Sonny Rollins - "Worktime"

[sal]

Happy Saturday everybody!

A quick background......while John Coltrane will probably always be my all time favorite tenor, this last year for me has been the year of Sonny Rollins. After finally really "getting it" about a year or so ago, I've probably spent more time listening to Sonny Rollins recordings than any other jazz artist.

Anyways, I was spinning my new K2 remaster of "Worktime" this morning and got to thinking about some things. I read on the back that it was his first date as a leader after kicking his drug habit, and that he had been spending time woodsheding in Chicago before this date. Upon reading this, a thought came to mind and I wanted to know what people thought about it.

I've heard a fairly good amount of pre-1955 Sonny Rollins recordings. There is no doubt that he was a fantastic player in those days. But to me, he really didn't sound like....Sonny. I hear a very good tenor player with a strong concept of rhythm and melody. But when listening to "Worktime", as well as the recordings with Clifford Brown & Max Roach, I hear the MONSTER Sonny Rollins that revolutionized jazz saxophone. The endless way of approaching a melody, the playing against, with, over, under, and around the rhythm, the sense of humor...it all seems to come together at this point in time. Sonny Rollins seemed to graduate from "Sonny the really good tenor player" to "Sonny Rollins the Master".

What are you're thoughts on this? Are there pre-"Worktime" recordings that you feel showcase Sonny so fully formed? Do you think he didn't reach his stride until a year later? I'm interested to hear what the board members have to say.

[JSngry]

Coming to all this stuff after the fact, and out of sequence at that, I can't say that I hear WORKTIME as the "breakthrough" that those who heard it contemporaneously seem to have heard it as (Steve Lacy in particular has noted what an immediate impact it had on him). I DO hear it as a full coalescence of a lot of things that had been bubbling around for a few years, most notably in the sessions with Monk.

No matter, it's definitely Sonny's first great album, from start to finish, and the programming, whoever's decision that was, flows as well as SAXOPHONE COLLOSUS, which is no small feat.

Edited July 24, 2004 by JSngry

[Larry Kart]

Sal -- I agree that Rollins became Rollins with "Worktime" -- or that was the first recorded evidence of what he had become during his year of woodshedding in Chicago. On the other hand, pre-"Worktime" Rollins still sounds like Rollins to me, just not with the same gargantuan comand of every musical and emotional resource. FWIW, here are the notes I wrote for a 1972 reissue of "Worktime" (with a slightly different ending than the original):

Most jazz fans, myself included, tend to view the process of jazz creation in a dramatic, even romantic light. If the artistic product is turbulent, passionate, noble, etc., we feel that the circumstances surrounding its creation must have been similar in tone. As one has more contact with musicians, though, one discovers that it is rarely that simple--musical events that to the listener seem immensely dramatic may have been created in a casual, "let’s get the job done" manner. I mention this as a mild corrective, for if ever there was a recording that deserved the term "dramatic," Worktime is it.

The situation was this: Sonny Rollins, who by 1954 had established himself as the best young tenorman in jazz, moved to Chicago for most of 1955 and "woodshedded" (that apt jazz term for artistic self-examination). He emerged to join the Clifford Brown/Max Roach Quintet, and when he recorded Worktime on December 2, 1955, it was his first appearance on record since October 1954, when recorded as a sideman with Thelonious Monk.

"Worktime" was a dramatic and startling event, then and now, because it revealed that during his sabbatical Rollins had made a quantum jump in every area of musical procedure. He was no longer "the best young tenorman" but a major innovator whose achievements would have implications for the future course of jazz that have not yet been exhausted, either by himself or by all those he has influ-enced. Most obviously, there was an increase in rhythmic assurance and sonoric variety on Rollins’s part. But these and other seemingly technical gains were all in the service of a shift in sensibility, a unique attitude toward his material that had only been hinted at in his previous work.

