When Sonny Rollins Rose in the West: Before he took to the Bridge, the original jazz colossus headed to California (Michael J. Agovino, February 21, 2018, Village Voice)
Much has been made of this album’s cover art — by the noted photographer William Claxton — of city guy Rollins in the Mojave Desert with cowboy hat and holster, armed with his tenor horn, but the backstory to the recording session, detailed in Koenig’s original liner notes included here, is still more revealing. (For fans of Claxton, who did several books of jazz photography, a more conventional portrait of the urbane Rollins, in dark suit and dress shirt, is also included in the new box.) Since all three musicians were performing at night, and Manne and Brown — both of whom, as Koenig noted, were just voted number one in the popularity polls of Down Beat, Metronome, and Playboy — had gigs during the day, the recording session took place between 3 and 7 in the morning.
According to Koenig, the three had never played or recorded together before. Clearly, though, they had an intuitive simpatico. Manne — who also raised horses in his ranch outside L.A. — sets the tone immediately by perfectly mimicking the clippety-clop of a Standardbred’s slow gait in “I’m an Old Cowhand.” Throughout, he and Brown are like two middle-infielders so sound they can turn a double-play blind-folded and still afford to showboat now and again. (A few years ago, when I reported on the bassist Linda May Han Oh and observed her teaching at the Manhattan School of Music, she consistently brought up Brown to her young students. “In terms of fundamentals,” she would tell me later, “if you want to be a solid working bassist and Ray Brown is all you checked out, that would be great.”)
Way Out West is traditional, at least superficially. It has a standard (“There Is No Greater Love” — Rollins wows on both takes) and a piece of Ellingtonia (“Solitude”); two originals by the leader (“Come, Gone” and the title track); and, extending the cover concept, two cow-poke ditties from the old westerns Sonny so enjoyed as a child (“Wagon Wheels” and that opener “I’m an Old Cowhand”), albeit with a modernist, hard-bop spin. But then look at the trio again, and how emphatically untraditional it is: tenor saxophone, bass, drums. It’s a configuration that had hardly been used at that point. As critic Neil Tesser writes in his informative new essay for this re-issue, “Only Lucky Thompson had recorded in this format, and he did so in only one song, in early 1956.”
It was Rollins who established and popularized this combo: He would play with just a drummer and bassist often after Way Out West and again post-hiatus — as would Albert Ayler and Dewey Redman later in the 1960s, David Murray in the ’70s, Joe Henderson in the ’80s, to Mark Turner into this century, Ingrid Laubrock, and now the 26-year-old Kevin Sun, who has absorbed Turner and so much of the jazz canon, and advances the concept in his excellent debut album Trio, just out, in which he’s joined by bassist Walter Stinson and drummer Matt Honor. A sixty-year line, however undulating, from Sonny Rollins to Kevin Sun.
Without the chordal structure of the piano, Way Out West anticipated free jazz. As Rollins told Tesser last year in preparation for this re-issue, “[In the trio] I could have the rhythmic support of a drummer, and then I could have the harmonic support of a bassist. But that’s the thing about it: It wouldn’t be more intrusive on what I might be playing. It’s still very freeing to just have the bass providing harmonic content.”