Saxophone Colossus
Artist:  Sonny Rollins
Label:  Prestige / Essential Jazz Classics 
Time:   10 Tracks / 73 mins
 
Saxophone Colossus was Rollins’ most lauded disc of the mid-fifties, but it is not all you get here. His complete previous disc, Work Time, is added as a bonus.
 
As much as a saxophone-led quartet can do, the 40-minute Colossus shows a variety of styles from the perky and memorable traditional calypso “St. Thomas,” through the sumptuously mellow – but never bland – standard ballad “You Don’t Know What Love Is,” to the hard bop of “Strode Road,” named after a Chicago jazz room in which trumpeter Freddie Webster died. The piece still sounds contemporary. The second original side comprised two long tracks: the ten-minute “Mack the Knife” (known here as “Moritat”), which has a darker edge than we are used to hearing; and the longer, improvised “Blue 7,” with its bluesy feel and sophisticated solos.
 
Rollins is pushing the genre forward with this disc, something it is easy to miss from a twenty-first century perspective, now that we are used to the changes that he helped to forge. His tone is warm and light, but a touch less breezy than, say, Stan Getz. The music is highly accessible and popular, without being populist.
 
Like several of the great jazz albums of the ‘fifties, its strength is in the organic whole-band performance. Drummer Max Roach was Rollins’ employer at the time and they have a great understanding with each other; but the whole quartet is cohesive.  
 
The 32-minute bonus album was recorded a year earlier, but comes afterwards on disc. Ironically, Work Time takes away a little from Saxophone Colossus by its lesser character and so dilutes its impact slightly. This section doesn’t have quite the sensitivity of mood found on other fifty-year-old classics from that time, such as Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue and Sketches of Spain; neither does it have quite the variety of sound, there being too little piano for these ears’ liking. 
 
That said, the nearly-ten-minute blues-based “There are Such Things” and the strong, classic jazz of “Paradox” show it to be Rollins’ preparation for the structure of Colossus. Rollins was a fan of Irving Berlin tracks (his follow-up album to Colossus would include the short “Count your Blessings, Instead of Sheep”) and Work Time has “There’s No Business Like Show Business.”
 
Saxophone Colossus is a disc rightfully and universally regarded as huge in its field, with a whole extra album tacked on. This has to be excellent value. 
 
Derek Walker

Saxophone Colossus 
Work Time