Sonny Rollins - The Bridge (1976 Japanese RCA Stereo Vinyl LP)

Sonny Rollins - The Bridge | Vinyl LP - 1976 Japanese RCA Stereo Reissue (PG-23, Jazz Grand-Prix 1500 series)

The Bridge is one of the most famous comebacks in jazz. At the end of the 1950s Sonny Rollins was already regarded as one of the greatest tenor saxophonists alive, and he responded by walking away. For roughly two years he stopped recording and performing and, living in a small apartment on the Lower East Side, took to practising on the pedestrian walkway of the Williamsburg Bridge, where he could play as loud and as long as he liked. This 1962 album is the sound of his return, and he came back with a new kind of band. Rather than a pianist he chose the guitarist Jim Hall, whose spare, harmonically open playing gave Rollins room to roam. Bob Cranshaw is on bass and Ben Riley on drums for most of the record. The two Rollins originals, the surging title track and the knotty "John S.", show how much he had been thinking, and the standards, "Without A Song" and "You Do Something To Me", are turned inside out with the calm authority of a man with nothing left to prove.

The partnership with Jim Hall lasted only about a year, but it left a deep mark. The pianoless quartet became a model other players followed, and the interplay between the two men, neither crowding the other, is still studied. Rollins would keep reinventing himself for another sixty years, but The Bridge holds a special place as the record where he stepped back into the light on his own terms. George Avakian, who signed Miles Davis to Columbia a generation earlier, wrote the original liner notes.

This copy is the 1976 Japanese stereo reissue on RCA, part of the Jazz Grand-Prix 1500 series, manufactured by RVC Corporation, catalogue number PG-23.