Billboard : 11/23/1959
Four stars

This album captures Sonny Rollins at his most impressive, in fact it is one of his best performances in a long time. It was cut in October of 1958 on the West Coast with many top West Coast musicians including Hampton Hawes, Barney Kessel, Leroy Vinnegar, and Shelly Manne. The tunes are all standards, with such unusual items as Rock-A-Bye Your Baby With a Dixie Melody and In the Chapel in the Moonlight as well as How High the Moon and I’ve Found a New Baby. But the most important item is Rollins’ tenor, and he makes good use of it here.

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Cashbox : 07/25/1959
Jazz Pick of the Week

Acknowledged as the most important tenor sax man today, Rollins joins forces with other formidable jazz giants to offer his amazingly inventive improvisations of eight sturdy pop tunes. Selections include I’ve Told Ev’ry Little Star, The Song Is You, Alone Together and How High the Moon. Jazz at its best; important issue.

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American Record Guide
Joe Goldberg : October, 1959

West Coast musicians, with their lighter approach, seem to bring out the whimsical side of Sonny Rollins. His last Contemporary record, Way Out West, was a masterpiece of often-humorous jazz, and on his return, the label has trotted out an all-star rhythm section – Hampton Hawes, Barney Kessel, Leroy Vinnegar, Shelly Manne, and, on one track, Victor Feldman – in an attempt to make it happen again. Rollins responds with some of his best work in that vein: a lazy, impudent swing, irreverent reshaping of melodic lines, seemingly casual but actually extremely well-organized solos, constant inventiveness, an unusual amount of inflected notes, and the ever-present suggestion of dance-music. Often, on a Rollins album, the least-likely piece is transformed by Sonny into an instantly affecting high point. Here, it happens again, most improbably, with Rockabye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody. Highly recommended, and superior to many recent Rollins releases.

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Kansas City Star
J.W.S. : 07/19/1959

Sonny Rollins of the humorous tenor sax is one of the biggest men in late, late, modern jazz. If you haven’t heard him you have your chance with Sonny Rollins and the Contemporary Leaders. The fine group consists of Shelly Manne, Barney Kessel, Hampton Hawes, Leroy Vinnegar and Victor Feldman. To me, Rollins is a mystery. At times, his efforts are inspired and beautiful. Then, the aforementioned “humor” is displayed. Can great, stirring jazz really be funny? Usually humorous jazz is the squawk of a horn, a grotesque parody of another style of something so incongruous as to be painful. Rollins can rise to heights and often does on this record. but for me the “Yuk-Yuk” spots are sour. Rollins is probably laughing at the deep jazz thinkers who analyze his quaint beeps.

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Minneapolis Star Tribune
Charles Hanna : 08/02/1959

Sonny Rollins‘ most recent Contemporary LP is at once his most arresting and exasperating recording effort to date.

He soars in the splendor of beautiful solos and falls in grotesque efforts to be funny. He blats, bleats and honks one moment, then purls phrases of true genius.

There are moments in Sonny Rollins & The Contemporary Leaders that will make the most avowed Rollins fans squeamish.

Dick Hadlock in The Jazz Review calls Rollins “the Genghis Khan of the tenor saxophone.” That’s an identification that can hardly be improved on. His music is muscular and energetic and insistent.

His so-called humor is evident in the seventh and eighth bars of I’ve Told Every Little Star as a series of four ripping notes that hang far out of context.

He is magnificent in a warm up session of How High the Moon. The tape was taken while he, Barney Kessel, guitar, and bassist Leroy Vinnegar wait for drummer Shelly Manne and Hampton Hawes, piano, to arrive at the studio.

The trio noodles this traditional piece with sustained imagination that leaves one gasping for more. Rollins blows a moody first chorus with emotion and restraint. He then fills in behind Kessel and Vinnegar with splashes of sound and twisting phrases that sound out like blotches of sunlight in the shadows.

