Consumer Guide Album

Sonny Rollins: Freedom Weaver: The 1959 European Tour Recordings [Resonance, 2024]
There are two jazz perennials at my house: pianist Thelonious Monk is my favorite musical artist except maybe the Beatles, while Carola is almost always glad to hear inexhaustably listenable trumpet titan Miles Davis. So when I compared their Consumer Guide entries to tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins's, I was surprised to find that Rollins scored more A plus albums than either of them: four to Davis's one (Jack Johnson, not 1959's infinitely listenable but pre-CG Kind of Blue, which certainly gets more plays), Monk's two (Ken Burns Jazz and Prestige's Thelonious Monk Trio but not my beloved Misterioso). For Rollins the scorecard begins with the live 1987 G-Man, moves on to 1996's Gary Giddins-informed best-of Silver City, Ken Burns Jazz again, and also includes Rollins's 2008 Road Shows Vol. 1. Yet somehow Rollins never displaced Monk in my personal jazz pantheon, leaving me wondering how and whether to address what is after all merely a three-disc live set documenting nine days in the early post-junkie phase of the 28-year-old tenor titan. But I found myself playing it and playing it again (and again)--it just sounded so good. Structurlly it's bare-bones, with no pianist adding his own harmonic notions, and all three drummers--Pete LaRoca, Joe Harris, and most impressively bebop pioneer Kenny Clarke--texturing and accenting in their own ways. But mostly its jazz's greatest tenor player launching a suzerainty that would last more than half a century. A