Road Shows, Vol. 2

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Product Description ------------------- The saxophone colossus delivers a stellar new album of live performances from 2010. Joining songs recorded in Japan with Sonny's working band are four recorded at his 80th-birthday show at the Beacon in NY: I Can't Get Started and Rain Check with Roy Hargrove; In a Sentimental Mood with Jim Hall, and the 20-minute Sonnymoon for Two , his first-ever public performance with Ornette Coleman (it's amazing)! From the Artist --------------- "I believe that jazz is the music which best expresses the stirrings of the human soul," says Rollins. "I feel tremendously privileged to have succeeded to some extent in a music that includes the likes of Louis Armstrong and s Waller--all of these guys who I thought were such tremendous people putting out all of this positive music," Rollins says. "It was all that I could ever dream--to be involved in this." P.when('A').execute(function(A) { A.on('a:expander:toggle_description:toggle:collapse', function(data) { window.scroll(0, data.expander.$expander[0].offsetTop-100); }); }); About the Artist ---------------- Sonny Rollins knows how to throw a party. His 80th-birthday celebration at New York's Beacon Theatre on September 10, 2010 was the jazz event of the year, and the release of Road Shows, vol. 2 allows everybody to share in the already-legendary proceedings. Sounding as robust and inventive as ever, the tenor saxophone titan joins forces with an unprecedented array of friends old and new, including Jim Hall, Roy Haynes, Christian McBride, Roy Hargrove, and, most unexpectedly, alto sax revolutionary Ornette Coleman. The festivities add another illustrious chapter to the career of jazz's most prodigious improviser. For Rollins, the palpable affection and respect of his peers was the evening's most profound gift. "I was extraordinarily happy that my colleagues agreed to come and join me for this birthday celebration," says Rollins, whose delight is evident as he energetically doubles as the concert's emcee. "It was really a great honor that all these guys came. I was quite touched that everybody seemed anxious to do it." On an evening marked by one musical high point after another, the encounter that set fans buzzing for months was the dramatic arrival of Ornette Coleman, who was also in the midst of celebrating his 80th year. While they had never before shared a stage together, Rollins notes that he and Coleman once practiced together on the beach in Malibu back in the mid-1950s when he came out to Los Angeles with the Max Roach-Clifford Brown Quintet. He didn't know whether or not Coleman was going to perform at the Beacon until the last minute, so there was no rehearsal before he introduced the harmolodic innovator in the middle of an already riveting performance of Rollins's blues "Sonnymoon for Two" with the ageless trap master Roy Haynes and bass virtuoso Christian McBride (reprising the pianoless trio format defined by Rollins more than five decades ago). At almost 22 minutes long, "Sonnymoon" is the album's centerpiece, less a cutting contest than an inspired parallel conversation between jazz's most surgically acute dissectors of time. It was a piece Rollins selected with Coleman in mind, "something that would be open enough to lead to free conversation, and could go any place, rather than something like `I'm in the Mood for Love,' with much more set harmonic patterns," Rollins says. "The blues would be wide enough for Ornette to do whatever he wanted. It was all spontaneous. It was exciting to play with him again so many years later, a nice circular situation." Coleman's indomitable presence on the stage was only one of the evening's completed circles. McBride and Haynes performed with Rollins at the 2007 Carnegie Hall concert marking his golden anniversary as a bandleader, an epochal event documented on the concluding track of Road Shows, vol. 1. Guitarist Jim Hall's participation at the Beacon concert harks back to his crucial role on The Bridge, the 1962 album that announced Rollins's thrilling return to the scene after his first famous hiatus. They've been close ever since, and Rollins was so intent on featuring him on Road Shows that he includes Hall's sublime rendition of "In a Sentimental Mood," a piece on which Rollins sits out. "I love playing with Jim and I really wanted to get him in there," says Rollins, who notes that a technical glitch on their version of "If Ever I Would Leave You" prevented him from including the performance on the album. "We go back a long way, and I have an affinity for his