Sonny Rollins

Featuring: Max Roach

condition (record/cover): NM / EX

December 1955: Sonny Rollins emerging from his first retreat with the authority that would define the golden run - Worktime!, with Ray Bryant, George Morrow and Max Roach driving behind him, and the title announcing the work ethic that was about to produce two years of unbroken masterpieces. "There's No Business Like Show Business" gets famously dismantled and rebuilt in real time, Broadway corn transformed into thematic improvisation of total logic - the Rollins method announcing itself whole: take the most unlikely material, respect it completely, and reveal the architecture nobody knew it had. Roach and Rollins together formed one of the great tenor-drums conversations of the era, fresh from the Brown-Roach quintet's front line and rhythm chair, and it crackles across every track here with familial ease. The doorway to the miraculous 1956-57 stretch stands open on this record.

Prestige pressing of a hard bop cornerstone with the ideas of a whole revolution folded quietly inside it.