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Sonny Rollins
SWEET INSPIRATION



Who knows what was running through Sonny Rollins’s mind. About midway through his almost two-hour concert at the Berklee Performance Center last Saturday night, he dropped his band and proceeded, a cappella, into a ballad. One could make out a chord progression, a fragment of a tune, and then came a rush of notes. The tune emerged, then fragments of other melodies came into sight and disappeared before one could name them, then fragments of a calypso (he’d just finished one and would play two more before the concert was over). Then there was a little staccato figure in the upper register and a double-time rush to the bottom, then a variety of fast and slow passages all tumbled together. This was the speaking-in-tongues Rollins, the Rollins who seems to be channeling every tune he’s ever heard or played in a single solo, the Rollins whom fans of this 74-year-old tenor-saxophonist and jazz giant have come to crave. And then he took the horn out of his mouth, threw a hand up in the air, and shouted, "Somebody shoot me right now!" He dove back into his solo and brought in the band to finish with a half-chorus of "A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square."

Rollins has said that his longest solos are sometimes born out of frustration — he’s playing not because he’s inspired but because he can’t find inspiration and he’s looking for it. It’s one of the reasons his fans return year after year to his concerts. You may or may not like his band, you may be frustrated that three out of the eight tunes he plays are calypsos. But Sonny’s searching becomes the point. At Berklee, he was forever restless, moving around the stage as he played, often coming right out to the lip past the monitors. If trombonist Clifton Anderson was soloing, Rollins was moving to the beat, shaking a raised hand. He looked great — in shades, with full gray beard and steel-gray hair brushed straight back, wearing a black opened zipper jacket with a white Mercury wing on each breast, black pants, and black-and-white sneakers.

So who knows why he wanted someone to shoot him? He couldn’t find what he was looking for? And who knows why he gave percussionist Kimati Dinizulu his first extended solo on the ballad-tempo 3/4 time "Moon of Manakoora" — a recipe, it would seem, for disaster, or at least torpor. (Dinizulu recovered with some dynamic playing on "Global Warming.") Or why he programs all those calypsos when their rhythms just seem to get him — and the band — in a rut? At this point in his life, he seems determined to find what he’s looking for on his own. Finishing "Tenor Madness" with a coda from "Easter Parade," he guaranteed that most of us will be there to watch.

BY JON GARELICK

Issue Date: April 16 - 22, 2004
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