Billboard : 03/30/1957
Jazz Special Merit Album

Any listener jaded with the sameness of the modern sounds can freshen up with this one. Here’s some of the most vigorous and creative blowing of recent months by the tenorman all the young cats are digging. Rollins also inspires brilliant young trumpeter, Don Byrd, and pianist, Wynton Kelly. Great rhythm from King Max Roach and Gene Ramey. Four originals are hard-hitting, basic jazz pieces with plenty of solo space, and How Are Things in Glocca Morra is an unexpected delight. This deserves a big dealer push.

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Cash Box : 04/20/1957

Rollins is the acclaimed tenor sax artist, who has been favored with a number of previous sessions. On this Blue Note entry, Rollins displays a searchingly calm, but assuring, attack on 4 Rollins creations plus 1 standby How Are Things in Glocca Mora). Assisting Rollins in the quintet are such notables as Donald Byrd (trumpet), and Max Roach (drums). Smooth work.

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Down Beat : 05/02/1957
Nat Hentoff : 4 stars

Rollins has gained more and more of the confidence that his position as the most influential of the younger tenors warrants. This was recorded Dec. 16, 1956, and further marks the growing authority with which Sonny is speaking. Though Charlie Parker has been his main influence, there is not a little Coleman Hawkins in Sonny’s roots, as Leonard Feather notes. Not only, in some root-ways, in conception, but more in the vibrant robustness, the aggressive hot strength in Sonny’s attack.

Rollins, of course, has forged, besides, his own craggy, searching conception that may sound somewhat forbidding at first but becomes intensely stimulating once your ear becomes oriented. Dig his off-the-wall rhythmic intensifications here, and his further stretching of melodic and harmonic challenges. He only disappoints in his surprisingly uneventful, for the most part, work in Glocca Morra.

Byrd‘s ideas have been becoming more personal and absorbing, but in his more assertive moments in Bluesnote he sounds like he’s fighting the horn. Byrd, however, is clearly growing into an important hornman. Kelly continues to impress me more and more with the spare, building imagination of his solos, his time, his blues-conviction, and his sound. I still hope Blue Note gives him a second album.

Max and Gene are firstrate, and there are several short, pointed statements by Max aside from his rhythm sustaining. Recommended. The set would have been better if more takes had been tried on the ballad. The rating for Sonny is higher.

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Liner Notes by Leonard Feather

Jazz, like art and life and trees, is a family affair. Out of its trunk grow branches, and from the branches twigs emerge, and before long the leaves on these tender shoots are as fresh and green and pleasing to the senses as was the youthful tree itself.

In jazz the family tie is not visible to the eye, nor always immediately to the ear; it takes a discerning study of the habits and customs of the natives to figure out the heredity of jazzdom’s citizens. The tenor saxophone, perhaps more than any other instrument, has given birth to several generations of styles, all varying widely in their approach to the niceties of tone, phrasing, dynamics.

Theodore Walter Rollins is one tenor saxophonist who illustrates all the above observations. He is the student who has turned teacher, the scholar who became a school. During his high school days as an alto saxophonist he reputedly sounded like Louis Jordan, but in 1944 he heard Charlie Parker, and from that moment on his theme song could have been I’ll Never Be The Same Again. Bird was his main influence, though when he switched to tenor in 1948 it was evident that he had listened attentively to Coleman Hawkins, and presumably to Ben Webster and Miles Davis. The Hawk impact was probably the most important of these three. (If this sounds incompatible with a Parker influence, play one of Hawkins’ LP records speeded up to 45 rpm. You’ll be amazed at the Bird-like sound that will emanate from your speaker.)

Born in New York City, Sept. 7, 1929, the younger brother of a violinist, Sonny began piano studies at the age of nine. The above-mentioned alto debut, and the subsequent switch to tenor, led to his professional bow around 1948, gigging with Babs Gonzales. Sonny was only nineteen when Art Blakey came, saw and was conquered by his rapidly developing style and technique; Art hired Sonny for a series of dates, and during the next two years he was elevated to the companionship of the big-timers, notably Tadd Dameron, Bud Powell and Miles Davis. Miles was perhaps the first to recognize fully the Rollins potential, to the extent of offering him verbal encouragement, his first recordings, and a prominent featured solo spot on their joint in-person appearances.

