Sonny Rollins - The Bridge
"I was getting very famous at the time and I felt I needed to brush up on various aspects of my craft. I felt I was getting too much, too soon, so I said, wait a minute, I'm going to do it my way. I wasn't going to let people push me out there, so I could fall down. I wanted to get myself together, on my own. I used to practice on the Bridge, the Williamsburg Bridge because I was living on the Lower East Side at the time."
Listen for the hard hittin' intro theme of "John S," Billie Holiday's "God Bless the Child," and the title track.
1 comment:
Obviously the romanticism in this record is attractive, given the comparison to his contemporaries at the time who were exploring more "out there" or "new thing" types of songs, playing, and sounds. Sonny's place in the jazz and saxophone lineage is marked since he kind of broke in the mid to late 50's and took a hiatus from '59 to '61 or so - what seems to be the maturation period for the "new thing." He definitely came back in a unique way. In my humble listening, I've never heard any other record sound quite like this one and I think it's the distinctiveness and timing that separates this record from others.
I'm usually not crazy about jazz guitar, but I get the feeling Rollins had a hard time finding a compatible piano player, given his penchant for trio settings. Jim Hall on the guitar works great. It's almost like an organish sounding rhythm, lots of vamps, contrasted by single note melodic lines, harmonies, and solos.
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