Billboard : 07/14/1958
Special Merit Jazz Album

Freedom Suite represents Rollins‘ first entry into extended composition. Actually, the suite is a form of theme and variations. One blues-like theme is expanded upon in several melodic and rhythmic patterns. The work itself is not particularly challenging, but the execution by Rollins on tenor, Max Roach on drums and Oscar Pettiford on bass is excellent. Flip side offers four standards also done by the trio, however, the suite is the side that will attract. Platter merits exposure.

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Audio
Charles A. Robertson : October, 1958

By inscribing a suite to the cause of freedom, Sonny Rollins might easily be celebrating the liberating effects derived from fronting his own trio during the past year. It gave him the opportunity to increase his creative powers and broaden the scope of his tenor-sax playing to bear the brunt of the nineteen-minute composition which fills one side of the LP. Only for want of a better name can the work be called a suite. Not separated into rigidly defined parts, it is still departure from the usual variations on a jazz theme. Its form is rather that of a pointed but informal discussion, and pertinent interjections by his former employer and mentor Max Roach, on drums, or that supreme bassist Oscar Pettiford frequently change the course and intensity of the conversational flow.

Their comments range from Rollins’ philosophic introduction, reminiscent of his St. Thomas theme of last season, to the persuasive lines of Pettiford and convincing statements by Roach. Needless to say, several hearings are needed to absorb the trio’s work in sum. Particularly worth of study are the methods each uses to prepare the way for new trend of thought. More immediately accessible are Till There Was You, from the score of “The Music Man,” and reworkings of Someday I’ll Find You and Shadow Waltz.

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Miami Herald
Fred Sherman : 12/21/1958

Freedom Suite is the latest of the big efforts by Sonny Rollins, a searching and searing tenor sax player. As with earlier successes, this is trio music, with Max Roach on drums and Oscar Pettiford on bass. A tough one to teeth on, but plenty of meat here for the hard bop fan. The newcomer to the Rollins school will prefer his earlier Way Out West album made for Contemporary.

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San Francisco Chronicle
Ralph J. Gleason : 08/17/1958

Accompanied only by bassist Oscar Pettiford and drummer Max Roach, Rollins plays four interesting ballads (one a waltz) and then essays a longer work (the title piece) which is his own composition. On all of these, he displays the same gently exploratory tenor style that has made him one of the most important young musicians of the past few years. With excellent support form the two other men, Rollins gives us a real glimpse of how his mind works in his own composition. It is a moving, sometimes even eloquent, musical protest.

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Saturday Review
Wilder Hobson : 08/30/1958

Shifting quickly to the other side of the house, we have an indomitable soloist who almost invariably has something to say. Even so, the tenor saxophonist, Sonny Rollins, has had the wisdom to back himself with Oscar Pettiford, bass, and Max Roach, drums. This duo not only add up to a superlative rhythm section; they are also insinuating voices in and around Rollins in a fashion possible only for masterly string bass and percussion players. Here, the rear line really moves into the front line. The album Freedom Suite devotes one whole side to the title work, which is a robust demonstration by all hands. And when Rollins lets go on a number of ballads, his punch and savor and rhythmic mischievousness (he is an intoxicating disturber of phrase lengths) are irresistible.

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Down Beat : 09/18/1958
Martin Williams : 4 stars

The advance news of this LP suggested that it might be theRollins record since Saxophone Colossus and Way Out West. It is not as good as either of those sets.

The Suite takes one side and, since the liner is more concerned with its intended content, a bit about its structure might be appropriate. It has four parts (or four “tunes” or “dances”); the first a calypso, the second Afro, the third a ballad-like melody, the fourth fast and in jazz “four.”

The best of the pieces is the first; it is the longest, contains the most improvisation, and Rollins and Pettiford are very good. The second, rather brooding, theme is stated before the third theme, returned to for some improvisation after the third, and is the most pointed composition. The ballad is a languid section, Rollins’ exploration of it seems a bit hesitant, and Pettiford has a good solo which modifies its mood without clashing with it. After the return for some improvisation on the second theme, comes the rapid fourth, a vehicle for fours with Roach and a good Pettiford solo.

The first impression one gets is that the themes are well laid-out for an overall sense of structure, but that several of them are simply played with a looseness but little improvisation. A second impression is that the first does have some very good improvisation – but hardly Rollins’ best on record. Roach very able modifies an accompanying drum line into an improvised, interplaying percussive part almost throughout.

One the reverse, Shadow Waltz may be one of the most excellent examples of comedy (in the true sense) in jazz music. With apparent casualness, Rollins burlesques that silly tune without ridiculing it, kids it without scorning it, picks it to pieces without despising it.

The suite was a challenge. It is a program piece about the Negro in American of serious intention. But Rollins’ real achievements so far have come because he is one of the few hornsmen in the history of jazz (perhaps the first) who can give in a long improvisation a sense of structure and development.

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Liner Notes by Orrin Keepnews

One of the most exciting characteristics of the growing creative artist is that he seems to be in a constant, dynamic state of flux. His work is marked, above all, by an urgent sense of ferment, motion, change. Sonny Rollins is at this time clearly in this position.