I imagine that everyone who admires Rollins’s music has commented on its humorous quality, though there seems to be agreement that "humorous," by itself, is not an adequate description. David Himmelstein has added the information that it is "the humor of inwit, of self-consciousness or, as Sonny once aptly put it, the consciousness of a generation nourished on ‘Lux--you know, the Radio Theatre,’ " and Max Harrison has given us the terms "sardonic" and "civilized irony." But the best guide I have found to the sensibility that emerges on Worktime is a remarkable article by Terry Martin titled "Coleman Hawkins and Jazz Romanticism" that appeared in he October 1963 issue of Jazz Monthly. In commenting on Hawkins’s version of "Until the Real Thing Comes Along" (which can be heard on the album Soul ) Martin says that "the whole is a finely shaped drama. Dramatic structure may in fact point to the core of Hawkins’s art. He handles his materials with the ease and cunning of a great drama-tist, and as with great drama the meaning may not correspond exactly with what the characters are made to say. It is the personae and the relations generated be-tween them that contain the essence of the achievement."

Much of this also applies to Rollins, though his kind of drama differs in form and content from Hawkins’s. A comparison between "Until the Real Thing Comes Along" and "There Are Such Things" from Worktime may show what the differences are. As Martin points out, one of Hawkins’s methods is to make an initial statement that is romantic in character and then juxtapose it with "highly emotive rhythmic figures" that eventually lead back to the original mood. It is as though he were saying, "Yes, romance does exist, but I want to show you the tough reality that lies underneath." Structurally, Hawkins’s drama is double in effect but single in method--i.e., allowing for foreshadowing devices, he presents one personae at a time--while with Rollins the method as well as the final effect is double ( at the least). No statement is allowed to rest unqualified by him for more than a few measures, and often the very tone quality and accentuation with which a phrase is pre-sented is felt as an ironic commentary upon it.

The implications of such an approach are numerous. For one, even though Rollins can retain and heighten the pattern of linear motivic evolution that was hailed en-thusiastically by Gunther Schuller as "thematic improvising," the effect of constant renewal produced by his simultaneous or near-simultaneous expression of multiple points of view is, I believe, the more radical and lasting de-velopment, for it enables the soloist to achieve an emotional complexity that before was largely the province of such orchestral masters as Duke Ellington, whose every band member is potentially a musical/dramatic character. Also, it opens the door to a new view of the jazz past, for the improviser can now range beyond the apparent boundaries of style and make use of any musical ma-terial that his taste for drama can assimilate.

Rol-lins’s frequent use of such unlikely vehicles as "There’s No Business Like Show Business," "Sonny Boy," "In a Chapel in the Moonlight," "Wagon Wheels," and "If You Were the Only Girl in the World" can be seen in this light--for while one wouldn’t swear that none of these pieces (and there are many more like them) appeals to Rollins on essentially musical grounds, it’s a safe bet that he is drawn to them because he likes to evoke, toy with, and comment upon their inherent strains of corniness, prettiness, and sentimentality . And by bringing orchestral/dramatic resources into the range of the individual soloist, Rollins may have given to jazz just the tool it needs to survive the apparent exhaustion of the emotional resources open to the improviser whose relationship to his material is one to one, which is what I think can be heard in the later work of John Coltrane.

The finest tracks on Worktime, for me, are "There’s No Business Like Show Business," "Raincheck," and "There Are Such Things." Notice, in particular, the utterly unexpected insertion of the verse of "Show Busi-ness" (where Rollins is accompanied only by Morrow’s strong bass line) right after the theme statement. What results is quintessentially Rollins-esque, a compulsively swinging, serio-comic tour de force that at once embraces and bemusedly holds at arms’ length the flag-waving fact of Ethel Merman’s existence.

[dig dis]

Thanks Sal for this thoughtful thread and thanks Larry for the fascinating reply. I have yet to hear Worktime and, to say the least, my appetite is whetted (or is that whet?).

[Late]

Most obviously, there was an increase in rhythmic assurance and sonoric variety on Rollins’s part.

But these and other seemingly technical gains were all in the service of a shift in sensibility, a unique attitude toward his material that had only been hinted at in his previous work.

I think the first sentence of Larry's above nails it most for me. Rollins' command of the horn is now (already) so virtually complete that it literally radiates confidence. One gets the impression that there's no obstacle between Rollins's thoughts and their conveyance through the horn. I would say, however, that this authority was at least foreshadowed in solos such as "I Know" from Rollins's very first album.

Larry, do you think you could speak more on what you mean by "a shift in sensibility" in the second sentence above? I'm not necessarily in disagreement, but I guess I'm not always hearing a "shift." Maybe (at least for me) more of a logical progression?

[MartyJazz]

The finest tracks on Worktime, for me, are "There’s No Business Like Show Business," "Raincheck," and "There Are Such Things."

