Sonny Rollins

condition (record/cover): NM / VG+ (light yellowing on back)

Insert and obi included.

1972: the return. After his second great sabbatical - the years of yoga, Indian study and deliberate silence, the most famous pause button in jazz history pressed a second time - Sonny Rollins re-emerges on Milestone with Next Album, and "The Everywhere Calypso" announces within its first bars that the joy survived the retreat completely intact, possibly enlarged. The tenor sound is huger than ever, the phrasing looser and more vocal, the spiritual undercurrent now explicit where it had been implicit; "Skylark" receives one of his great late ballad readings, patient and enormous. Comeback records carry crushing expectations by definition, and this one met them with a shrug, a grin and a groove - the colossus simply resuming, as if the silence had been a long breath. The gateway to the entire second half of an epic career that would run four more decades.

Japanese pressing on Victor, quiet and warm. Welcome back - as if he ever truly left.