In 1955 Sonny spent most of his time around Chicago. The following January, when Max Roach and Clifford Brown were in town with their combo, he subbed for Harold Land, tenor man with the group. When they were getting ready to leave town Max asked Sonny to continue with them; he has been driven by the spur of the Roach Rider ever since.

During the past year Sonny has emerged fully as an individual. The respect in which he is held among fellow-workers was most vividly demonstrated when I conducted a poll of 101 jazzmen for the “Musicians’ Musicians” poll in the Encyclopedia Yearbook of Jazz. As can be seen by an inspection of the pages that show a breakdown of each vote, Sonny was selected for the “Greatest New Star” in the tenor sax category by such people as Clifford Brown, Bill Holman, Osie Johnson, Quincy Jones, Red Mitchell, Max Roach, George Wallington, Randy Weston, Ernie Wilkins, and was even hailed as “Greatest Ever” by Miles Davis, Herb Gellar, Bud Powell and Horace Silver. The Rollins qualities — an aggressively swinging style with a tone that is neither as transparent as Getz’s nor as opaque as Hawkins’ — can be seen reflected in the work of J.R. Monterose, Hank Mobley and many more of the younger tenor school.

For this session Sonny was joined by a superior and finely integrated quintet. Donald Byrd, a 24-year-old Detroiter, has been on the scene in the Apple since the summer of 1955 and has worked with Wallington, Blakey et al. Wynton Kelly, a native of Jamaica, B.W.I., but raised in Brooklyn, paid his dues in rhythm and blues, but graduated to work as Dinah Washington’s accompanist and has been associated with Dizzy Gillespie off and on for several years. Gene Ramey, born in 1913 in Austin, Texas, has seen service in bands of every school, from the Jay McShann crew of 1938-44 (in which Charlie Parker was his intermittent colleague) to the Count Basie orchestra of 1952-3, with frequent ventures into New York free lance work with various singers and instrumental combos.

Max Roach, who appears through the courtesy of EmArcy Records, need hardly be introduced at this point. Suffice it that in the above-listed poll he was accorded a unique honor: the musicians named him as “Greatest Ever” on drums. Even Lennie Tristano, who is reputed to hate drummers, voted for him.

The quintet starts provocatively and decisively with Decision. This is an unusual minor blues theme 13 bars long instead of the customary 12, characterized by little abrupt blocks of two-note phrases. Sonny’s solo, too, you will notice, is very much in the style of the composition itself at certain points. Byrd is in a somewhat Milesish mood here; Wynton delivers himself of a smooth single-note solo with occasional forays into fourths and thirds. Max’s solo chorus, a simple exercise for brushes on snare, is delightful. Then back to the unison theme.

Bluesnote is a medium-tempo twelve-bar blues with plenty of solo space for all five — Byrd, Rollins, Kelly, Roach, Ramey — followed by some fours.

How Are Things in Glocca Morra is a ballad from Finian’s Rainbow that has often appealed to modern musicians. It is done more or less as a solo vehicle, with Byrd used only for the intro and coda. Sonny plays the first chorus hewing fairly closely to the melodic line; Wynton then wanders on the changes, and Sonny ad libs a little more freely in his second solo, building to climactic high notes.

Plain Jane, third of the four Rollins originals in this set, is actually just one eight-bar block of two- and four-note phrases, constituting the “A” of an A-A-B-A chorus in which the B comprises tenor improvisation. Listen closely to Sonny’s wonderful control during his solo here, particularly in the sixteenth-note runs, and in the little up-and-down cascades of clustered notes. Byrd continues the mood with a similarly fleet performance; Wynton, during his solo, becomes increasingly funky, and Sonny has some healthy workouts at fours with Max.

Sonnysphere is a bright-tempoed item with no theme to speak of. After an eight-bar sendoff it plunges straight into Sonny’s extemporaneous view of I Got Rhythm with a Honeysuckle Bridge. Byrd’s work here is mainstream bop, fluent and well coordinated, as is the Kelly piano. Sonny has some exciting fours and twos with Max.

This is an unpretentious session, displaying Sonny Rollins in the kind of setting that can consolidate the recognition, long-overdue but none the less welcome, that is finally coming his way.