This is one of my favorite Sonny Rollins records. Derek hits the nail on the head when he talks about Sonny "keeping his ideas succinct without sounding terse or flippant" and "stressing brevity without sacrificing improvisational integrity". The tunes here are so "tuneful" that in other hands they might sound trite, but Sonny really grabs hold of them and pumps some life into them, not by adding improvisational tangents, but by just playing the tune. I always think of this record along side Roscoe Mitchell's "Hey Donald", which features a similar approach to similarly tuneful tunes.

Not sure if it's just a case of seredipitous timing on Derek's part, but apparently Rollins just recently played with Roy Haynes for the first time in a million (er, 50) years...

review here = http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/20/arts/music/20roll.html

Encouraging to hear that Sonny's trying the trio format again - the setting for most of his best work. I usually don't like hearing him in groups with chordal instruments (with a couple exceptions - The Bridge, Newk's Time, On Impulse) as it seems to crowd him both harmonically and sonically. Is it just me or has most of his music over the last 3 1/2 decades been really lackluster and disappointing? Each time I've seen him live there's been a few inspired moments of brilliance inevitably followed by some lame meanderings or rote cliches from one of his bandmates. Hey, I paid $40 to hear Sonny Rollins, not some piano or trombone solos that wouldn't be out of place on a cruise ship!

Truly sad that Sonny and Max never re-united to do a duo concert like Max did with Dizzy. Would have been great to hear them stretch out together. Maybe some enterprising promoter will put Sonny and Han Bennink on as a duo (they have played together before, after all...)

That would be a good idea - Han told me he also has some very good recordings of them playing together in 67. Unheard Music Series, anyone?

There's a boot of the Sonny/Bennink recording floating around--I've heard one track (poor sound, amazing playing)....

Must confess that I don't get much out of The Sound of Sonny -- one of the few duds from Rollins' work of this period. (Is this the one with the weird doubletime "Everytime We Say Goodbye"?)

"one of the few duds from Rollins' work of this period."

I disagree. But I'm curious, what are the other ones?

Thanks, Jacob. I need to pull out Hey, Donald again. I don’t remember digging it all that much the last go ‘round, but that was years ago. Something about Jodie Christian & "Tootie" Heath not meshing all that well w/ Roscoe & Malachi...

From what I understand, Sonny is planning to couple the results of that Carnegie trio gig w/ Haynes and McBride w/ the recently discovered Library of Congress trio material (same location & tunes, w/ Wendell Marshall & Kenny Dennis from ‘57) and release it on his own Doxy imprint. Very much looking forward to that.

Jeff: it's the only dud I've heard from the 1950s work (though some of the pre-Worktime recordings are clearly prenticework), but there are at least a couple recordings I've not heard (...and the Contemporary Leaders and Sonny Rollins Volume 1 on Blue Note), hence the imprecision.

So you're basically revising your previously stated "few" to just one. Again, I'm not clear on what specifically makes this a "dud".

As Jacob states above, it's Sonny showing his talent for breathing life into tunes & opting for precision over extended improv. A nice change of pace from some of the previous projects for Prestige (though most of those are great too). As Derek states, the rhythm is a bit stiff in places, especially on the trio opener, but I don't hear anything amiss in Sonny's playing. He sounds like he's having fun.

Derek, how does this new remaster sound in comparison to previous reissues, like say the Freelance Years box?

Jeff, I haven’t done a comparison to the Freelance box, which I think is 20-bit, but this edition is 24-bit and sounds great to my ears. I can say that the Monk Town Hall set in this batch of Keepnews titles is a marked improvement over the earlier OJC and Riverside box editions. Much better presence amongst the instruments in the larger ensemble.

A question, gentlemen! Really, nothing underhand intended. Isn't it true that all CD players are 16 bit? Thus how does one tell the difference between a 16, 20 or 24 bit remaster? Is it in fact audible? Would one spot the difference in a blind-fold test? Has anyone here ever done so? Repeat (for the benefit of the cynics): Genuine question.

Good question, Graham. Staying true to my general subscription to Luddite principles, my grasp of audiophile matters is severely limited. I don’t know if there is much of a difference discernable on bit-rate grounds at all, but I do hear differences between successive generations of remasters (the Monk example, for one). Whether that’s a function of bit-size or some sort of related scrubbing, I’m not sure.

Other handy examples are the RVG masters for the Blue Note and Fantasy-owned labels. There are definite audible differences between the first run of Blue Note cds (pressed in ’87 & mastered by Ron McMaster- always loved that surname & often thought it a pseudonym) and the subsequent RVG editions of the past decade or so. But again, I think that might more a function of Rudy’s tinkering with the tapes (boosting things here, sharpening things there) rather than a direct result of bit-rate increase. There are some albums where I prefer Ron’s take and others where I side w/ Rudy’s, but Malcolm Addey trumps them both, IMO.

Thanks Derek, for your thoughts. Totally sensible, as always! I agree many of the first generation of CD transfers were very sloppily done (Columbia's first CD issue of "Bitches Brew" being a fine example), but later remasterings have done our ears a lot of good indeed, RVG's work most especially. I guess it took the engineers a decade or two to figure out what really needed to be done. How much the bit-rate actually matters is, I imagine, something we won't discover until we all own 24 bit CD players.

To give credit where it is due, the question was not exactly mine. It arose from one of the articles by the esteemed Vladimir, of North Country Audio, whose monthly column on sonics in Cadence has for years comprised more common sense on the subject of sound than could be thought humanly possible.

Thanks, Graham. The cynic in me also thinks it’s sometimes a function of how much money can be made repackaging & hawking the same product. RVG is an interesting case. I’m an admirer of his work, but I gather there are many who feel he frequently got it wrong to begin with at those hundreds of sessions at Englewood Cliffs.

Vladimir (always thought that was a nom de plume for Marc Rusch, but I’ve never had that verified) is a national treasure. I have little to no interest in audiophile shoptalk, but the man really brings it home in salt-of-the-earth terms.