It is already quite generally recognized in the jazz world that he is an artist of huge and as yet unbounded importance and potential. But it is far from easy to guess what Sonny will be up to next. (It isn’t even safe to guess: reviewers who first dogmatically pigeonholed him as a hard-bopper with a raw, harsh sound, then had to listen as he developed a considerable ability to express a deep, if quite unique, sense of melodic lyricism.) He is not an infallible or even performer: that limited form, of perfection cannot be one of the goals of the innovator and creator. It is of much more consequence to say that he is virtually never dull, and usually unpredictable. For example, while it probably remains accurate to label him a “blowing” musician, Rollins demonstrates on this LP (in the remarkable Freedom Suite) that that term can mean vastly more than just taking a loose string of choruses on a standard tune or routine original.

Sonny is working here with the instrumental format- a trio consisting of himself, bass and drums – that has recently appealed most strongly to him. On one side he is concerned with the adventurous reworking of pop tunes, past and present: two waltzes (Someday I’ll Find You and Shadow Waltz) to which he applies his own personal standard of lyricism; a new ballad from Meredith Willson’s score for the Broadway hit, “Music Man;” and one of Matt Dennis’ most melodic and most lasting tunes, Will You Still Be Mine. But the heart of the record is unquestionably the work that takes up all of Side 1: The Freedom Suite. Representing something that Sonny has never before attempted and that very possibly no one has ever attempted in precisely this way, it could turn out to he a jazz work of massive and lasting significance. And at the very least it must be judged a rare listening experience and a vivid proof that flux and change and the unexpected are among the most exciting qualities a creative artist has to offer.

The Freedom Suite is Sonny’s first venture into extended composition. Just as Rollins’ approach to his instrument and, for that matter, to the entire structure of modern jazz has been characterized by departures from accepted procedures and conventions, so is his concept of a long jazz piece a highly personal and unusual one. The suite is built on a very simple musical basis: it consists, fundamentally, of a single melodic figure, which is developed and improvised upon through several different phases. The difference between one of its separate sections and another may be a matter of tempo or of rhythm, or simply of mood. But these differences are actually secondary in importance to an overall feeling of unity of expression: the suite makes up a single complete whole, so that it is very much to the point and very much a part of the writer-performer’s intention that it is presented here un-subdivided – as a full, uninterrupted record side, not as a series of separate tracks.

Precisely what this unity consists of is none too easy to describe; but having heard the piece several times, and having discussed it with Rollins, I feel that some understanding of its meaning is an important part of listening to it. Not completely essential, perhaps: it is probably possibly to enjoy the suite very much merely as nineteen minutes of fascinating variations on a theme by a superior improvisor and two of the finest rhythm men in jazz. But that approach puts undue emphasis on the virtuoso aspects of the performance. True, it is no of music without ever becoming trite or repetitious. But if you stop with that, you are missing a great deal.

For this is, as very few pieces of jazz writing even attempt to be, music about a specific subject. It is, by title, about “freedom,” but just as that one word itself means many things, so does its application here have many facets. In most fields of music, a composition that is about something is concerned with a concrete picture, is “program music.” But in jazz, which is so much a music of personal expression, “program music” is more fittingly about someone. This suite, then, is ‘about’ Sonny Rollins: more precisely, it is about freedom as Sonny is equipped to perceive it. He is a creative artist living in New York City in the 19505; he is a jazz musician who, partly by absorbing elements of Bird and Monk and many others, has evolved his own personal music; he is a Negro. Thus the meaning of freedom to Rollins is compounded of all this and, undoubtedly, much more. In one sense, then, the reference is to the musical freedom of this unusual combination of composition and improvisation; in another it is to physical and moral freedom, to the presence and absence of it in Sonny’s own life and in the way of life of other Americans to whom he feels a relationship. Thus it is not. a piece about Emmett Till, or Little Rock, or Harlem, or the peculiar local election laws of Georgia or Louisiana, no more than it is about the artistic freedom of jazz. But it is concerned with all such things, as they are observed by this musician and as they react – emotionally and intellectually – upon him.

The suite is, then, in essence a work dedicated to freedom: it is dedication and homage and resentment and impatience and joy – all of which are ways that a man can feel and that this man does feel about something as personal and basic as “freedom” – and all expressed through the medium he best commands. Someone else, having something like this set of feelings, might write an essay or a novel or paint a picture, or, being artistically inarticulate, might ride a train to another city or get into a fight without knowing why. Sonny Rollins, being who he is, writes a musical theme and plays it. And (without ever talking about it in this way) communicates to two fellow musicians so that they support him most sympathetically and, in specific instances, create their own apt solo expressions of it. This, as closely as I can get to it, is what The Freedom Suite is.

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Sonny Rollins is by now, to use the toastmasters’ cliché, “a man who needs no introduction.” For the record, he was born in New York in September, 1929, has been playing tenor sax. since 1946, first came into prominence playing alongside the late Clifford Brown in Max Roach’s quintet in 1955, has most recently been leading his own small groups. It should also be noted, in case anyone hasn’t been listening lately, that Sonny has? been the most sensational new jazz force of recent years, and that his impact has quite literally revolutionized jazz tenor playing. Max Roach and Oscar Pettiford have not needed introductions for many years: let us just say that Max is the major jazz drummer and Oscar has comparable status among bassists of the past decade, and merely add that here they are up to the standard that their own past performances have set for them.