Since launching his Doxy label in 2006 with the
Grammy-nominated studio album Sonny, Please, the great tenor saxophonist Sonny
Rollins has been turning to his vast archive of his own concert recordings to
compile superior performances for release in Doxy's acclaimed Road Shows
series. The selections in Volume 1 (2008) spanned nearly 30 years and included
a trio track from the saxophonist's 50th-anniversary Carnegie Hall concert,
while Volume 2 (2011) focused primarily on his epic 80th-birthday concert at
New York's Beacon Theatre.
Road
Shows, vol. 3, to be released May 6 as part of a distribution agreement with
Sony Music Masterworks and its jazz imprint OKeh, draws its six tracks from
concerts recorded between 2001 and 2012 in Saitama, Japan; Toulouse, Marseille,
and Marciac, France; and St. Louis, Missouri. "Patanjali," a
recent-vintage Rollins composition, is given its debut recording on the new
disc. The performances, says Rollins, "present parts of me I want to have
presented."
On May 5
at 12:00 noon EDT, Rollins will expand his forays into social-media territory
(and CD promotion) by participating in an unprecedented video conference,
"Sonny Rollins Meets His Fans," broadcast live on YouTube and
Google+. Ten members of Sonny's global community of listeners and fellow
musicians, chosen from the winners of a video contest on his Facebook page,
will interact with Sonny, one by one, in real-time video, utilizing Google's
popular Hangout platform. Immediately after the live broadcast, the program
will be available for viewing on demand on Sonny's web site and Facebook page.
In addition to the ten guests (each of whom will receive a copy of Road Shows,
vol. 3), moderator Bret Primack will be choosing questions from Google+
viewers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOmclIi0CnU
"As
one of the few jazz musicians able to fashion a career exclusively as a concert
artist," writes Bob Blumenthal in his CD notes, "[Rollins] has made
his appearances events that blend the soul-baring seriousness of a 'classical'
recital with the participatory release of a music that has always drawn on
various kinds of call and response. At his best, which Rollins presents to us
here and in the previous Road Shows, he rides the spontaneity of the moment
into unique collections of moods, grooves, and feelings."
Road
Shows' material reflects an artist who has become as enthralled by narrative
lines as melodic. Noel Coward's "Someday I'll Find You" - which he
first recorded on 1958's Freedom Suite and then on Sonny, Please - takes him
back to his boyhood days, when it was the theme for the long-running radio
show, Mr. Keen, Tracer of Lost Persons.
The infectious
"Biji," introduced on the 1995 album, Sonny +3, was written
"back in the days when guys had nicknames like Rahsaan and Famoudou. I
adopted Brung Biji as mine. It was sort of African style."
"Patanjali"
is named after the sage whose Yoga Sutras, he says, "lay down everything
you need to know" about a discipline and philosophy that "has helped
me get through life and kept me trying to be a better human being."
The
nearly 24-minute rendering of Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II's
masterwork, "Why Was I Born," is as moving as it is breathtaking - a
monument to Rollins's emotional powers. He won a 2006 Grammy for his version of
it on Without a Song: The 9/11 Concert, performing it in Boston five days after
the terrorist attack on New York, which forced him to evacuate his apartment.
"I've
played it a lot," he says. "So I was wondering whether I should put
it out again. I decided to because it captured me going in certain directions I
felt needed to be put on record. I actually had two versions to choose from. On
one of them, everything was quite clean. On this one, I played something I
might be the only one who likes. But I liked the groove and a lot of other
things. It represents Sonny Rollins at a certain point of creation."
Rounding
out the program, there's an eight-minute, stand-alone cadenza taken from a 2009
St. Louis show and a brief, album-closing dose of his perennial crowd-pleaser,
"Don't Stop the Carnival."
Road
Shows, vol. 3 was produced by Rollins and his longtime engineer, Richard
Corsello. Trombonist Clifton Anderson and bassist Bob Cranshaw are heard
throughout, joined on selected tracks by pianist Stephen Scott; guitarists
Bobby Broom and Peter Bernstein; drummers Kobie Watkins, Perry Wilson, Steve
Jordan, and Victor Lewis; and percussionists Kimati Dinizulu and Sammy
Figueroa. "All of these people in my bands are top of the line in their
own right," says Rollins. "It's a privilege and pleasure to play with
them."
Twitter:
@sonnyrollins
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