Going to the 'Woddshed'

...in the winter ol 1955 He had been playing dates in and around New York, frequently with Miles Davis, and doing a lot of recording on the Prestige label His tone was relatively light, he blew nice, long melodic phrases that sounded good Yet he also sounded familiar, for there were a lot of other young tenor sax men around at the time who had listened just as carefully to Young Being the best of them was not sufficiently satisfying, because the first-among-equals ranking somehow left the essential Rollins out of the equation So Sonny, deciding to find him, disappeared from sight There was much speculation at the time m magazines like Down Beat about where he was and what he was up to Hence, I felt a party to an event when as a student at Roosevelt University in Chicago I attended a lounge session of the jazz club and a well-dressed young man strode in with an instrument case in hand A murmur went through the small crowd It was Sonny Rollins Members of the little pickup band continued to play, sending wide-eyed messages of anticipation to one another as he unpacked his saxophone He waited his turn, stepped forward and took a solo The audience was puzzled Where before Rollins had been smooth, he was now jagged and abrupt, where the phrases had poured forth from the bell of his horn with fluent ease, they now jumped out in staccato Some people frowned and shook their heads But Rollins paid no attention to reactions that night, after finishing his solo he just packed up his horn and walked out of the lounge He had done what he came to do Little did the listeners present realize they had been given a preview of Rollins' new style—harsh, even abrasive, yet strong, emphatic and above all confident In an era ot whispering tenor men, Rollins had chosen to shout Once Sonny came out of seclusion, his new sound had an instant impact on the jazz world It accelerated, it it did not start, the very healthy shitt away from the "cool school" ol the West Coast that had come to dominate jazz Joining the Clifford Brown-May Roach quintet, Rollins found the perfect instrumental context He made a good group one of the truly important units in the history of jazz Listening to Clifford Brown and Sonny Rollins trade fours on "I'll Remember April," is a rare electric moment m music Unfortunately, only months after Sonny joined the quintet, Clifford and pianist Richie Powell were killed in a fiery auto crash on the way to a date in Chicago Sonny joined other groups, continuing to take leaves of absence—one of them nearly two years long—to renew himself and change his direction His latest transformation can be heard on Don't Stop the Carnival (Milestone Stereo M 55005), a double-LP package recorded in live performance at San Francisco's Great American Music Hall over three separate evenings in April 1978 Never one to play it safe, Rollins put together a band for the occasion composed partly of musicians with whom he was more or less unfamiliar To my knowledge, for instance, he had never recorded—and perhaps had not played—with Tony Williams That bet paid off, the brilliant drummer, who broke in with Miles Davis and made his reputation with his own jazz-rock group, Lifetime, performs superbly, holding things together and driving the band through number after number On the other hand, Rollins' decision to use Donald Byrd on trumpet, was not quite as happy Although he and Byrd did collaborate most effectively in the '50s, for the past 10 years the trumpeter has been pretty much out of jazz, first teaching at Howard University and more recently fronting the pop group that he calls the Blackbyrds The ideas are still there, just as they always were, but the execution is rusty, especially on "Nobody Else But Me," where hp and even fingering problems mar his performance Byrd does, however, capture a little of the old fire on his own sprightly tune, "President Hayes " Rollins compensates for the weaknesses of Don't Stop the Carnival by playing more strongly than ever In the years since his initial trip to the woodshed in Chicago, he has cultivated an increasingly coarser and rougher tone His sound today may put some people off, particularly as it is heard on the old '40s standard, "Autumn Nocturne " He tears that one apart, blowing a cap-pella cadenzas through most of the number as he might have some years back in a room by himself, improvising up and down the scales Finally, he takes it home, blowing with rhythm backmg like some Earl Bostic disciple of old in a hoarse, reedy, rhythm-and-blues tone This is not to say that Rollins has become simplistic and crude, he hasn't He is earthy and tough—a nice counterpoint to the electronic sound of his rock-oriented rhythm section The single cut where he and the band lean too far toward rock and play a kind of baby-talk jazz is something called "Non-Cents", it might have been more accurately described without the cute orthography While some critics may dismiss the current Rollins sound as a commercially-motivated bid by the saxophonist for wider appeal a la Herbie Hancock, to me it seems the jazz equivalent of Norman Mailer's effort to create a kind of poetry out of obscenity in Why Are We in Vietnam For Mailer that proved a dead end It will be interesting to see if Rollins can—or will—push further in this new direction Jazz is a highly competitive profession—a condition not solely attributable to the demands made on the musicians by audiences and critics It did not take the Down Beat poll to convince jazzmen that, like it or not, they entered a vast, informal contest the moment they first stepped up on a bandstand This is inherent and can be traced from New Orleans—where King Oliver and Buddy Bolden used to lead their brass bands up either side of the same street, each of them trying to blow the other away—through the Kansas City "cutting" sessions of the '30s and on into the battle of the bands fought out in the '40s at the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem That being the case, the musician who removes himself from the scene for years at a time seems unusually brave—particularly if he takes himself as far away as Europe Yet that is precisely what tenor saxophonist Dexter Gordon, now residing in Copenhagen, has done For over a decade he has been among that highly accomplished contingent of American jazz musicians who have chosen to live abroad (others include such notables as drummer Kenny Clarke, trumpeters Dizzy Reece and Benny Bailey, and saxophonist Johnny Griffin), running the risk that their U S public may forget them Gordon tried to insure against such a fate by returning here late in 1976 to play a few well-chosen dates m the company of trumpeter Woody Shaw The album they recorded live at the Village Vanguard in New York, on Dexter's visit, released as Homecoming (Columbia PG 34650), was one of the big jazz hits of 1977 and won Gordon the number one tenor sax spot m last year's Down Beat International Critics Poll Actually, Dexter Gordon has not changed much in the last 20 years —both his greatest strength and his severest limitation—but he is more fluent and he plays with an assurance and strength that few contemporaries can equal This year he is out with another album—Sophisticated Giant (Columbia JC 34989)—and though it hasn't caused quite the stir Homecoming did, it is even better The reason for this is the arranging done by trombonist Slide Hampton Working with only 11 pieces, Hampton achieves a big-chording, full sound reminiscent of Gil Evans at his big-band best And despite the fact that the charts serve mostly as settings for Gordon's solos, they are so beautifully written and originally conceived that they make the extended tenor passages, with their compulsive quotations of old popular songs, seem more original than perhaps they really are Given this sort of leap in his abilities, it is a safe bet that Hampton has been to the woodshed lately...

...On Music GOING TOTHE 'WOODSHED' by bruce cook wce in theory (and sometimes, it seems, in practice) there is no limit to how far the jazz improviser can go, his listeners always demand all he can give —and a little bit more Unlike the artist in any other medium, he is under constant pressure to "make it new," to explore unexpected harmonies and come up with fresh phrases It is not for nothing that the New Yorker's Whitney Balliett has called jazz the "sound of surprise " But eventually such pressure begins to take its toll Many jazzmen seek relief in drink or drugs, both readily available in their night world, a very few actually take time to rest, recuperate and think through their next move in music Theodore "Sonny" Rollins is one of the few This superb tenor saxophonist, part of the generation that grew up under the dual influence of Charlie Parker and Lester Young, has managed to continually change and grow creatively by simply dropping out of sight every couple of years to "woodshed"—a term that harks back to the days when a musician would take his horn out to the one place he could blow as loudly and recklessly as he wanted Rollins dropped out the first time, it I recall eorrcetlv...