As a Rollins enthusiast and collector for some 40 years (in particular from his initial appearance on record through his Impulse recordings of the mid '60s), your sentence above serves to remind me of how great WORKTIME really is. For while I love the tracks you mention, my favorites from that session are Cole Porter's "It's All Right With Me" and Rollins' undeservedly neglected original "Paradox".

On a sidenote, it has been remarked over the years how Rollins' live appearances have overshadowed his studio sessions, even though there is so much greatness strewn among the latter. I can attest that from 1972 through 1992, I saw Rollins perform an average of once a year. There were some occasions (I'm thinking of the Vanguard in '72, the Bottom Line circa '87) where no other jazz musician (and I was fortunate to have witnessed the playing of Trane, Dizzy, Monk, Mingus, and many other "giants') in my experience was so able to catapult an audience into such rapture and enjoyment, i.e., the proverbial "joint was jumpin'". He is truly one of the very greatest and I continue to be amazed at the lack of recognition accorded him outside of the jazz community.

[JSngry]

He is truly one of the very greatest and I continue to be amazed at the lack of recognition accorded him outside of the jazz community.

Staying alive and sane is not necessarily the best of career moves these days....

[Larry Kart]

Jim -- Maybe "shift" isn't the right word, but what I meant is everything that follows that sentence in the notes about the way Rollins developed what might be called "a set of orchestral selves" or "an orchestral set of selves" (hey, why didn't I think of putting it that way?) -- and developed this both in the sense that people like you and me could take what he was doing that way but also in the sense that was really what he was up to: toying with a near-incredible humane gusto with ways of being "here," "there" and "elsewhere" at one and the same time, something that was open to an orchestral dramatist like Ellington, who had an orchestra of personalities/colors at his command, but not to many (if any) horn soloists before Rollins, with of course the pioneering exception of Hawkins. And then would come Wayne to do something similar yet different with the old soloistic "self."

[Lazaro Vega]

Larry Kart: "...Rollins may have given to jazz just the tool it needs to survive the apparent exhaustion of the emotional resources open to the improviser whose relationship to his material is one to one, which is what I think can be heard in the later work of John Coltrane."

Larry would you mind elaborating on that? Trane's later works (Ascension?) are examples of a musician who had wrung out all of the emotions possible in a one on one relationship to the material? I'm just not reading that clearly.

[Larry Kart]

Lazaro -- What I meant at the time (not sure that I still believe it 100 percent) is that when Trane's music sounded excited, ecstatic, transcendent or would-be transcendent, that pretty much meant that the state/attitude/whatever of Trane himself could be pretty much identified with the excited, ecstatic, transcendent or would-be transcendent nature of the music (i.e. his relationship to his material was one to one). This had at least two possible effects: It seems to have drained/ate up Trane as a human being, and its implicit placement of him right inside the music's fiery furnace at all times didn't give him much room to step back and ponder whether somewhat different means (e.g. more rhythmic variety) might have given him more musical room to manuever. Guess I was thinking of the then (and still) vivid example of Roscoe Mitchell, who always gives me the feeling, even at his most explosive, that he's looking down or at himself exploding. Different strokes, I'd prefer to think of at as nowadays. Here's a passage that may apply from my "The Avant-Garde 1959-1967" chapter in "The Oxford Companion To Jazz":

