Sonny Rollins

Featuring: Herbie Hancock

condition (record/cover): NM / EX+

Insert included. No obi.

1964, from the fascinating RCA years: Sonny Rollins takes on the standard repertoire with Jim Hall among the guests - reuniting the partnership that made The Bridge one of the decade's landmarks, the guitar's crystalline logic once again the perfect mirror for the tenor's restless interrogations. The RCA period catches Rollins at his most experimental inside conventional frames: tempos float and dissolve, phrases end in question marks, familiar tunes get cross-examined rather than recited, sometimes abandoned mid-thought for a better idea arriving. Critics of the day were puzzled, wanting the fifties colossus back; posterity has been much kinder, hearing instead a master refusing his own formulas in real time - which is, of course, exactly what made him the colossus in the first place.

Japanese RCA pressing, quiet and detailed. For those who know Rollins only through the fifties triumphs, the sixties records are a rich second country with its own strange weather - and this is a fine port of entry.