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Pittsburgh Courier
Harold L. Keith : 08/01/1959

Sonny Rollins has gotten together with the bellwethers of the Contemporary label, namely, Hamp Hawes, Barney Kessel, Leroy Vinnegar and Shelly Manne, with Vic Feldman contributing some nice vibraharp on You. Sonny plays a mirthful, clowning horn on this with jollies very evident on How High the Moon and I’ve Found a New Baby. All in all, Sonny is not serious at all here, and it shows in his playing, but it must be emphasized that a serious Sonny and a non-serious Sonny are both the greatest.

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Roanoke Times
Arthur Hill : 08/16/1959

Sonny Rollins is one of the brightest and most controversial stars of contemporary jazz music.

His simple, curiously flat-like tone on the tenor saxophone has been both highly praised and condemned by critics, musicians and listeners, which would seem to indicate a wide influence on jazz by Rollins and his horn.

One of the best recordings made by Rollins has just been released by Contemporary, Sonny Rollins and the Contemporary Leaders. Nothing about the album suggests any spectacular fireworks. Just a set of eight standards from Tin Pan Alley’s productive years before the brain-washing effect of rock and roll set in.

But Rollins is playing with a stimulating organization composed of Barney Kessel, guitar; Hampton Hawes, piano; Leroy Vinnegar, bass; and Shelly Manne, drums. Victor Feldman, vibraharp, is heard on one selection.

The outstanding number seems the most routine of the eight. Two tunes that are almost sure to be requested of any jazz group are Lullaby of Birdland and How High the Moon. The latter is given the most exciting interpretation by Rollins, Kessel and Vinnegar that I have heard since the Jazz at the Philharmonic version by Les Paul.

Rollins opens with a driving solo very much like Charlie Parker but by the time he and Kessel are through eight minutes later, the result is a firm individualistic structure tied to the foundation of Vinnegar’s bass work.

Hawes, a vastly-underrated pianist, has an impressive solo on The Song is You done at a very fast tempo that has Rollins playing some of the notes and implying others. Other selections that stand out on the album are Alone Together and Rock-a-bye Your Baby With a Dixie Melody.

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San Francisco Examiner
C.H. Garrigues : 07/26/1959

It has long been a weakness of Sonny Rollins (though his most ardent admirers are unwilling to admit it) that he has chosen to work, wherever possible, as the leader of a trio – or at most a quartet – in order to free himself from what he may consider the inadequacies of ordinary musicians.

There is much to say for his point of view. Rollins’ mastery of his horn is so complete, his improvisations so filled with musical surprise (sometimes, in fact, so completely explosive) that one can scarcely blame him for his confessed unwillingness to be tied to the limits of five or six who, however competent, are no more than competent.

Nevertheless, Rollins’ work (I have here insisted) has suffered. Jazz is a cooperative art; men play with – or sometimes against – one another and no degree of technique (not even that of Bird himself) is sufficient for its own self-justification. Even Rollins must work within the context of a group if he is to be more than a virtuoso – no matter how much it may hurt his virituose spirit.

Considerable support for this bit of dogma on my part is given by Rollins’ newest album, which shows him in the company of some of the West’s most authoritative jazz men – and shows him at very nearly the best I have heard him on record since he left Max Roach. On the date with him are Hamp Hawes, Barney Kessel, Leroy Vinnegar and Shelly Manne (and, on one, Vic Feldman); it would certainly have been impossible to assemble, on either coast, a rhythm section which could better answer him, idea for idea, and so deter him from blowing some of the nonsense of which he is sometimes guilty. The result is an album which, on the whole, shows a group lifted to the level of Rollins’ greatness, rather than one displaying Rollins alone.

For the most part, what Rollins has done here is to take pretty tunes of the musical stage (or, in some cases, war-worn jazz standards) and transform them by the technique of overstatement which is peculiarly his own into something fresh and humorous and new. I’ve told Every Little Star, which leads the album, is a case in point. In the Chapel in the Moonlight is another. So is You. And so, above all, is How High the Moon – which you had hoped you would never hear again.

This is, I think, essentially, an album for jazz enthusiasts rather than outsiders. But it is also an album through which the jazz bug may well bite you.

