Stanley Crouch has an offline profile of the jazz saxophonist Sonny Rollins in the current New Yorker (online Q&A here). Speaking of Rollins' Freedom Suite:
...Part of its excitement stems from the interplay between Rollins and Roach, which clearly anticipates the avant-garde elasticity of the sixties... Gone are the witty quotations from other tunes and the unexpected shifts of color that Rollins had so often inserted into his playing. The music has a stoic quality, a heroic certitude, and a grand lyricism without being stiff or cold or pretentious.
I don't know why but my interest in Sonny Rollins had greatly dwindled. I saw him at a great Cal Performances concert in the Nineties and I have The Bridge CD but nothing else. Ah, that's it -- all those Rollins LPs I had were never replaced by CDs. Spurred on by the article, I'll rectify this, maybe via eMusic.
Crouch's piece also talks about the negative impact of the competition Rollins felt from the innovative music of Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane. And yet, Coltrane and Rollins were friends with a high regard for each other. I'm always impressed how in the jazz world, at least publicly, there is a sense of community and brotherhood. I have a downbeat magazine of a year or two ago where current jazz stars wrote tributes to jazz legends that meant so much to them. It was quite touching.
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