Sonny R, Rd Shows 4

[danasgoodstuff]

https://www.google.com/search?q=sonny+rollins+holding+the+stage&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8#

 

feel free to relocate if there's another thread, complete list, has to be opened as a doc, at least on my computer

[Hardbopjazz]

     

 

 

 

 

S O N N Y    R O L L I N S

 

Biography

 

 

Tenor sax titan Sonny Rollins is an unsurpassed master of time who can subdivide a beat into almost subatomic intervals while maintaining hurtling momentum. His latest foray into his vast archives, Holding the Stage: Road Shows, vol. 4, captures a different facet of the saxophonist’s temporal command. Despite encompassing some 33 years, with performances cherry picked from 1979 to 2012, the album coheres with all of the compelling logic and narrative force of an extended Sonny solo. Slated for release on his Doxy Records label as part of a distribution agreement with Sony Music Masterworks and its jazz imprint OKeh Records, the album is truly a treasure chest that includes tunes Rollins has never before recorded and musical relationships previously undocumented.

 

Rollins says that he didn’t set out to create an album that flows like a concert, complete with obscure ballad and calypsonian closer. “It just turned out that way,” he says, noting that engineer and co-producer Richard Corsello deserves credit for matching the sound quality of tracks drawn from different venues and eras. “We go back and forth how to sequence it and the final decision is mine. You know my reputation as being very self-critical, so the hardest part is listening to all of this stuff. This album consists of various periods of my career, with something for everybody. It’s who I am, and the music represents just about every aspect of what I do.”

 

The album opens Duke Ellington’s immortal “In a Sentimental Mood,” a soaring rendition that centers on Rollins’s magisterial unaccompanied statement of the melody. In the first of several tunes that offer a hat tip to a valued colleague, he delivers the premiere of a recent (circa 2011) composition “Professor Paul.” A funky tribute to saxophonist/arranger Paul Jeffrey (who died last year at the age of 81), the performance includes some pleasingly tart guitar work by Peter Bernstein.

 

Rollins didn’t compose the tune to evoke a particular aspect of Jeffrey’s musical personality. Rather, after writing the sinewy groove he decided to dedicate the piece to “a good friend who also a confidant to Charlie Mingus and Monk, somebody in the intelligentsia who was engaged in the inner workings of some of the minds who created this music of ours,” Rollins says. “I’ve known Paul since the 1950s. He helped me in my quest in many ways, and I figured it would be good to recognize him.”

 

He doesn’t reserve his tributes to players who flew under the radar. A sleek and soulful blues, “H.S.” summons the spirit of Horace Silver, with whom Rollins played in the band of Miles Davis in the early 1950s. Introduced on his 1995 Milestone album Sonny Rollins + 3 (and occasionally used as interstitial music on the public radio show Fresh Air), the tune “has sort of an elemental tone and I thought a little bit of Horace’s music. We both broke through in the 1950s and I always liked Horace. As I look back, I’ve done a lot of homages to different musicians I’ve worked with. I like to celebrate some of these people.”

 

Like several tunes on Holding the Stage “H.S.” remained in Rollins’s repertoire for many years through various personnel changes. One of the album’s most exquisite numbers is an obscure ballad that Rollins has never performed in public. Written by little-known composer Stuart Louchheim, “Mixed Emotions” was a minor hit for Rosemary Clooney in 1951, though Rollins came to the song via Dinah Washington’s version. His duo rendition with veteran New York guitarist Saul Rubin is a brief snippet captured in Prague.

 

“Saul is a very fine musician and if we were still working together I’m sure I would do the whole song,” Rollins says. “I always loved the song and I put that in the repertoire but we never ended up performing it.”

 

The album’s oldest track is another revelation. Rollins wrote “Disco Monk” during the height of the dance music’s popularity in 1979. A couple of months after he recorded it on the album Don’t Ask, he toured with a stripped-down version of the same ensemble. The title might seem dated, but with its compelling melody the tune is far more Thelonious Sphere Monk than Saturday Night Fever. Rather than trying to ride the disco bandwagon, Rollins conceived the tune “as an antidote to all of the disco that was so omnipresent then. We only played that for a while. Some material I played depended upon the musicians who were working with me. I don’t think I ever played ‘Disco Monk’ with another group.”

