Sonny Rollins
The Cutting Edge (Milestone/Original Jazz Classics 468)

Primo Sonny Rollins stuff from his Milestone era, recorded in 1974 at the Montreux Jazz Festival. Mainstream jazz at this point was balanced between fusion efforts and the feel-good jazz that has morphed into smooth jazz, with traditional jazz taking a backseat.

On this record, Sonny is playing kind of an update of what he'd been doing for 15 years, with more groove and dare, resulting in an incredibly searing, jubilant sound. Sonny's tenor is bolstered by Stanley Cowell on piano, Bob Cranshaw on electric bass, David Lee on drums, Masuo on guitar, and Mtume on congas and percussion – everyone is playing deeply and this is probably not too far off from what Coltrane might have been doing around the same time.

Rollins never got too far out into the spiritual explorations that Coltrane did, but he had a similar searching quality about his playing that makes almost everything he's ever recorded of interest to hear.

That, and he just plays the saxophone so goddamn well – truly one of the best to ever play the instrument. I actually enjoy his 70s work more than his more well-regarded 50s and 60s stuff, because the type of stuff he was doing was so much less established in the public eye.

The classic-era stuff is great, but there's something to it that is kind of taken for granted; you knew what to expect – a great Sonny Rollins performance – and you got it. The 70s albums can be so hodgepodge, as he tried to connect and reconnect with popular success without compromising his style that much – and that's what really makes these albums fascinating to me.

Like, what happens when a jazz titan forges ahead into an era when younger, hipper cats are storming the charts with new sounds? Sonny, always hipper than anyone, kept on doing his thing, exploring, using his instincts, and moreover, playing that beautiful, sweet horn and playing it with no hesitation.

The cover speaks to what the album is like. Sonny's clad in a golden yellow shirt and Spanish-looking brown vest, with medium-big Afro, three-inch Pharaoh beard, and stage lights glinting off his glasses – a smile beginning to cross his face that looks like satisfaction.

The Cutting Edge is something to be satisfied about. The band plays with incredibly synergy, and Sonny is on 100% all the way through. It really has more of a studio album flow than a live album feel, though these are live recordings. The five cuts are more like standout snapshots from what must have been a truly special night – apparently Sonny didn't take the stage til after midnight, and the tunes all have the vibe of songs that could only arise at that hour.

There's a drunken quality to it, not in terms of being unfocused, but just a feel-good buzz that pervades the set. The disc opens with "The Cutting Edge," which is sort of a cross between a vamp like "The Theme" by Miles Davis and a blaxploitation theme like "Foxy Brown" by Willie Hutch.

This is not Sonny Rollins playing the same old chestnuts. Next comes "To a Wild Rose," a pretty ballad that seems like your usual heart-charging tenor sax standard, but gets raised to a whole new level when the band drops out and Sonny carries the song solo for nearly two minutes – absolutely brilliant. Anyone interested in why Sonny Rollins is so well regarded, check out that solo. Subtle, tasteful, masterful.

"First Moves" follows, a Rollins original that has a great bluesy theme and is played marvelously by the whole band. The Bacharach-David song "A House is Not a Home" comes next, another pop ballad, which is a side of Sonny that pretty much always works.

It's nice that the balance is between these contemporary sounding soul-jazz tunes and these ballads – really provides a well-rounded listening experience. The disc ends with one of the weirdest but coolest things Rollins has ever done – a nearly 15-minute version of "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" featuring bagpipes as the most prominent instrument.

The song begins with about two minutes of bagpipes and sax before the band comes in with a deep groove that must have gotten people to their feet at 2 in the morning or whenever it actually happened. The bagpipes actually sound black, if you can fathom that idea.

It's a wonderful moment and elevates this album to a whole new level. What inspired Sonny to bring a bagpiper to Montreux, I have no idea. But it's a gamble that pays off, and really, how many jazz albums can you name that feature bagpipes at all? That's actually what inspired me to pick up this album in the first place, just the sheer confusion of being unable to imagine how something like that would sound in a jazz context, doing a spiritual, no less.

Does this make Sonny Rollins the coolest guy ever? I don't know, but wherever The Cutting Edge is, Sonny Rollins is bound to be pretty close by.

Loud Bassoon rating scale

Review by Halley Auschwitz