In this extract from Aidan Levy's new biography Saxophone Colossus: The Life & Music Of Sonny Rollins, we learn about the formation of the great saxophonist's quartet with Don Cherry, Bob Cranshaw and Billy Higgins, and the recording of its 1963 album Our Man In Jazz.

On Sunday 8 July, Sonny performed at the Newport Jazz Festival for the first time since 1958. Even Max Roach and Charles Mingus, who organised the Newport Rebels, performed with their groups, alongside Coleman Hawkins, Roy Eldridge, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Thelonious Monk and Aretha Franklin. Sonny was also part of a panel discussion called “Jazz and the Church” with Revs John Gensel, Norman O’Connor and Eugene S Callender as well as gospel singer Clara Ward, with attorney Maxwell T Cohen, known for his fight against the New York cabaret-card policy, moderating.

Back in New York, Sonny “revamped” the band, as he wrote on 12 July to Gertrude Abercrombie. He decided to dispense with any chordal instruments and amicably parted ways with [guitarist] Jim Hall. The new group was [bassist] Cranshaw, [drummer] Billy Higgins and [trumpeter] Don Cherry; with Higgins and Cherry part of Ornette Coleman’s groundbreaking quartet, this was Sonny’s foray into the New Thing. Sonny and Cherry liberated each other in different ways. The long commute to Cherry’s job as a busboy with United Airlines made it impossible for him to even practice.

Cherry “is a very enthusiastic young chap and he furnishes me with that word again – incentive and inspiration,” Sonny wrote. Two weeks later, Sonny wrote Abercrombie again. He was pleased with the new group and was progressing musically and spiritually. He had acquired a writing desk for his correspondence and composition, as well as Bob Hoffman’s Functional Isometric Contraction apparatus, and was staying away from cigarettes. “My Rosicrucian studies are progressing beautifully,” he wrote, “and I am now up to the degree which reveals ways and means of ‘releasing’ the all-wise ‘master within’ (if you follow me).”

From 3 to 30 July, Sonny was booked at the Village Gate, with Don Cherry replacing Jim Hall in the second week. The club was a cavernous basement space in Greenwich Village. Once a commercial laundry and then a storage space, it was beneath the Mills Hotel, a flophouse with “people throwing bottles and dirt and worse than that, faeces and urination,” said Art D’Lugoff, “but that was the price I paid for paying a low rent.” The Village Gate would be the recording studio for Sonny’s next RCA album, Our Man In Jazz. One by-product of simultaneously gaining more artistic control and more commercial pressure was that Sonny developed a growing anxiety around the recording studio that he eventually characterised as a phobia. In order to ensure that Sonny met the contractual obligation to release a third album by the end of 1962, George Avakian suggested that the next album be recorded live. In response, D’Lugoff had recently installed a high-end sound system to streamline the process; RCA would be the first to try it out. They scheduled the recording dates for 27–30 July, which would give Sonny enough time to break in the new band and the label enough time to get the right material.

The album posed challenges. As much as the idea was market tested, Sonny’s long-playing explorations often exceeded the limited capacity of an LP. Furthermore, the music itself would be more radical than The Bridge or What’s New and even less conducive to mainstream radio play. [Ornette Coleman’s] The Shape Of Jazz To Come was a hit for Atlantic, though, and now Sonny had half of Ornette’s band. And Sonny’s band had to master “the reading of minds,” recalled Billy Higgins, Sonny being “one of the most rhythmically original players... you can’t take anything for granted playing with him.”

Sonny felt Higgins was ready for mind reading. “Billy had a grasp of the big picture,” Sonny said. “It wasn’t just about what was happening here in the song or there in the song. He seemed to have that understanding of where the whole thing should be, and that would be throughout the entire piece we were playing. In his mind, there was a plan.”

Sonny had guidelines for collective improvisation. He referred to it not as “improvised music”, he wrote, but as “Logical Music”. The “format of composition” was essentially a round-robin of conversations in duo, with a third and fourth voice entering to create a “dissonance” that advanced the musical discourse.

1. All begin together
2. Throughout composition 2 instruments play together. eg Sonny + Bob play together after start. Then Sonny + Bob are joined for a dissonance by Donald which then leads to the Donald Sonny duet which incidentally should suggest a different timbre than the dissonant ‘carry over’ 3 part section!
3. (Billy bears a strong resemblance to Bud Powell.)
After duet of S+D, B joins in for a TRIO which should have a HARMONIC sound rather than a dissonance sound.

Being on the same wavelength was paramount. Sonny wrote out a set of “rules”. Each set began “away from the bandstand”; they entered the stage in medias res.

After finding our KEY/MOD/GROOVE/, through a series of statements we gradually involve ourselves with the rhythm and the sound and make our way to the bandstand in a rhythmic manner. Almost a DANCE! For after all do we not do everything in rhythm?

