunny Ade, and three killer compilations (there are a lot of compilations of Nigerian music, but these are among the best). Here’s the link.

My latest Stereogum column went up in late June; I dove deep into a new box set containing Charles Mingus’s 1970s studio albums for Atlantic, and reviewed a bunch of great new records by Donny McCaslin, Linda May Han Oh, the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, and more. Here’s the link.

I got to interview Japanese techno legend Ken Ishii for Bandcamp Daily; here’s the link.

Jesse Rifkin interviewed the late Greg Tate in 2021 for an upcoming book on New York rock scenes, and has posted the full transcript here.

There never seems to be an end to archival, historic, previously unreleased jazz recordings, does there? This week, a pretty amazing John Coltrane live set from 1961, featuring Eric Dolphy, is being released. Every year, just about, there’s a new Miles Davis something. Thelonious Monk has had some real treasures come out over the years — the 2005 release of a 1957 performance at Carnegie Hall with Coltrane; the 2017 release Les Liaisons Dangereuses 1960, featuring his unused soundtrack to the film; 2018’s Mønk, recorded live in Denmark in 1963; and 2020’s Palo Alto, capturing a performance at a high school(!) from 1968.

Recently, a recording that’s been issued a few times under different titles came out again, newly remastered and on the revived Candid label, as The Classic Quartet. It was taped during a tour of Japan on May 23, 1963, with Charlie Rouse on tenor sax, Butch Warren on bass, and Frankie Dunlop on drums — a transitional band that never recorded in the studio, which sort of contradicts that album title. But the band heard here is absolutely a classic quartet, a locked-in unit thinking and acting as one. The set list is pretty straightforward: “Epistrophy,” “Ba-Lue Bolivar Ba-Lues-Are,” “Evidence,” a short solo version of “Just a Gigolo,” and a long, closing “Blue Monk.” But the performances are some of the most muscular and driving I’ve ever heard from Monk, and I say that as someone who already prefers his mid ’60s material to that which came before (heresy, I know). The rhythm section in particular will cave your skull in on the blues tunes, and I was trying to figure out how they were doing it until I took another look at the album cover. The recording is in mono. Everybody is coming straight down the middle at you like a bulldozer. The tapes have been remastered by legendary engineer Bernie Grundman, and they sound fantastic, but it’s the pure muscle of everyone’s playing that turns this into an essential Monk document. Don’t miss it.

There’s also a killer new Sonny Rollins archival release out, Live at Finlandia Hall, Helsinki 1972. Surprisingly, this date, which was recorded by the Finnish national broadcasting company, YLE, is not discussed in Aidan Levy’s exhaustive (and essential) biography, Saxophone Colossus; all he says is “That August [1972], Sonny reclaimed the top spot in the Down Beat International Jazz Critics Poll and toured Europe as a single. [His late wife] Lucille came with him; she had begun taking a more active role in managing his career.”

As Levy says, Rollins was traveling solo, performing with pickup bands in each city he hit, like Chuck Berry, so for the Finnish concert he’s backed by Heikki Sarmanto on Fender Rhodes, Pekka Sarmanto (yes, they’re brothers) on bass, and Esko Rosnell on drums. This immediately sets the performance apart for two reasons. First, because while this was an existing unit, the foundation of Sarmanto’s big band, who put out an album, Everything Is It, that year, they’d never played with Rollins before. Second, Rollins was well known for his general unwillingness to play with pianists live; he felt like their insistent chords were too restrictive, keeping him from wandering as far afield as he might like.

That said, he was on the road having just tracked Sonny Rollins’ Next Album, his first studio session since 1966’s East Broadway Run Down, and SRNA featured George Cables on acoustic and electric piano, and marked Rollins’ exploration of a heavier, more groove-oriented sound. So this set, which features just three tunes in an hour — a nearly 25-minute “Night and Day,” an 18-minute “My One and Only Love,” and a 17-minute “St. Thomas” — fits quite snugly within his 1970s oeuvre. If you like albums like Horn Culture, Sonny Rollins in Japan, The Cutting Edge and Nucleus as much as I do, then you’ll like this.

The sound is very nice on this recording, with a lot of air and ambience. The Fender Rhodes has a wavering, cloudy quality, and the bass is a thick, almost dubby boom. The drums are soft, but still somewhat prominent in the mix. Rollins, meanwhile, is sounding absolutely huge. He’s in absolute control of the horn at all times; it sounds like he’s wrestling a bear, but his tone never slips, every note is perfectly placed, and most important of all, he’s listening to his bandmates. “My One and Only Love” begins and ends with extended passages of solo sax, but in between, he steps aside to let the Sarmanto brothers take solos of their own, and when he comes back in, he doesn’t bigfoot them — this music has real flow. And it concludes with a version of “St. Thomas” that’s an absolute celebratory romp, with Heikki Sarmanto’s electric piano hovering just this side of cruise-ship cheese without ever going too far, and a crushingly heavy (we’re talking Bill Ward/Ginger Baker/John Bonham heavy) drum solo from Rosnell. There aren’t that many live Rollins recordings from the ’70s, and this one is among the best. It’s not available digitally, only as a CD or a 3-sided double LP, so I recommend buying it straight from the label.

That’s it for now. See you next week!