 

From the serpentine fun of “Disco Monk,” the album takes a solemn turn with the gorgeous Johnny Green/Edgar Heyman ballad “You’re Mine You,” which features a particularly brilliant solo by pianist Stephen Scott. Written by the same composer/lyricist team responsible for “Body and Soul,” the song is drawn from the storied Berklee Performance Center concert Rollins gave in the bleak, disorienting days following the 9/11 attacks. Though he’s never recorded it before, “it’s one of those songs that sticks in my mind. That’s how it is with music. It gets in your mind like an infection and I can’t get rid of it. I played it with some other lineups, but it didn’t stay around forever.”

 

The album closes with a searing medley from the Berklee concert of September 15, 2001. Rollins released most of the evening on his last Milestone album, the Grammy Award-winning Without a Song: The 9/11 Concert, but space limitations prevented him from including the entire performance. The old Bing Crosby vehicle “Sweet Leilani,” which Rollins recorded the year before on This Is What I Do, sheds its lush Hawaiian air as he tears through the melody in surging 6/8 time. With its dizzying succession of quotes his unaccompanied solo rewards repeated listening, while the concluding “Don’t Stop the Carnival” has never sounded quite so dangerously ecstatic.

 

From beginning to end, Holding the Stage makes another incontrovertible case for the value of an artist seizing control of his own output. It’s been a decade now since Rollins launched Doxy, and the label has provided the jazz world with a sure and steady flow of Rollins at his best, which is to say music at its most profound and powerful. Doxy’s first CD release, the 2006 studio recording Sonny, Please, earned a Grammy nomination. In 2008, Doxy issued In Vienne, a DVD of a dazzling 2006 European festival performance, and Road Shows, vol. 1, the first omnibus of live tracks culled from an international archive compiled by Carl Smith and Rollins’s own personal soundboard tapes dating back to 1980.

 

With its glittering cast of guests, including Ornette Coleman, Jim Hall, Roy Hargrove, and Roy Haynes, Road Shows, vol. 2 documented Rollins’s bracing 80th-birthday celebration at the Beacon Theater in 2010. And 2014’s Road Shows, vol. 3 hinged on an epic 23-minute excavation of Jerome Kern’s “Why Was I Born?” a stunning performance that answered the titular question in no uncertain terms. Sonny Rollins has made musical exploration his life’s work.

 

Walter Theodore Rollins was born in Harlem, New York on September 7, 1930, of parents native to the Virgin Islands. His older brother Valdemar and sister Gloria were also musically inclined but only Sonny veered away from classical music after his uncle, a professional saxophonist, introduced him to jazz and blues.

 

He gravitated to the tenor saxophone in high school, inspired in particular by Coleman Hawkins. By the time he was out of school, Rollins was already working with cutting edge modernists such as Bud Powell, Fats Navarro, and Roy Haynes. In 1951 he debuted as a leader on Prestige; his affiliation with that label also produced classics such as Saxophone Colossus, Worktime, and Tenor Madness (with John Coltrane).

 

In early 1956, until he went out on his own permanently as a leader in the summer of 1957, Rollins played in the Max Roach–Clifford Brown Quintet, one of the most definitive (and tragically short-lived) hard-bop ensembles of its day. Often with his own pianoless trio, Rollins then entered a tremendously fertile period during which he recorded major works such as A Night at the Village Vanguard, Way Out West, and Freedom Suite.

 

In 1959, Rollins took the first of his legendary sabbaticals. Living on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, he was often spotted on the nearby Williamsburg Bridge, deep in a rigorous practice regimen. “I wanted to work on my horn, I wanted to study more harmony,” he told Stanley Crouch in The New Yorker. When Rollins returned to performing in 1961, he recorded The Bridge with Jim Hall and Bob Cranshaw, led a quartet with trumpeter Don Cherry and drummer Billy Higgins, and recorded with his idol Coleman Hawkins. He also received a Grammy nomination for his score for the popular film Alfie.

 

At decade’s end he undertook one final hiatus, studying Zen Buddhism in Japan and yoga in India. While living in an ashram, he considered leaving music permanently in order to pursue spiritual studies, but a teacher persuaded him that music was his spiritual path, and an uplifting force for good. In 1972, with the encouragement and support of his wife Lucille, who had become his business manager, Rollins returned to performing and recording, signing with Milestone and releasing Next Album. (Working at first with Orrin Keepnews, Sonny was by the early ’80s producing his own Milestone sessions with Lucille.)