interpretations. It's always exhilarating playing with Jim." A more recent Rollins associate, trumpeter Roy Hargrove, joins the saxophonist for riveting performances of Billy Strayhorn's classic "Rain Check" and the beloved standard "I Can't Get Started." They're accompanied by Rollins's working band featuring guitar star Russell Malone, rising young drummer Kobie Watkins, versatile percussionist Sammy Figueroa, and Bob Cranshaw, the redoubtable bassist who's been a dependably swinging Rollins mainstay since the early 1960s. While Rollins first recorded "Rain Check" in 1957, he first heard the original Duke Ellington shortly after it was recorded in the early 1940s. "It's a very important song in jazz history, something that I thought Roy could display his wares on," Rollins says. "We didn't have a lot of time to rehearse, and I thought `Rain Check' was perfect for letting these guys show who they are." Rollins spotted Hargrove as an immensely gifted young player nearly two decades ago, and they bonded on a shared love of the American Songbook. It's an ongoing passion reflected by their mutual caress of Vernon Duke's soaring melodic line on "I Can't Get Started." "When I first heard Roy and recorded with him back in 1990s I was amazed at his knowledge of jazz repertoire," Rollins says. "I had some older fellows in the band that didn't know some of the standards that Roy and I chose. It's one thing that makes him so special. When he's playing `I Can't Get Started,' you're hearing him today and a history of the music." In keeping with the road rubric, the album opens and closes with tracks recorded in Japan about a month after the Beacon concert. A nearly 15-minute up-tempo romp through Irving Berlin's "They Say It's Wonderful" serves as a rousing overture for the birthday tracks, and offers yet another example of his capacious gift for turning familiar standards into vehicles for enthralling improvisation. "That's a great song to improvise on," Rollins says. "Johnny Hartman and John Coltrane played it as a ballad, but it's a great up-tempo song. The band really had a good groove on that one. That's a tight rhythm section! I think finding drummers is part of my legacy. It's very important for the drummer I play with to have a certain feel, and Kobie has a beat I feel I can improvise on. I accumulated some good karma by getting guys like Bob, Kobie, Sammy, and Russell Malone, who loves ballads and knows a lot of jazz standards." The album closes with a brief run through Rollins's famous calypso "St. Thomas," a piece he uses as a sign-off, perhaps following the old show business maxim to always leave the audience wanting more. With the 2005 creation of his own label, Doxy, Rollins seems prepared to provide his legions of fans with a steady stream of new music. Doxy's first CD release, the 2006 studio Sonny, Please, earned a Grammy nomination for Rollins. In 2008, Doxy issued In Vienne, a DVD of a 2006 European festival performance, and Road Shows, vol. 1, a treasure trove of live tracks culled from an international archive compiled by Carl Smith and Rollins's own personal soundboard tapes dating back to 1980. By that time he had long established himself as one of the music's most influential and charismatic performers, a giant who willingly wears the title of jazz's greatest living improviser. 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, s 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 , 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 s with the Milestone Jazzstars (Ron Carter, McCoy Tyner); in the studio and on the concert stage (Montreux, San Francisco, New York, Boston). Sonny was also the subject of a mid-'80s documentary by Robert Mugge entitled Saxophone Colossus; part of its soundtrack is available as G-Man. He won his first performance Grammy for This Is What I Do (2000), and his second for 2004'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 Arts and Sciences in 2004. In June 2006 Rollins was inducted into the Academy of Achievement at the International Achievement Summit in Los Angeles, and in May 2007 was a recipient of the Polar Music Prize, presented in Stockholm. In November 2009 he became the third American (after Frank Sinatra and Jessye Norman to be awarded the Austrian Cross for Science and Art, First Class; and in August 2010 he was named the Edward MacDowell Medalist, the first jazz composer to be so honored. More recently, Rollins was presented with the National Medal of Arts at a White House ceremony, and the Jazz Journalists Association named him 2011 Musician of the Year and Tenor Saxophonist of the Year. See more ( javascript:void(0) )