A father figure to much of the avant-garde, John Coltrane, like Moses, was not destined to enter the promised land. There were, in the latter portion of Coltrane’s career, at least two dramatic turning points: first, his shift from the dense "sheets of sound" harmonic patterning of "Giant Steps" (Atlantic, 1959) to the agonized, harmonically stripped down expressionism that would be exemplified by "Chasin’ the Trane" (Impulse, 1961); and second, his abandonment of meter, which began in 1965 and continued to his death in 1967. Both of those developments were startling, and both arose because the relationship between foreground and background in Coltrane’s music was an uncommonly uneasy one -- so much so that it seemed at times as though he wished to erase the line between foreground and background and fuse all elements into one. That’s certainly what happens on "Giant Steps": To negotiate at speed the harmonic obstacle course that Coltrane devised for himself is to find that many melodic and rhythmic choices have almost been predetermined -- which may be why, as Ekkehard Jost has pointed out, "some melodic patterns in the first chorus [of Coltrane’s "Giant Steps" solo] appear note for note later on." On "Chasin’ the Trane," the uneasy background/foreground turbulence yields a very different sounding yet finally similar result. On"Blue Train" (Blue Note, 1957), Coltrane had invented a corruscatingly brilliant, "foreground" solo against a spare blues backdrop; on "Chasin’ the Trane," against an even more stripped-down blues framework, he plays a long expressionistic solo of such narrow melodic scope that pitches seem to have become almost irrelevant -- the goal, in the face of Elvin Jones’ galvanic drums , again being to virtually merge with an extravagant background rather than to differentiate oneself from it. In 1961, Coltrane said, "I admit I don’t love the beat in the strict sense, but at this phase I feel I need the beat somewhere." By 1965, it had become clear, in the words of his biographer Lewis Porter, that Coltrane "no longer wanted to swing" but rather to play over "a general churning pulse of fast or slow." Here, too, the example of Charlie Parker may have been crucial. While Coltrane was regarded by his peers as perhaps the most forcefully swinging soloist of his time, he could not, within a metrical framework, approach Parker’s dauntingly transcendent rhythmic acuity.

[Larry Kart]

Oops, that's "The Avant-Garde 1949-1967."

[Lazaro Vega]

Thanks Larry -- I see what you were saying then. Hey, is the book out now?

Roscoe added those elements of rhthmic variety to the energy school. What is amazing is that he did it in the moment. There are still musicians who don't "get" what was going down in that period of music, but Roscoe was there (actually past it into his own band concept) by '66 or '67.

Over the 4th of July I was reading Frederick Douglass' speech about the 4th (http://afgen.com/douglas.html) -- in a sense the ideals of recognition he was enunciating came closer to becoming reality in the 1960's than at any other time in American history. That's like a giant social geyser erupting -- how many years of pressure finally finding release?

While the romantic side of the jazz fan plays into hearing the music from that era in the social context, it is also the dramatic moment that calls for something other than a madrigal to get across the joy/pain/shock/hope and dignity the moment called for. And Ornette made that possible, too, the freedom to express it all. Nothing before contained the fullness of those emotions in music, but by re-interpreting the tradition, the music gave voice to the time. Duke "sang" about it, but musicians of the 60's became it, it being the drama and excitement at the birth of a new emancipation -- the civil rights movement -- and the confusion of war, riots, assasinations and poverty.

So in some ways Coltrane was multi-faceted dramatically in his later period -- or at least able to capture the energy, ecstacy and simultaneous confusion of the time, a time that was not so much about reflection as it was going headlong into the future. By the mid-60's Sonny was sounding like that , too, don't you think?

What a world it was when Malcom X and Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were talking about real change. There's no contemporary equivilant. Today Martin would be arrested as a terrorist under the Patriot Act. No wonder music of that era sounds foriegn to so many folks -- it parallels ideas of social change that have just about disappeared or are under constant assault toward elimination.

Sorry to take this so generalist -- I mean, thanks for the specific musical examples.

Edited July 26, 2004 by Lazaro Vega

[Larry Kart]

Lazaro -- I have some further thoughts, I think, but won't be able to post until this afternoon or evening.

[JSngry]

Sonny & Trane are yin and yang, the complimentary opposites that make up the whole, although which is which I'll have to think about.

[JohnS]

Worktime was the beginning for me. It was the first Rollin's album I bought. "Show Business" still gives me much the same thrill as when I first heard it all those years ago.

[couw]

Sonny & Trane are yin and yang, the complimentary opposites that make up the whole, although which is which I'll have to think about.

dialectics says it doesn't matter

[Shawn]

Worktime is the album that really opened my ears and got me interested in Sonny in the first place. You just can't beat "There's No Business Like Show Business"...WOW! Anyway, I had heard Rollins previously..and even owned a couple discs and enjoyed them, but they never really "sunk in". But man, when Worktime hit the player I was on my way....

[MartyJazz]

Worktime was the beginning for me. It was the first Rollin's album I bought. "Show Business" still gives me much the same thrill as when I first heard it all those years ago.

And "John S" from THE BRIDGE is still one of my all time favorite cookers, the better because you don't expect how much it's going to swing when you first listen to the opening theme.

