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SONNY ROLLINS
WITHOUT A SONG: THE 9/11 CONCERT
BY JON GARELICK
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Without a Song may eventually be recalled more for the circumstances of its recording than for its music: from his Lower Manhattan apartment, Sonny Rollins watched the Twin Towers fall six blocks away. Four days later, he played a concert at Berklee. Inherent in this document of the show are all the contradictions and frustrations of latter-day Rollins. Despite a string of studio masterpieces, it’s long been the tenet of fans that you have to catch Sonny live; yet his live shows are notoriously inconsistent. So you wait, as Sonny tears into his calypsos and standards, with his sandblast tone and iron-jaw articulation, pounding and pushing the melodies, hoping they’ll yield whatever it is he’s looking for. Meanwhile, the trombonist plays too long, and the rhythm section is boring. Sonny does have his moments, when he explodes the harmonies and the rhythms of the tune, speaking in tongues. And at the nine-minute mark of the original calypso "Global Warming," he begins to levitate, floating through all ranges, tones, and keys into that great pan-tonal beyond, as rough and bruising as one of his younger former practice partners, David Ware. For a while at least, maybe he’s found it: something he doesn’t know how to play. Sonny Rollins | Tanglewood Jazz Festival, Lenox | Sept 4 | 2 pm | 888.266.1200.
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