Sonny Rollins' East Broadway Run Down from 1966. Rollins is backed on this record by John Coltrane's rhythm section (Jimmy Garrison on bass and Elvin Jones on drums) and accompanied by Freddie Hubbard on trumpet, but it's mostly Rollins sound on tenor sax that you'll probably remember most from this recording, evoking as it does the sound of syncopated taxi horns and downtown NYC traffic.
The review on AllMusic by Steven McDonald describes it nicely:
Around the ten-minute mark of the title track [actually the 10:50 mark], things get very interesting indeed -- moody and spooky as Jimmy Garrison hangs on a single note, making his bass throb along while Elvin Jones widens the space and fires drum and cymbal hits in all directions. . . it's a supreme moment of tension-building, one that gets repeated after Rollins and trumpeter Freddie Hubbard restate the theme in unison. This is the sound of Rollins' group working in unity.
Later in the piece, it sounds like Rollins is blowing through just the mouthpiece of his instrument, bypassing the tenor sax altogether for something more direct and immediate.
East Broadway Run Down is arguably Rollins most avant, free-jazz recording, and also the last record he released before taking a six-year hiatus from music. During that break, he visited Jamaica for the first time and spent several months studying yoga, meditation, and Eastern philosophies at an ashram in India. Rollins is probably most famous, though, for an earlier break from recording that was memorably documented in a television commercial for Pioneer music that aired frequently in the late '70s. The Pioneer commercial was almost all most people knew about Sonny Rollins at the time ("Yeah, that Brooklyn Bridge guy").
As of this writing, Sonny Rollins is alive and well and living in Woodstock, New York, one of the few remaining Masters of jazz still among us.
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