[Larry Kart]

Lazaro -- Book is due in November, so they tell me. I'll post the whys and wherefores when I'm certain. There's a lot of stuff to think about in your two grafs that begin "While the romantic side of the jazz fan..." You're a wise man. About "So in some ways Coltrane was multi-faceted dramatically in his later period -- or at least able to capture the energy, ecstacy and simultaneous confusion of the time, a time that was not so much about reflection as it was going headlong into the future. By the mid-60's Sonny was sounding like that , too, don't you think?" I'd say that however necessary it may be to go "headlong into the future," a lot of heads got lost or badly mangled in the process. As for Sonny sounding like that, too -- what I've always wondered is why his great band with Cherry, Grimes, and Higgins was such a shortlived thing for him stylisticall, even if those particular players couldn't have remanind together. It's like Sonny went out on the edge and thrived there -- and then in the aftermath he became (or even decided to become) historical in relation to himself. A lot of fine music was still to come from him, of course, but it was like the Sonnyness of Sonny was now more or less fixed; the adventures would only be within the boundaries of (though it seems absurd to call it this) his "act" -- little or no significant interaction with players of similar stature or with what was happening in the music around him.

[JSngry]

what I've always wondered is why his great band with Cherry, Grimes, and Higgins was such a shortlived thing for him stylisticall, even if those particular players couldn't have remanind together. It's like Sonny went out on the edge and thrived there -- and then in the aftermath he became (or even decided to become) historical in relation to himself.

Another way to look at this might be by asking when the constant quest for discovery gets in the way of putting what you've already discovered to good use for yourself.

We all, myself included, tend to look at Trane as a model for the ideal artistic curve - keep probing, keep challenging, keeep refusing to settle down, all that Romantic stuff. And that's good, sure, but it sets up the possibility that everybody gets to enjoy the artist's work but the artist, for whom "settling" might be nothing more than the equivalent of a cold beer or two in the shade after mowing the yard, metaphorically speaking, but for which the artist's audience/fans it is too often tantamount to "throwing in the towel" for good, as if the artist should not be allowed the privilage of "comfort".

It's not that simple, of course, and Sonny restlessness throughout the remainder of the 1960s suggests that whatever impression of "comfort" his music might have suggested was at least in part illusory. Still, when I hear Trane mention that he wonders what his music sounds like to somebody who had never heard it before, and that he himself would like to have the experience, I am hearing not just a restless explorer who was congenitally unable to sit still, I'm also hearing a man who might have benefitted (in the long term) from the occasional plateauing.

Of course, one could (and many have) argue that Sonny's plateauing has gone beyond that, but that is not what I am here to argue. I'm here merely to suggest that the notion held by some (certainly not you, though, Larry), that an artist's "highest" goal is to always push, push, PUSH, might want to ask themselves this - if the point of the bear going over the mountain was to see what he could see, who's to say what the proper course of action is after reaching the mountaintop? Seems to me that there's three choices - keep climbing upwards after the mountain ends, upwards into the ether, leaving the mountain behind; set up shop on the mountaintop and never come back down; or come back down the other side of the mountain to rejoin those of us who reside on the other side of the mountain, but with a perspective and knowledge forever changed from having made the climb.

It seems to me that Trane took the first option, and Sonny the third, after flirting several times, it seems, with the second. Far be it from me to say that either decision was improper. I'm just a fan of their lives (as it comes out through their music). They're the ones who actually have to live them.

Edited July 27, 2004 by JSngry

[blue lake]

Good stuff JS. Thanks Larry. Interesting point about "On the Outside."

Larry kart: "...little or no significant interaction with players of similar stature or with what was happening in the music around him."

But oh those exceptions: Chicago Jazz Festival with Marvin Smitty Smith. Think I've mentioned that before (and that you were out of town). Maybe fewer and further between, but when they went off, look out!

And the solo album! The solo album wasn't entirely successful, but it is fascinating. Reminds me of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the Romantic poet, casting about his room for something, anything, that will fire his imagination in "Frost at Midnight" http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/stc/Coleridg...t_Midnight.html , before lighting on a dying ember and developing a poem from there. Sonny sort of does it in public, casting about the rehearsal room of his mind, picking up "Stuffy" and riffing on it, meandering, finding something else and turning it around before wandering off again. "Just his 'magination runnin' away with him...."

Edited July 27, 2004 by blue lake

[Tony Pusey]

This thread reminds me why I visit so often, thoughtful reflection and nobody afraid to go out on a limb to share their take on this wonderful music of ours. Thanks one and all!