The key was unity, as Sonny explained in all caps: “ALL SHOULD HAVE WATCHES SET TO THE MINUTE AT THE BEGINNING OF EVERY NIGHT. THE START OF A SET WILL BE ON SIGNAL OF AN EXACT MOMENT —THIS WAY WE WILL ALL BE READY TO ANSWER EACH OTHER IF the situation so necessitates — which at the beginnings it will call for this conversation to find the MODE which we all hear.”

Bob Prince was co-producer again, but the engineer for the album, Paul Goodman, had never worked with Sonny. Complicating matters, it was not a quiet crowd. “We got quite a few complaints,” said the emcee at the Village Gate. “Respect your musicians and your neighbours. Please, listen instead of talking. And now, Sonny Rollins and Company!”

Our Man In Jazz sounded more like spoken dialogue than anything Sonny had ever recorded, with pregnant pauses, interruptions, and a kind of rhythmic punctuation. These improvised scenes took place over three hour-long sets a night, opposite Mose Allison’s trio, and for a four-day period at the end of July, RCA recorded all of them. On the first set, 27 July, they played a 25 1/2 minute “Oleo”, with Sonny playing in and out of metronomic time, shifting tempo from a brisk gallop to half-time, growling, playing multiphonics, then superimposing a blues onto rhythm changes. Anything was possible as long as it was “logical”.

“My heroes usually played a song without any deviation,” Sonny later told saxophonist Jon Irabagon, adding: “The spirit of the way Charlie Parker played suggested freedom. And therefore, the next generation after him and so on would be leading in that direction... It is trying to push the tradition forward and still be in the tradition.” In short, building a bridge.

The songs flowed into each other with no break in between – everything was a coda to a coda. The idiosyncratic repertoire spanned the Great American Songbook to the avant garde, and Sonny had recorded much of it previously. There was the Afro-diasporic “Don’s Tune” by Cherry. This was followed by a version of Sonny’s “Doxy” that segued into Gershwin’s “Love Walked In”, with a cadenza by Sonny in the middle that quoted “Someone To Watch Over Me”, culminating in a bluesy take on Chopin’s “Funeral March”, a common reference for Sonny, who never hesitated to laugh in the face of death. Sonny twisted and turned the melody of “There Will Never Be Another You” into a 30 minute improvisation that ended in “The Blacksmith Blues” a la Bing Crosby, which culminated in a far-reaching cadenza with Don Cherry until they came back to “Another You”. There was a 24 minute workout on “Tune Up”, a radical departure from the version on Newk’s Time, that segued into “Don’t Stop The Carnival”, interspersed with quotes from “Bemsha Swing” that seamlessly became a blues shuffle. They played Mercer and Kern’s “Dearly Beloved”, ending with a quote from Monk’s “52nd Street Theme”, and Irving Berlin’s “Alexander’s Ragtime Band”. Sonny was building a bridge from the past to the future.

This bridge could not possibly fit on one LP. Side one was taken up entirely by the 27 July “Oleo” (longer versions were taped). Side two came from the first set on 28 July. “That was a tough album to work on because the best takes were very long,” recalled Avakian. “We needed to be able to get something between, say, 18 and 22 minutes a side. It was very hard to do.” They cut about 40 seconds from “Doxy” to fit it on side two. To round out the album, “Dearly Beloved” was edited down from 18 minutes to eight.

The album was part of the 20 album Our Man Series released in 1963 on RCA Victor, as though the label was a news organisation with international correspondents. Ray Ellis was Our Man On Broadway; Henry Mancini was Our Man In Hollywood; Al Hirt in New Orleans; Chet Atkins in Nashville; Perez Prado in Latin America; Paul Anka was around the world. Sonny was the only man not in a geographic location and the only Black man. RCA evidently had no women anywhere.

Our Man In Jazz was another polarising album; not everyone understood the logic behind Sonny’s “Logical Music”. Pete Welding gave it three stars in Down Beat, Sonny’s worst review in a decade. “Much of it is just plain boring,” he wrote. “It just goes on and on.” Conversely, the album was listed in the Cash Box “Jazz Picks of the Week” as having “plenty of sales potential”. The poet, jazz critic, performer, and eventual Black Arts Movement progenitor Amiri Baraka (then LeRoi Jones) wrote in the avant garde journal Kulchur, “This is new, friends... Assassins is what I have been calling this group privately. The Assassins.”

Excerpted from Saxophone Colossus: The Life And Music Of Sonny Rollins by Aidan Levy. © 2022. Available from Hachette Books, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

Read Phil Freeman's review of the book in The Wire 466. Wire subscribers can read the review and the magazine in full online via the digital archive.