 

His lengthy association with the Berkeley-based label produced two dozen albums in various settings—from his working groups to all-star ensembles (Tommy Flanagan, Jack DeJohnette, Stanley Clarke, Tony Williams, George Duke); from a solo recital to tour recordings with the Milestone Jazzstars (Ron Carter, McCoy Tyner); in the studio and on the concert stages (Montreux, San Francisco, New York, Boston). He was also the subject of a mid-’80s documentary by Robert Mugge entitled Saxophone Colossus. Part of its soundtrack is available as G-Man.

 

Rollins won his first performance Grammy for This Is What I Do (2000), and his second for 2005’s Without a Song (The 9/11 Concert), in the Best Jazz Instrumental Solo category (for “Why Was I Born”). Sonny, Please was nominated for a best jazz album Grammy in 2006. In addition, Sonny received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences in 2004. In June 2006 Rollins was inducted into the Academy of Achievement at the International Achievement Summit in Los Angeles. In May 2007 was a recipient of the Polar Music Prize, presented in Stockholm, and in 2009 he became the third American (after Frank Sinatra and Jessye Norman) to be awarded the Austrian Cross for Science and Art, First Class. Which isn’t to say that Rollins isn’t equally honored at home. In 2011 President Barack Obama presented him with the Medal of Arts at the White House, and the following year Rollins was named a Kennedy Center Honoree.

 

Rollins isn’t ready to rest on his laurels. “I want to return to live studio recording,” he says. “I had a little health issue, and that might be alleviated soon. I’d like to do some Sonny Rollins à la 2016 rather than doing these archival things.”

 

Every jazz fan can say “Amen!” to that, while savoring another finely wrought program handpicked by the maestro’s most exacting critic.  •

 

 

 

Sonny Rollins: Holding the Stage: Road Shows, vol. 4

(Doxy Records/OKeh Records)

Street Date: April 8, 2016

 

 

Web Site: www.sonnyrollins.com

Facebook: www.facebook.com/officialsonnyrollins

Twitter: www.twitter.com/sonnyrollins

 

 

Photos available at www.sonnyrollins.com/press

 

 

 

 

Media Contacts:

 

For Sonny Rollins:

Terri Hinte, hudba@sbcglobal.net, 510-234-8781

 

For Sony Music Masterworks/OKeh:

Angela Barkan, angela.barkan@sonymusic.com, 212-833-8575

Larissa Slezak, larissa.slezak@sonymusic.com, 212-833-6075

 

 

[jcam_44]

I have the other three so there probably is a good chance I'll get this, but even with the 3rd one I wasn't excited about it. This one doesn't have me excited in a way other releases do.

[Hardbopjazz]

[Eric]

That is coool

[Hardbopjazz]

Take a listen to Vol 4. I am counting the days till it is released.

 

http://doxyrecords.com/

 

 

http://doxyrecords.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Sonny-Rollins-Holding-the-Stage_-Road-Shows-vol.-4-HD.mp4?_=1

 

[JSngry]

I've pre-ordered, and those excerpts certainly excite, but whoever wrote that narration is trying way to hard to gild the lily, is that the expression?

[erwbol]

"Some material I played depended upon the musicians who were working with me. I don’t think I ever played ‘Disco Monk’ with another group."

Probably for the best.

[Gheorghe]

I saw him live for the first time in the beginning of july 1979, that was just a few weeks after the record date "Don´t Ask" with the controversial "Disco Monk".

I think, the album wasn´t out yet, Rollins in any case did "Isn´t she lovely" and of course "Don´t stop the Carnaval" from other recent albums. Though I don´t remember all the other tunes he didn, I think he didn´t play "disco Monk" since I might have noticed that groove even if I wouldn´t have known the tune.

By the way, Larry Corryell was also on schedule at that festival, but they didn´t play together......

I might say Sonny Rollins was the main reason why I made that long trip with a really old little car on terrible streets , always had in my mind "man, you goin´ to see Sonny Rollins, incredible, THE Sonny Rollins......, oh my God, great memories......

