I'm trying to gather some reliable discography information about this album, an album I'd throughly recommend. All the sites I've found so far indicate that it's a collection of previously unreleased private recordings from 1980 to 2007, made in Japan, Sweden, Poland, Canada, France and the US.but listening to it makes me wonder who's trying to pull who's leg.
1) It all sounds like the same vintage of Rollins - Newk, of all players, has ALWAYS developed style-wise.
2) It sounds very much like exactly the same location acoustics, and about the same size audience.
3) The tracks themselves belie the published information.
Track 1 (Best Wishes - "1986-05-25, Tokyo") runs smoothly, with identical audience noise, into
Track 2 (More Than You Know - "2006-05-15, Toulouse") same thing, into
Track 3 (Blossom - "1980-10-25 - Umeå"), at the end, the audience starts clapping rhythmically, the rhythm
continuing smoothly into
Track 4 (Easy Living - "1980-10-23 Warsaw"), at the end of which Rollins announces "Tenor Madness", directly
into
Track 5 (Tenor Madness - "2000-06-08 - Tama City"). Now, at the close, Rollins thanks the audience, "Deeply"
for coming to hear him in Victoria, "... it's our first time in Victoria" and starts into
Track 6 (Nice Lady - "2007-06-24 - Victoria"), finally introducing "... from South Pacific, called Some Enchanted
Evening", and so to
Track 7 (Some Enchanted Evening - "2007-09-18 New York").
There are two possibilities I can see: one, that I have some kind of bootleg album, but all the track times agree;
two, somebody's lying. I cannot imagine a record producer inserting canned applause, MATCHING applause at that, into a compilation of private recordings from over a period of seventeen years.
I remember well my excitement when I first acquired "The Bridge" from 1962. 45 years later he sounds even better!