Billboard : 03/30/1959
Four Stars

Sonny Rollins, who has gradually worked his way back to the critical favor he enjoyed when he first burst upon the jazz scene, has turned in a fine new waxing here, one that shows off some of his best work, and is enjoyable listening to boot. The driving style of Rollins is well represented in on Tune Up, Wonderful, Wonderful, and the attractive Blues for Philly Joe. Credit must also be given to the drummer P.J. Jones, W. Kelly on piano and D. Watkins on bass. A strong Rollins LP.

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Cash Box : 04/11/1959

Tenor saxist Rollins, a major figure in present day jazz circles, swings his big horn through 6 immensely gratifying performances, getting immeasurable assistance from Phille Jo Jones on drops. Complete the rhythm section on this set are Doug Watkins, bass, and Wynton Kelly, piano, who, along with Jones provides a solid impetus for Rollins’ improvisations of three “pop” tunes and three original jazz compositions. Outstanding deck.

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San Francisco Chronicle
Ralph J. Gleason – 04/19/1959

Rollins, as is obvious even on an uncomfortable night, is a major jazz soloist, one of the really important musicians of today. This LP presents him playing with a full rhythm section consisting of W. Kelly, piano; D. Watkins, bass; and the incomparable Philly Joe Jones, drums. There are six tunes ranging from the Johnny Mathis hit, Wonderful!, Wonderful!, to Blues for Philly Joe. It is impossible to describe the enjoyment continued listening to this record brings; the interplay between Rollins and the rhythm section, the forceful swinging and intelligent fill-ins and solo work of Philly Joe, who is unquestionably the greatest drummer of his generation… all of these things combine to make this album a worthwhile investment.

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San Francisco Examiner
C.H. Garrigues – 06/29/1959

Rollins is undeniably the dominant tenor of the day and this one is just about par for the Rollins course: technically very adept, even inventive, but essentially more a display of virtuosity than “soul.” Rollins fans will want it.

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San Francisco Examiner
C.H. Garrigues – 09/20/1959

This is not the newest Rollins and should have been reviewed before this had it not, somehow, got into the bottom of the pile. It shows Rollins at his hardest, most pungent, most sardonic. What he does to Johnny Mathis‘ pop tune Wonderful!, Wonderful! and to Surry With a Fringe is (as they used to say) a caution.

Backing Rollins are Wynton Kelly, Doug Watkins and Philly Joe Jones; as so often happens when Newk gets together with just a rhythm section, the whole deal turns into more of a race for effect than a means of musical expression.

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Washington Post
Tony Gieske – 04/05/1959

Probably the two key ideas in jazz today are “soul” and “whole.”

Sonny Rollins understands both. Newk’s Time, his new record, has him working out these concepts with his characteristic intelligence, an intelligence which is among the most powerful and sensitive in contemporary jazz.

In Surrey With The Fringe On Top, for instance, he directs your attention to drummer Philly Joe Jones, declaring him an equal partner in a musical duet; an equal member of the whole. Rollins knows the drummer is not a mere metronome. Other numbers pull the whole rhythm section up to almost equal status with the soloist.

On Tune Up, particularly, Rollins shows that he has the whole piece in mind all the time he’s playing and the whole band as well. To me, this emphasis is one of the most important new things he is saying.

His soul is most pervasively apparent in the vigorous, masculine sound he gets. But it is really everywhere in his playing. Wynton Kelly and Doug Watkins are the other musicians.

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Down Beat : 04/30/1959
Unknown : 3.5 stars

This is in the main a blowing session. But since Rollins blows with such enormous vitality and virility, some of it is rich stuff. Rollins, of course, is hard to to the point of roughness, but defect gets plowed under. And anyway, there is Kelly‘s piano, which is firm enough to keep up with Rollins, suave enough to counterbalance him.

Rollins afficionados may be intrigued by the drums-and-tenor work on Surrey, but it’s really not satisfying – though one must admit that Rollins very nearly succeeds in the try. Tune Up swings potently; Namely You is very attractive and justifies Rollins’ liking for improbable sources of material.

The solos by the others are strong, particularly on the Blues which movies with a firm head-nodding swing. Watkins walks through a big-toned bass solo that is rendered more interesting by a subtle pause thing in which Kelly and Jones respond as smoothly as Fred Astaire says his sister always did.

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Liner Notes by Joe Goldberg

Excellence seldom goes hand in hand with consistency; when it does, it is a unique occurrence. It is more difficult for a jazz musician to be consistent than almost anyone else; he is creating in public, for as much as six hours at a stretch, with no chance to revise a single note once it has been played. Under these extremely difficult conditions, you are justified in calling yourself lucky if you hear one really inspired eight-bar passage in an evening. The rest of the time you get competent workmanship or a more-or-less artful stringing together of pet runs and cliches.