[Gheorghe]

I saw him live for the first time in the beginning of july 1979, that was just a few weeks after the record date "Don´t Ask" with the controversial "Disco Monk".

I think, the album wasn´t out yet, Rollins in any case did "Isn´t she lovely" and of course "Don´t stop the Carnaval" from other recent albums. Though I don´t remember all the other tunes he didn, I think he didn´t play "disco Monk" since I might have noticed that groove even if I wouldn´t have known the tune.

By the way, Larry Corryell was also on schedule at that festival, but they didn´t play together......

I might say Sonny Rollins was the main reason why I made that long trip with a really old little car on terrible streets , always had in my mind "man, you goin´ to see Sonny Rollins, incredible, THE Sonny Rollins......, oh my God, great memories......

[GA Russell]

Sonny Rollins's

"Holding the Stage: Road Shows, vol. 4"

To Be Released

By the Saxophonist's Doxy Records

With Distribution by

Sony Music Masterworks/OKeh

 

Available Digitally April 8 & On CD April 15

 

CD Contains 7 Tracks

Recorded Between 1979 & 2012

Plus a Previously Unreleased 23-Minute Medley

From the Boston 9/11 Concert

 

 

 

March 15, 2016

 

 

For his new album Holding the Stage: Road Shows, vol. 4, the great tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins once again taps into his vast archives of his own concert recordings to compile superior performances for release in the acclaimed Road Shows series. The album encompasses some 33 years (1979-2012) yet coheres with all of the compelling logic and narrative force of an extended Sonny solo.

 

Holding the Stage, to be released by Doxy Records digitally April 8 and on CD April 15, the second album in a distribution agreement with Sony Music Masterworks and its jazz imprint OKeh, is truly a treasure chest that includes tunes Rollins has never before recorded and musical relationships previously undocumented. "This album consists of various periods of my career, with something for everybody," says Rollins. "It's who I am, and the music represents just about every aspect of what I do."

 

Three Rollins originals pay tribute to departed friends and colleagues. The soulful blues "H.S.," for Horace Silver, has been a concert staple since its appearance on Sonny's 1995 Milestone album Sonny Rollins +3. Saxophonist/arranger Paul Jeffrey, who died last year at 81, is remembered in the funky "Professor Paul," a new composition making its recorded debut here. Of "Disco Monk," from 1979's Don't Ask (Milestone) and rarely performed since, Rollins told CD annotator Ted Panken: "It was disco-disco-disco then, everywhere you went, but I heard something juxtaposed with [Thelonious] Monk within this disco craze, and I wanted to meld them in a way that both styles would be themselves and yet be one."

 

Another highlight is a previously unreleased 23-minute medley (and concert closer) from his September 15, 2001 Boston performance, most of which had been immortalized in Rollins's final Milestone album, the Grammy Award-winning Without a Song: The 9/11 Concert. "Sweet Leilani," introduced on his This Is What I Do album of the year before, morphs into a richly evocative solo cadenza and an epically ecstatic "Don't Stop the Carnival."

 

In the Harlem of his youth, Rollins told Panken, "music was happening on every street corner. So the idea of 'keep the music going' is in that song. Don't stop the carnival. In the case of 9/11, that was especially prophetic."

 

Since launching his Doxy Records imprint in 2006 with the Grammy-nominated studio album Sonny, Please, Sonny Rollins has been turning to his concert recording archive dating back nearly 40 years for release on the label. The selections in Volume 1 (2008) spanned nearly three decades and included a trio track from the saxophonist's 50th-anniversary Carnegie Hall concert, while Volume 2 (2011) focused primarily on his historic 80th-birthday concert at New York's Beacon Theatre. Volume 3 (2014) marked the first recording of "Patanjali" and hinged on a stunning 23-minute excavation of Jerome Kern's "Why Was I Born?"

 

Holding the Stage: Road Shows, vol. 4 was produced by Rollins and his longtime engineer, Richard Corsello. Personnel includes trombonist Clifton Anderson; pianists Stephen Scott and Mark Soskin; guitarists Bobby Broom, Peter Bernstein, and Saul Rubin; bassists Bob Cranshaw and Jerome Harris; drummers Kobie Watkins, Perry Wilson, Victor Lewis, Jerome Jennings, Al Foster, and Harold Summey Jr.; and percussionists Kimati Dinizulu, Sammy Figueroa, and Victor See Yuen. 

