Sonny Rollins

Tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins entered the world of top-level professional jazz in 1949, as the bebop revolution ignited four years earlier - a movement that brought a fundamental turning point in the history of the genre - was winding down. Following collaborations of great significance (Miles Davis, Fats Navarro, J.J. Johnson etc.), he embarked on a solo career, taking a leading role in jazz's next transformation: the birth of hard bop.
His earliest work, alongside stints as a sideman on two Thelonious Monk albums, quickly won widespread approval from both audiences and critics. The ground he had already covered successfully put the American artist in an ideal position for his creative breakthrough, which took place over 1955 and 1957 and continued through the spring of 1958.
In this period, undoubtedly the finest this great musician ever experienced, he recorded many excellent hard-bop albums, including several masterpieces still remembered today as milestones of jazz ("Tenor Madness", "Saxophone Colossus", "Sonny Rollins Vol. 1", "Sonny Rollins Vol. 2", "A Night At The Village Vanguard" etc.).

It's within this musical context that we find "Newk's Time", recorded on the afternoon of September 22, 1957, and running for around 34 minutes. The album takes its name from one of Rollins' nicknames, "Newk", given to him because of his striking resemblance to a 1950s American baseball player: Don Newcombe.
Rollins' tenor saxophone style grows out of bebop, retaining its incisiveness and energetic drive, but between 1953 and '56 it evolves into something more direct, shorn of ornate flourishes. Here, the sense of organization he brings to his solos is clearly audible, holding together highly compelling ideas steeped in disciplined imagination. These ideas are carved out by the solid, faintly rough timbre of his horn, producing a charge of fiery drive that's bound to delight the listener and spur reflection in equal measure.
On this occasion, three talented jazz musicians roughly the same age as the twenty-seven-year-old saxophonist join him: Doug Watkins (bass), Wynton Kelly (piano) and Philly Joe Jones (drums). The session, produced by Alfred Lion for Blue Note (with the miraculous Rudy Van Gelder on engineering duties), brings together a quartet with an instrumentation typical of the era, ideal for fluidly conveying Rollins' gripping musical thinking.

A testament to the sheer caliber of the three sidemen is the artistic background each had built before entering the studio to record this album.
Watkins had been part of the original lineup of the Jazz Messengers since 1954, before lending his talents to a string of great hard bop LPs credited to (among others): Jackie McLean, Hank Mobley, Lee Morgan, Donald Byrd, John Coltrane, Horace Silver, etc. He would continue down this electrifying path into the early 1960s.
A pianist for Dinah Washington and Dizzy Gillespie, Kelly too took part in a great number of celebrated hard bop records between the mid-1950s and 1965, while also earning a formidable reputation as a leader in his own right during this same period.
Finally, Jones arrived at these sessions while still a member of Miles Davis' outstanding first quintet (1955-58), and just one week after taking part in John Coltrane's "Blue Train". Beyond these landmark moments, the drummer can be found on a wealth of superb hard bop LPs through to '63, going on to maintain a solid standard throughout the rest of the 1960s.
All three musicians had already worked with Rollins before. Jones and Kelly had crossed paths with the leader of this session back in his bebop days, playing respectively on "Tenor Madness" (1956) and "Sonny Rollins Vol. 1" (1957). As for Watkins, his name appears in the official credits of "Saxophone Colossus" (1956).

The experience the three musicians had built up, both under Rollins' direction and more broadly, proves far from negligible to the success of these recordings. Indeed, the ease of dialogue and rhythmic rapport developed by the group assembled for "Newk's Time" are plain to hear. This allows the arrangements to embrace unusual experimental touches, even as that experimentation stays firmly within the bounds of hard bop. Reshaping the vocabulary typically used within this jazz style is something Rollins invests a great deal of energy into. He successfully takes on the difficult task of inventing new modes of expression while still working within an established structure (theme-improvisations-theme).
The record's underlying thrust can be summed up in exactly these terms: pushing hard bop forward, both in the shaping of certain passages and in the solos, sharpening certain traits and shrewdly recombining its constituent elements with inventive flair.
This comes through vividly in the use of rhythm as the driving element in an imaginative tenor sax solo passage ("Tune Up", from 2:01 to 2:30). Here a tight, almost percussive cadence replaces chords as the basis for improvisation, underscoring with elegant irony Rollins' knack for conjuring up unusual and surprising musical shapes. Similarly, the saxophonist's notes stretch out, sliding voluptuously for a few seconds during the dynamic solo phrasing of "Blues For Philly Joe" (from 1:21 to 1:31). A device also used in "Surrey With The Fringe On Top", where part of the theme is repeated over and over, its notes stretched and smoothed out, to shape the opening solo (from 0:57 to 3:21).

It isn't only the details within Rollins' solos that determine the innovative edge of the album's six tracks. The instrumentation, for instance, is further pared down to just bass, drums and tenor sax for the first minute and a half of "Tune Up", while "The Surrey With The Fringe On Top" is played entirely as an urgent two-way conversation between the leader and the drums.
Worth noting, too, is how the theme of "Asiatic Raes" is evenly split between two distinct moods: Latin-tinged in the first half, more straightforward in the second. This division is then echoed within the opening solo (Rollins'), which unfolds over a distinctly exotic backing until the 1:23 mark, when a more conventionally flowing rhythm takes over.
The musical departures just described run through all six tracks on the record, on which fast tempos predominate ("Tune Up", "Asiatic Raes", "Surrey With The Fringe On Top" and "Blues For Philly Joe"), leaving less room for the medium-tempo numbers ("Wonderful! Wonderful!" and "Namely You").
The absence of slow numbers and ballads is mirrored in the consistently superb quality of Rollins' solos. They plunge with striking intensity into the blues of "Blues For Philly Joe", glide through "Wonderful! Wonderful!" with intricate nonchalance, set "Tune Up" alight with playful intensity, and cut through "Asiatic Raes" with a pleasingly uneven resolve.