Sonny Rollins is an excellent and inconsistent musician, but the night on which you heard only one inspired passage from him would be a rare one indeed. He is capable of much more than that. There are two reasons for his lack of consistency, both of which go toward making Rollins the complete jazz musician that he is. How he plays is entirely a matter of when you happen to hear him. Since he first appeared on the scene, his style has been has been in a continual process of evolution. He began, on a point with which few men achieve, by being one of the the better bop tenormen. By 1955, after working with Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk, he was obviously the best. From that point, rather than stopping, he continued to grow. His style, on the stand, altered almost nightly; by the time a Rollins record was released, Sonny was almost surely not playing quite that way any more. By now, he has created his own musical language, one that, while difficult to classify, is being imitated by so many that Rollins is in the sometimes unfortunate position of having created his own cliches.

Change is one reason for inconsistency. The second is the desire to play, a desire which of course varies with anyone, and with Sonny, this seems to be the determining factor: if you hear a phrase from Rollins on a listless night that you have heard before, you have almost surely heard it from him – he is merely repeating a few favorite words. When he wants to play, when he something new to say, he extends himself constantly.

In case any of the preceding sounds like an apology, let it be made immediately clear that this record needs no apology. Blue Note is fortunate enough to have recorded Sonny Rollins under the best circumstances: on this particular afternoon, his style was at a point where it was fresh and vital to him, and he had an intense desire to communicate it. Sonny seems here to start slightly before a tune begins, and finish a little after it ends, trying all the time to get everything in. The group is a quartet, which allows him maximum freedom, and the rhythm section is made up of three musicians who understand Sonny’s music and have played with him often: Wynton Kelly, Doug Watkins, and Philly Joe Jones.

The record opens with Miles Davis’ Tune Up, on which the spontaneity of Sonny’s phrases conceal the highly developed sense of structure that holds the entire solo together. Rollins has often been accused of being a “rough” musician, and gets casually lumped together with men to whom he is far superior. This performance can serve to disprove that opinion. There is as much organization here as there is in, say, a John Lewis solo, but it is an organization that holds the ideas together rather than exists for its own sake, and is partially marked by the enormous drive of Sonny’s playing. An entire series of exchanges with Philly Joe is based on the rapid staccato bursts that Rollins usually employs only for emphasis, but here uses for a complete statement.

Asiatic Raes is a Kenny Dorham tune of difficult structure and shifting rhythms which Sonny negotiates with great ease. Most musicians use such rhythms only on the tune itself, going into straight four for their improvisations. Sonny has the grace to improvise in the rhythms of the song.

In any discussion of Sonny Rollins, mention is sooner or later made of the unusual sources of his material. In the past, he has presented such varied songs as If You Were The Only Girl in The World, Wagon Wheels, Shadow Waltz, and How Are Things in Glocca Morra. Here he plays Wonderful! Wonderful!, a song whose familiarity rests almost entirely on a recording made by Johnny Mathis. In its mood and chord patterns, Wonderful! Wonderful! has definite overtones of Broadway musical comedy, and Sonny gives a happy showtune feeling in this performance. Many of Sonny’s own tunes have the same feeling, Broadway apparently having a considerable influence on him, and the way this song is played here, it could almost be his own composition.

In recent years, the emphasis in the rhythm section has shifted, with the bass laying down the basic beat and the drums being used primarily for accent. Here, Philly Joe Jones becomes a one-man rhythm section, as he and Sonny duet on Surrey With The Fringe On Top. On firsts hearing this sounds like one of the tenor-bass-drums sides that Rollins has featured recently. The rendition has such a remarkable fullness that you only gradually realize that all the music is being made by two men. A tour de force for both Rollins and Jones, it is fine jazz even after you are finished being amazed at the technical virtuosity.

Blues For Philly Joe is Sonny’s only composition on this record. Sonny is becoming a jazz composer of stature, and is already the author of two established jazz standards, Doxy and Valse Hot. His tunes have an unusual freshness and charm, full of humor and immediately affecting. On this record, however, his composing abilities are definitely subordinated to his talent as a soloist and this Blues is merely the simplest basis for improvisation. Like most good jazzmen, Sonny has evolved a personal style of playing blues that is one of his trademarks. This is not one of those blues. A driving, freewheeling performance, it resembles nothing quite so much as the Wardell Gray–Dexter Gordon chase exhibitions of the late forties. Sonny sounds here as though he were involved in a chase with himself, playing both parts and enjoying every minute of it. Wynton Kelly contributes an unusually fine solo here, followed by Doug Watkins. Sonny, finally finding someone besides himself to reply to, enters with the main phrase of Watkins’ solo and finishes out.

That is Sonny you hear at the beginning of Namely You, sounding as though he were beginning a dance set. And he might well be. One of the time-honored functions of music is to be danced to, and many top jazzmen served extensive apprenticeship in dance bands. When a musician can preserve this dance feeling and still turn in a jazz performance, the result, as in this example, can be delightful. Much of the credit here must go to Philly Joe, who employs the light, easy rhythms that have given the Miles Davis quintet much of its charm.

These six pieces make up the present album, Newk’s Time. (The nickname, by the way, derives from Sonny’s resemblance to Don Newcomb, but Sonny is long past the point where he can benefit from borrowed glory.) The album, as I have said, is simply a record of how Rollins felt on one particular afternoon. It is a measure of how his achievement that such feeling impressions can have this much significance.