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Saturday Review
Wilder Hobson : 07/25/1959

Sonny Rollins, the newest grandmaster of the tenor saxophone, has been West again and recorded with some of the foremost Pacific talents: Hampton Hawes, piano; Barney Kessel, guitar; Leroy Vinnegar, bass; Shelly Manne, drums; and Victor Feldman, vibraharp. I do not find this group as congenial as the small East Coast ensembles with which Rollins has been recording. Kessel’s guitar seems a little light for Rollins’ company, and Manne’s drumming a little neat. Rollins, after all, is among the strongest, most rhythmically loose and eccentric performers we have; he thrives with companions of a similar robustness and elasticity (I think of the drummers Max Roach and Elvin Jones). Where Sonny plays the bar lines had better be thrown on the scrap and a musician should be able to keep his rhythmic head amid what is really a most subtly controlled abandon. Freedom and inner fixture are of the essence. Still, it is delightful to hear this powerful, droll, and lyrically capricious inventor go to work on such established themes as I’ve Told Every Little Star, Rock-A-Bye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody (an old vaudeville favorite that I had despaired of hearing again), I’ve Found a New Baby and The Song is You. Finally, a lovely piece of impromptu jamming on How High the Moon fortunately found its way onto the tape. At the moment, I cannot think of a more delectable version.

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Toronto Star
Roger Feather : 08/08/1959

There are two basic styles of tenor saxophone playing in jazz. One is the forcefully emotional, fully-blown school exemplified by Coleman Hawkins and Ben Webster. The other derived from the late Lester Young who played with a much smaller and purer tone and developed complex harmonic and rhythmic musical lines.

From the mid-forties to the mid-fifties, a big-sounding tenor-man was a rarity. A few years ago, though, a young man with a powerful musical personality came along and showed both listeners and musicians that full-throated, gutty tenor playing was still acceptable.

This young New Yorker, now 29, is Sonny Rollins, a deep-probing, vigorous musician with tremendous capacities. On his new album, Sonny Rollins and the Contemporary Leaders, he tackles eight more or less standard tunes with the help of four leading west coast musicians who, probably because of Rollins’ inspiration, have rarely sounded better. They are pianist Hamp Hawes, guitarist Barney Kessel, bassist Leroy Vinnegar and drummer Shelly Manne. On one tune, vibist Victor Feldman is added.

Rollins, primarily a thematic improvisor, digs deeply into his material to come up with rich, disturbing ideas which roll out of his horn relentlessly. He is beautifully logical and always conscious of melodic content. He also has a sly sense of humor which he uses to excellent advantage on Rock-A-Bye Your Baby With a Dixie Melody. On this tune, and elsewhere, Rollins revives the almost lost art of tonal manipulation which Lester Young exploited. This bends or changes the sound of notes unexpectedly to heighten interest.

How High the Moon is an intriguing eight minutes of extremely free improvisation with a trio of Rollins, Kessel and Vinnegar. The three needle each other into remarkably fresh and swinging choruses on this rather stale warhorse. On the pretty, but ordinary, melody of In the Chapel in the Moonlight, Rollins is penetrating and lyrical while on I’ve Found a New Baby, he is raw and exciting.

In a few short years, Rollins has had a great influence on jazz but happily he continues to learn and experiment without ever falling into a mould of success. This LP is an expressive and vivid example of his work.

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Down Beat : 10/15/1959
John A. Tynan : 4 stars

The idea was to team Rollins with various leaders-in-their-own-right on the Contemporary label. With almost any jazzman other than the mercurial New York tenorist, the notion would have been foolproof so far as getting maximum results is concerned. Rollins has a strong will of his own, however, and the results obtained here from the alliance are far form consistent.

Rollins doesn’t appear to take the first three tunes at all seriously. In fact, his tongue is firmly wedged in his cheek on Rock-a-Bye, and after some impatient sputtering staccatos and ejaculated short phrases behind Kessel‘s tasteful chording on How High, the tenorist plays a very good, if brief, chorus before satirizing the out chorus with evident contempt.