As he often did in his work, Rollins chooses to rework eccentric compositions drawn from the refined pop of Broadway musicals ("The Surrey With The Fringe On Top" and "Namely You") or from 1950s pop songs ("Wonderful! Wonderful!").
In this way, "Namely You" and "Wonderful! Wonderful!" are transformed from catchy but otherwise fairly ordinary tunes into clever reinterpretations of their own main melodies, a hallmark of Sonny Rollins' art. What's more, he punctuates the simple themes of these two pieces with brief but daring improvised forays, unexpectedly bursting out of the melodic frameworks on which the themes themselves are built. The treatment given to these two pop songs highlights the saxophonist's inquisitive nature, always ready to look around him in order to reinterpret and update musical trends from different eras and contexts.
A completely different story needs to be told for "Surrey With The Fringe on Top", also drawn from a Broadway score (the 1943 show "Oklahoma!"), but one which Rollins treats with far greater ambition and daring. The track, six minutes and thirty seconds long, represents the high-water mark of "Newk's Time" and is played by the leader accompanied solely by drums, a bold statement of experimentation unheard-of in 1957. The harmonic space left empty by the absence of piano is filled by the brilliant shimmer of Jones' ride cymbal, while the bass is replaced by the steady strikes of the snare drum: a fascinating blend of rhythm and inventiveness. Although the saxophone remains the center of attention, with its ingenious and endlessly stimulating twists and turns, the piece becomes a stage that Rollins raises up for the drummer, who delivers here one of the finest performances of his career, laying down a driving percussive pattern that is as steady and flowing as it is a source of thrilling sonic jolts.
This stripped-down, experimental instrumentation, difficult to handle but masterfully pulled off on "Surrey With The Fringe On Top", would be taken up years later by avant-garde and free jazz (John Coltrane, Archie Shepp, Sam Rivers, etc.). The idea Rollins conceived for this track thus injects fresh creative energy into hard bop, while at the same time providing material useful to the invention of new forms of jazz. "Surrey With The Fringe On Top", moreover, contains a series of exchanges between saxophone and drums (from 3:23 to 5:01), technically known as trading fours, also found in three other compositions: "Tune up" (from 2:17 to 3:05), "Wonderful! Wonderful!" (from 3:50 to 5:03) and "Blues For Philly Joe" (from 5:06 to 6:05). This is a variation introduced into the sequence of improvisations, in which quick solos from two (or three) instruments alternate with one another in rapid succession (the space occupied being, precisely, four bars, though it can occasionally vary). In this soloistic setup every note counts and carries weight, given how little time there is to shape one's solo. On the album, Rollins and Jones make frequent and brilliant use of this device, treating us to a tight run of thrilling, whirling miniature solos and heightening the dynamism of the music as a whole.

Rounding out the tracklist are "Tune Up" (by Miles Davis, already recorded by the trumpeter back in '53), "Asiatic Raes" (by Kenny Dorham, who would record it only two years later under the title "Lotus Blossom") and "Blues For Philly Joe" (the only piece written by Rollins). The three tracks showcase Watkins' skill at staying in the background of the arrangements with firm discretion and hard-working ability, chiefly by laying down a walking bass line to striking effect. The bassist deploys this technique, a hard bop staple, varying its elastic pace also to build the two fleeting, nimble solos he plays in the closing bars of "Tune Up" and "Blues For Philly Joe".
Similarly, on the three compositions mentioned, Kelly stands out for the lively solos he lays across the piano keys with a refinement born of experience. While in "Blues For Philly Joe" the blues underpinning his solo section is lightened by the pianist's spirited verve, in "Tune Up" and "Asiatic Raes" what stands out is his use of pauses and gaps between bars, immediately followed by engaging runs of notes with a lively, pleasingly rounded tone. The accompaniment that Watkins and Kelly manage to weave enriches and gives body to the sound of the six tracks, blending into them and coloring them with nuances that are almost imperceptible yet meaningful, carefully tended even in the most animated moments. Philly Joe Jones favors here a driving yet at the same time very direct style, one that perfectly supports the saxophone while still showing a notable degree of spirited independence. His rapport with Rollins on "Newk's Time" comes close to the one that already existed between the saxophonist and Max Roach, the drummer this session's leader favored on many albums throughout the 1950s, though here with a more forceful and exciting edge. Worth remembering is Jones' solo on "Asiatic Raes", during which he writes dense, frenetic paragraphs on the snare drum and separates them with line breaks marked by hits on the tom and bass drum.
In keeping with the stylistic conventions of hard bop, which by '57 had firmly established itself as the dominant jazz genre, the introductory and closing themes of the pieces take on special importance on this LP. The one Rollins wrote for "Blues For Philly Joe" stands out for its buoyant, elaborate structure, which retraces its own steps before pressing on through angular turns. A musical theme that, while granting little to catchy, straightforward melody — to the point of sounding like an improvisation in itself — exemplifies, on behalf of the whole album, how the saxophonist's intellectual bent translates into an idiom that is instantly understandable and gripping.

In short, "Newk's Time" doesn't rank among Sonny Rollins' best-known and most highly regarded works, even as it comes close enough to closely mirror their image. Even so, it earns itself a place of prestige within hard bop, and within jazz more broadly. Worth celebrating in particular for the innovative charge of certain arrangements, the record as a whole is very fine and rewarding, even if there exist (a few) even more vivid testaments to this great saxophonist's art.

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20/03/2026