Sonny In Paris

[Mark Stryker]

Anybody familiar with this particular Sonny Rollins Trio concert (Paris, 1965 or 66) on Jazz Way? I'm interested if the pitch is correct; I heard some excerpts that sounded sharp but wasn't in a position to actually check. Here are the details from the extensive Rollins discography on the web:

Sonny Rollins (ts) Gilbert Rovere (b) Art Taylor (d)

live in Paris, France, 1965 or 1966?

I Can't Get Started Jazzway (It) LLM 1501

Three Little Words -

St. Thomas -

There Will Never Be Another You -

When I Grow Too Old To Dream -

Mademoiselle De Paris -

* Sonny Rollins In Paris (Jazzway (It) LLM 1501)

Edited April 10, 2010 by Mark Stryker

[brownie]

I have that Italian bootleg Jazzway. Not an expert on exact pitch but the music sounds good to my ears.

This was a concert held at the Salle de la Mutualité in Paris on November 4, 1965. A double-header with the Ornette Coleman trio!

Happy to report I attended the concert. Unhappy to report that there are practically no chance of a similar concert being held nowadays!

Beside who plays 'Mademoiselle de Paris' these days

[John L]

Gambit just released most of this concert on a two disc set along with Copenhagen 1968. I haven't heard it, however.

[JSngry]

Pitch is good. "Can't..." and all that is in C, "There Will Never..." in Eb. So believe your ears on this one.

What's a trip is the Sonny/Max Graz trio thing...the pitch there is WAAAAAY hig...Sonny sounds like an alto, almost.

[Mark Stryker]

Thanks for the input folks. Re: the Sonny/Max tape. I actually downloaded that from Sonny's website and was shocked when I heard how high it was; I was able to locate another version that was much more accurate (Sonny again sounded like he was playing tenor) and alerted Sonny's web guy, Bret Primack, about the pitch issue. To my knowledge, Bret was able to replace the version on his legitimate site with the pitch-corrected version. Don't know if he's still offering it, but it was there for a while. (I know it was wrong to download from a bootlegger, but I thought in this case, since I had already bought the music legitimately through Sonny's site and was able to point Bret to a better version, I was, in the end, helping the good guys more than the bad guys.)

Edited April 10, 2010 by Mark Stryker

[Mark Stryker]

Special shout-out to Brownie -- the number of remarkable performances you seem to have heard on the other side of the pond is truly staggering ...