1957 · Album
Saxophone Colossus
Recorded June 22, 1956 · Prestige · Produced by Bob Weinstock
One Day, Four Sides, Everything Changed
Recorded four days before tragedy struck, this session captures a band completely in the moment.
There are albums that get called essential so often the word stops meaning anything. This is one where the label actually holds up. Saxophone Colossus (1956) was cut in a single June session at Rudy Van Gelder's studio in Hackensack, New Jersey, with Sonny Rollins leading a quartet that included Tommy Flanagan on piano, Doug Watkins on bass, and Max Roach on drums. Rollins was a working member of the Clifford Brown/Max Roach Quintet at the time, and the session happened just four days before Brown and fellow bandmate Richie Powell were killed in a car accident. None of that weight is audible on the record — what you hear instead is a group playing with total confidence and ease.
The album opens with "St. Thomas," a calypso-tinged melody that Rollins builds into something playful and inventive, and it remains one of the most immediately likable tracks in all of hard bop. "Moritat" (the theme from Threepenny Opera, better known as Mack the Knife) gets a brisk, no-nonsense reading. The ballad "You Don't Know What Love Is" shows a quieter side — Rollins stretching notes out, Flanagan comping with restraint. And then there is "Blue 7," the side that jazz musicians still talk about: a slow blues where Rollins develops his improvisation from a handful of motivic cells in a way that feels almost compositional. The critic Gunther Schuller wrote extensively about it, and for good reason.
What makes this recording distinct is how unhurried it feels without ever going slack. Roach and Watkins lock in without overplaying, giving Rollins space to think out loud. If you are new to jazz saxophone, this is a genuinely great place to start. If you already know the music, you probably return to it anyway.
Who's playing
Where next?
More by Sonny Rollins
All 23 albums →
The musicians on this record
Deeds, Not Words 1958
Max Roach
plays drums (drum set) here
plays drums (drum set) here
Overseas 1958
Tommy Flanagan
plays piano here
plays piano here
