Sonny Rollins - Saxophone Colossus (1975 Japanese Prestige Mono LP)

Vinyl: NM
Sleeve: EX
Obi: EX

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Sonny Rollins - Saxophone Colossus | Vinyl LP - 1975 Japanese Prestige Mono Reissue (SMJ-6501(M), Prestige Jazz Masterpiece Series No. 1, Victor Musical Industries, Inc.)

Sonny Rollins recorded Saxophone Colossus in a single afternoon on June 22, 1956 at Rudy Van Gelder's studio in Hackensack. Tommy Flanagan, Douglas Watkins and Max Roach made up the rhythm section. The album was released by Prestige in September 1956 and has not been out of print since.

Three of the five tracks are Rollins originals. "St. Thomas" draws on a West Indian folk song, "Hold Him Joe," that Rollins had heard from his mother, who was born in the Virgin Islands — he had played a version of it in his early career and returned to it for this session, giving it the calypso lilt and long stop-time saxophone exposition that made the recorded version famous. "Strode Rode" is an uptempo blues named for his friend and fellow musician Leroy Strode. "Blue Seven" is a slow twelve-bar blues in B-flat — Rollins improvises around the head's motif throughout, developing rather than departing from it.

The two standards are "You Don't Know What Love Is," the Don Raye and Gene DePaul ballad from 1941, taken at an unhurried pace that sits between the energy of the two fast pieces on Side A, and "Moritat" — the original German title for the Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht "Mack the Knife" from The Threepenny Opera (1928), which Rollins plays hard and rhythmically before Bobby Darin had made the song familiar to pop audiences.

This 1975 Japanese mono pressing is Prestige Jazz Masterpiece Series No. 1, manufactured by Victor Musical Industries from the original Prestige master. It carries the Swing Journal Seal of Approval.