 

 

Sony Music Masterworks comprises Masterworks, Sony Classical, OKeh, Portrait, Masterworks Broadway, and Flying Buddha imprints. For email updates and information, please visit SonyMasterworks.com.

 

 

Photography: John Abbott 

 

 

 

 

Album Purchase Links

iTunes http://smarturl.it/sr-road-vol4 

Amazon http://smarturl.it/sr-road-vol4-cd

[GA Russell]

I see that Amazon's pre-order price is only $10.82.  I wonder what the story is behind the decision to price it so low.

http://www.amazon.com/Holding-Stage-Road-Shows-Vol/dp/B01AVPGJYY/

[jcam_44]

If I recall, I picked up most of these for similar prices.

[bluesoul]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/music/artists/jazz-great-sonny-rollins-still-not-finished-at-85/

[JSngry]

Just got my copy in today's mail, already got it playing...I love Sonny Rollins. I get all the criticisms/reservations/caveats/etc., but do you understand me when I say that I love Sonny Rollins? Unconditionally. Anybody who puts the air through the horn that way and gets it out of the horn that way can have their way with my musical intimacies. It's one of those things where even when things don't go right at any given moment, you just hang on and keep going because that's just the way this shit goes, don't worry, just keep going, Remain Calm and Sonny Rollins.

Plus, this one, so far, is a bit more consistently spunkier than the previous volumes.

[JSngry]

So much music...

[JSngry]

I think this is one of the better Sonny Rollins records, period.

[GA Russell]

I'm enjoying it too.

[Eric]

On 4/14/2016 at 3:57 PM, JSngry said:

It's one of those things where even when things don't go right at any given moment, you just hang on and keep going because that's just the way this shit goes, don't worry, just keep going, Remain Calm and Sonny Rollins.

[JSngry]

"Keep Hold Of Yourself" is one of the great Rollins cuts ever, period.

Don't sleep on this record. It's more than usual, not just for Sonny Rollins Lovers.

[Hardbopjazz]

What an amazing collection of music. Man, Sonny is so good even into his 70s when most of this music was created.

[JSngry]

This is one of records that should make all kinds of "Best Of The Year" lists.

Again - this is one of the better Sonny Rollins records, period. I got the new Henry Threadgill in Wednesday, and have not been able to get to it because this freakin' thing is still in the player...what did Miles tell Trane, just take it out of your mouth, yeah, just take it out of the player. But...not happening yet, go figure that.

I mean, jesus, the "Disco Monk" on here...the record is on thing, but live, here, it's just a monster, a monster of sound and playing and flow and holy shit, Sonny Rollins playing Disco Fucking Monk like it was the greatest thing ever, and it may not be, no, definitely not the greatest thing ever, not even in the same gravitational field as the greatest thing ever, but the place that was created for and occupied by it for this brief moment, yeah, that is.

Sonny Rollins, y'all, one of my few living heroes, still, and still, and whether or not he is my hero has nothing to do with the greatness on display here. Here he is, y'all, if this ain't it, then there is no it, and good luck navigating that.

 

[duaneiac]

I don't know if it is a topic worthy of its own thread, but I got to wondering what has become of Bob Cranshaw since Sonny Rollins stopped performing?  Has he recorded any albums with any one else the past few years?  Has he become a regular member of any one else's group?  Is he quietly enjoying his own retirement?

[JSngry]

Geez, I still got this new Threadgill thing sitting here waiting to be played, but every time I walk over to the changer it's like, okay one more time for Sonny, and one more time turns into the whole dawn day.

Again - one of the better Sonny Rollins records, period. Ever.

[CJ Shearn]

On 4/26/2016 at 2:02 AM, duaneiac said:

I don't know if it is a topic worthy of its own thread, but I got to wondering what has become of Bob Cranshaw since Sonny Rollins stopped performing?  Has he recorded any albums with any one else the past few years?  Has he become a regular member of any one else's group?  Is he quietly enjoying his own retirement?

He just appeared on acoustic with George Coleman on his new one, would like to check it out.  And that has me excited, Jim!