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From album
Saxophone Colossus
Sonny Rollins · 1957 · Track 2
Details
Duración6:29
ÁlbumSaxophone Colossus
Año1957
ISRCUSFI85600002
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The story behind
Sonny Rollins recorded it his own way on *Saxophone Colossus*: with a saxophone solo that seems to breathe just like the piece. It’s not a piece that’s content to sound pretty; in those six-plus minutes, the instrument stretches, contracts, and even whispers. The original melody, written decades earlier for a film that never used it, found in Rollins an interpreter who took it beyond what Don Raye and Gene de Paul imagined. It’s no coincidence that this version appears in the Real Book as one of those pieces every jazz musician has to play at least once.
The album was recorded in a single day in 1956, in a small studio in Hackensack, where Rudy Van Gelder captured the raw, direct sound of Rollins and his quartet. What’s striking is that just four days after the session that year, two of the musicians who accompanied him—Clifford Brown and Richie Powell—died in a car accident. The recording stands as a testament to what might have been, but also as a document of how jazz lives on even when life is cut short. The 6:29 runtime isn’t a minor detail: it’s the time Rollins takes to explore every twist of the harmony, as if each note were a different landscape.