The one number on which Feldman plays, You, is easily the best on the first side. The vibist and Rollins solo very well, then trade 16-bar passages before Hawes leaps in with one of his best 16-bar passages on record; it is as if he had awaited his chance to speak and then made the utmost of the meager opportunity allowed him.

I’ve Found is medium-up and all solo Rollins. He opens it with a passionate cry of introduction and then, kicked by Hawes’ piano, Vinnegar‘s bass, and Manne‘s drums, works the song over for three minutes and 35 seconds of some of the most individualistic improvisation on record.

On Alone Together, Hamp strides out in an opening solo of distinction followed by good Kessel and Rollins and a fine walking bass solo by Vinnegar.

The only ballad in the set, In the Chapel, is something of a surprise in that there is no Rollins whimsey in evidence. It is a sensitive treatment of a good old tune played with sonorous tenor tone and almost deliberate-sounding obeisance to the master tenorists of the 30s. Kessel and Hawes speak with spare eloquence.

More brilliant Hawes distinguishes the set’s closing track, a very fast flag-waver with Manne carrying a straight four beat on top cymbal at a furious pace before embarking on a series of eights with a fiercely fulminating Rollins.

Though this album doesn’t really pick up until the last track on the first side, it is recommended because of the performances of a) Rollins, b) Hawes, c) Feldman, d) Manne, e) Kessel and f) Vinnegar.

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Liner Notes by Lester Koenig

Sonny Rollins‘ meteoric rise to fame during the past two years comes as no surprise to jazz fans and critics who had previously hailed the 28 year old New Yorker as “the most influential tenor of the decade,” “the boss of the tenor,” “saxophone colossus,” and the like.

In mid-1957 Sonny left the Max Roach Quintet (he’d bee with Max since November 1955) to “go out on the my own.” He formed his own group, worked in New York’s Village Vanguard, at a host of concerts and festivals, and on the road. He has found that a small group – a trio with bass and drums, or a quartet with bass, drums and trumpet – gives him the most freedom; and, while the personnel in his groups has changed from time to time, usually Sonny has worked within the piano-less framework.

Early in 1959 he made his first European tour. His fame had preceded him, and he played to enthusiastic audiences in Denmark, Sweden, France, England, Spain and in Italy, where he was the featured performer at the San Remo Jazz Festival February 22nd. On the return to the United States he took off on a cross-country tour which brought him to California in May. His future bookings reflect the extent to which he has arrived, with commitments extending into the latter part of the year for club and concert engagements, and appearances at almost every jazz festival of any consequence.

Rollins’ style and influence have been the subject of innumerable recent articles in the jazz press; most critics would agree with the statement by Quincy Jones in the May 1959 Jazz Review: “I think Sonny is the most important tenor on the scene.”

Why is he so highly regarded? Aside from his own enormous vitality, musicianship, and inventiveness, his importance seems to be in his ability to combine both the harmonic and rhythmic developments of the new jazz as revealed by Charlie Parker with the warm, melodic basic style of the preceding swing period, exemplified by the tenor styles of Coleman Hawkins and Ben Webster. He can improvise thematically, as well as on chord structures. He has reinstated a large, full hot sound on tenor. But above all, his music has virility, vitality, energy; by its own existence it constitutes an affirmation of life.

Of the importance of jazz tradition, Rollins has said, “I have a lot of respect for the art, you know, and for the tradition. Jazz is a thing that is only built upon what has happened before. It doesn’t begin with any one guy. The greatest anybody can be is just as great as what has come before, and to be great you have to be steeped in what has happened.”

Despite his success, Rollins is characterized by an insatiable desire to learn, to grow, to change, to experiment, and to invent. “I’m trying to do so many things. I’m trying to sound fresh all the time, and rhythmically I’m always trying to invent, you know. I’m trying to play my horn to a greater technical degree, too. Actually there are many things that remain to be done, and I’m glad about that, too. I’m the first to realize I have a lot of work to do, and there’s a lot I’m not doing.

“When I started, I didn’t study too much, I played more or less naturally… Bird inspired me to study and to really try.

