Colossus In Excelsis

Sonny Rollins - Alfie's Theme

Nobody likes writing these things, and neither does Nowbodhi I can most definitely assure you.

They're gonna be inevitable as long as this brief spasm of activity we call a lifetime doesn't end in the eternal sleep of mortality, anyway.

That may be true, but this one sure stings. Not because the departed didn't live a long, standard-setting life of human innovation and impressive longevity, but because anytime the Greatest Living Anything passes, it's gonna leave a void.

So, especially being the Greatest Living Tenor Saxophonist, the ancestral ascendance of our latest late Maestro is gonna ripple through the culture like the implacable rock touching the tranquility of the pond.

He had the hilarity of ironic taste to go on Miles' 100th birthday, so I'll reiterate what I said in that post a few days ago.

Which is that when I put these concerts and compilations together, I really make an effort to do it in a way that's representative enough of the artist's attributes as a whole that it functions as a gateway drug into their entire output and cultural weight, for some youngster out there who wouldn't know Miles Davis from Miles Standish.

I try to make it so all the unprecedented, almost extraterrestrial melodic skill set is on full display at all times.

Because the toppermost Jazz players and improvisers -- the ones who can play one phrase and you're twisting it around in your head for days or decades afterwards -- have this way of transmuting the harmonic information present in a melody and weaving it around itself like living strands of musical DNA, and are able to do so on the fly in almost any group or solo context.

The Dexter Gordons, the Coleman Hawkins, the John Coltranes and others that occupy the upper strata of instrumentalists all have this in abundance, and any shred of harmonic data in their hands can be turned into a hypnotic power that can separate the mundane from the extraordinary as it unfolds in real time.

That said, no one who has lived, currently lives, or will ever live will have the prodigious, easily otherworldly talent of this kind of magical, spontaneous melodic and harmonic development than Sonny Rollins did. Period, end of story, I'm not sorry, and how about those Mets?

The two times I was lucky enough to see/hear him in a concert setting -- once in the idyllic confines of SF's Palace of Fine Arts! -- he did stuff with melody and the recalibration of a melody's near-infinite permutational possibilities that had you sitting there wondering if there was something, somewhere about playing music this guy hadn't mastered.

There were moments in those performances when you had to wonder if he'd ever stop the carnival, or if the melodic inventions might outlast him in endless battle.

Here's one, with a bonus track from a little later on, from 1979 where Sonny demonstrates just this kind of fight to the Finnish.

Sonny Rollins Quartet

Pori Jazz Festival

Riihiketo School

Pori, Finland

7.13.1979

01 Don't Ask/band introductions

02 Little Lu

03 Strode Rode

04 Tai-Chi

05 Disco Monk

06 Keep Hold of Yourself

07 Don't Stop the Carnival

08 Alfie's Theme

09 Harlem Boys

10 Isn't She Lovely

Total time: 1:41:18

disc break goes after Track 05

Track 10 is a bonus track from an indeterminately-sourced off-air FM capture of Sala Kongresowa, Warsaw PL 10.28.1980

Sonny Rollins - tenor saxophone & Lyricon

Mark Soskin - keyboards

Jerome Harris - bass

Al Foster - drums

pre-FM reels of indeterminate origin, with Track 05 inserted from the 2016 CD "Holding The Stage (Road Shows Vol. 4)" on the fabulous Okeh label

edited, repaired and remastered for unity by EN, May 2026
693 MB FLAC/direct link

I stripped in the released track -- how is the official one from an FM tape, and the rest of it that remains unreleased from the pre-broadcast source? Will the Athletics ever play in Las Vegas before John Fisher's fingertips get fed to the wolverines? Where do babies come from, anyway? -- because who gives a fuck anymore? The bonus track is from about 15 months later and who doesn't wanna hear Sonny play Stevie? That's like Songs In the Key of Right if you ask me.

So that concludes May... ain't the death of irreplaceable icons from a bygone age of musical sophistication that may never happen again grand? I'll be back to tune June with some Brigadoon in a few daze, but you better spend the rest of this weekend, the month and your life on the Sonny side of the street if you know what's good for you.--J.

9.7.1930 - 5.25.2026