Sonny Rollins: Way Out West [CONCORD]

Why you'll love it

This Original Jazz Classics edition is remastered from the Contemporary Records original. It's Rollins' first album with just bass and drums, and it's widely regarded as a high point of his career.

This edition

• Original Jazz Classics series
• Remastered
• Stereo mix

About the album

Sonny Rollins, a New Yorker through and through, made his first trip West in 1957 and decided to dress for it. William Claxton's famous cover shot was Rollins' own idea: Stetson, gun belt, empty holster and a tenor saxophone held at the hip like a six-shooter, out in the desert scrub.

Inside, he did something just as bold. With bassist Ray Brown and drummer Shelly Manne, neither of whom had played with him before, he recorded without a piano or guitar for the first time, leaving his horn plenty of open sky. He takes cowboy songs seriously and with a grin: "I'm an Old Cowhand" trots along to Manne's clip-clop woodblock, and "Wagon Wheels" rolls easy. Duke Ellington's "Solitude" and "There Is No Greater Love" show off his ballad tone, and the title track is a Rollins original.

Producer Lester Koenig wrote that the session started at 3 a.m. to suit everyone's schedules, and at 7 a.m., with half the album done, Rollins announced he was just getting warmed up. Most of us at that hour are still negotiating with the kettle.

Also at Kops: more Sonny Rollins on vinyl · browse Classic Jazz

Tracklist

Listen

On Contemporary / Original Jazz Classics / Concord (cat# OJC-337), a reissue of the 1957 album.