“Music is a thing that you’ve got to do constantly to keep up because you can forget too easily. You’ve got to practice or work all the time to keep up with everything that you learned. It’s so easy to forget things that you have played. Everyone, I’m sure, plays things which sound good at the time and which they forget.

“Jazz is a very important force in the world, I believe. It’s the only thing that brings everybody together in a mutural cause. People just don’t understand enough about it. Not just about the music itself, but as a force for relations between folks.

“Jazz communicates to everybody. In Europe I never had any language problem. And it just makes me proud to be able to serve in any capacity. I feel very proud to be associated with jazz.”

One of the challenges in jazz recording is the possibility of creating something more than a literal preservation of a band, combo, or soloist’s repertoire. That, certainly, is important, and does pose problems of a technical and artistic nature. But the phonograph record is an art form itself, and one of its advantages is the performance which exists uniquely of, by and for the record, particularly by musicians who might not otherwise be heard playing together. This album is a case in point. During October 1958, Sonny Rollins was in the West for engagements in Los Angeles and San Francisco, and just before that for an appearance at the first Monterey Jazz Festival. Although Rollins has recorded widely, his sessions, with the single exception of his Contemporary album (Way Out West), had always been made in New York, or with east coast players. The chance to record in a different “context,” with a personnel selected from musicians available in Los Angeles, intrigued him.

Leroy Vinnegar, the giant of the walking bass, had been in San Francisco leading his own group while Sonny was there. They’d met and felt they wanted to record together. Shelly Manne was invited because Sonny had recorded with him before on Way Out West, and because Shelly and Leroy several years before had constituted one of the most widely praised rhythm sections teams in jazz. On piano, Hampton Hawes was chosen on the basis of his records and reputation, since Sonny had never worked with him.

By this time it was apparent the “sidemen” were all Contemporary leaders in their own right, and it was decided to make it an all-leader affair. Sonny hadn’t recorded with guitar before, and welcomed the idea of adding Barney Kessel. With Victor Feldman on vibes for one track, You, the roster of Contemporary leaders then in Los Angeles was complete.

The tunes for the album were selected by Rollins from the seemingly inexhaustible sheaf of music he carries in his saxophone case. Ranging form Jerome Kern to Dixieland, the varied program is unified by the force of Sonny’s creative personality, and bears out his reputation for finding fresh material, songs which do not usually serve as the basis for jazz improvisations.

I’ve Told Ev’ry Little Star, a sweet Jerome Kern love song, energized by Rollins, becomes a walking thing. Sonny puts his mark on the tune with a characteristically humorous break for the seventh and eighth measures of the basic eight-bar phrase of the melody.

Humor seems to be all too rare among modern jazzmen. “Monk,” Sonny recalls, “made me cognizant of how important it is to have a sense of humor in what you’re playing.” Rock-A-Bye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody, which Sonny refers to as a “humorous sort of thing,” illustrates both his humorous approach and his gift for finding values in material ignored by other players. How High the Moon, by contrast, was, for a time, overdone in modern jazz. Sonny hadn’t planned on recording it; he was jamming the tune with Barney and Leroy, at the start of the second session, waiting for Hamp and Shelly to arrive. The tape recorders were on, and the result, totally improvised in one take, is a fortunate record of a performance that almost got away.

You, a pop tune of the ’20s, is another unusual Rollins selection. Young British star Victor Feldman, now a Los Angeles resident and member of Howard Rumsey‘s Lighthouse All-Stars, long one of his favorite musicians. I’ve Found a New Baby features Rollins all the way, a hard-driving Rollins.

On Alone Together Hawes’ growth as a musician is indicated by the assurance with which he improvises on a tune he’d heard for the first time twenty minutes before. An odd, whimsical, Rollins-esque moment is the cut-off he gives at the end of the tune.

Chapel in the Moonlight, a sentimental ballad, is stripped of its sentimentality, and results in a cohesive, moving performance.

To wind things up, Sonny returned to Jerome Kerns – The Song Is You, which is taken to an unusually fast tempo. Sonny’s impassioned blowing, Hamp’s two rapid-fire solo choruses, and an exciting exchange of eight bar phrases between Sonny and Shelly, highlight the record.