Sonny at the Vanguard

A look back, if not some listening, with a legend.

Sonny Rollins at the Village Vanguard, Nov. 3, 1957. (Francis Wolff / Blue Note)

Memorial Day weekend is in the rearview, receding fast. I hope it brought you a moment of leisure, and some time with family and friends. For me, it also brought an overdue listening session: I finally had the time to settle in and enjoy Blue Note’s Tone Poet vinyl edition of A Night at the Village Vanguard: The Complete Masters.

This of course is a 3-LP set that captures tenor saxophonist Sonny Rollins with a trio in the club on the afternoon and evening of Nov. 3, 1957. I’m sure you know the result, in its original form: A Night at the Village Vanguard, released in ‘58, is an essential cornerstone of any jazz library, the sort of album that exhausts your encomiums. It was also the first album ever made at the Vanguard, kick-starting a venerable custom. (The novelist

Nick Hornby

just started a Substack, and one of his first posts is this brief meditation on the magic of live albums, notably those recorded here.)

Back to the Tone Poet edition, an extraordinary release. Without getting too mired in the technical details, I’ll note that it was made possible by a recent rediscovery of the 7.5ips master tapes — the very tapes that Rudy Van Gelder made with his portable recorder from a table in the club. RVG transferred those tapes to a 15ips master, which was used to make the original album. Joe Harley, the Tone Poet himself, went back to the source to produce this new all-analog version, which was brilliantly mastered by Kevin Gray. The sound quality is nothing short of spectacular.

Blue Note also put a lot of care into the package, which features a glossy booklet with newly unearthed photography by Francis Wolff, as well as a good amount of reading material. There’s a reappraisal by the estimable critic Bob Blumenthal; an excerpt from Saxophone Colossus, the definitive Rollins biography by Aidan Levy; and a soulful new Q&A with Rollins, by Blue Note president Don Was. I was honored to contribute the lead essay, adapted from an article I wrote for NPR Music in 2017, to mark the 60th anniversary of the auspicious gig that yielded this album.

For that piece, I called Sonny to talk about the gig, and what he remembered about it. Over the course of a 40-minute interview, he had a lot to say. Some of those details appear in the story, and I was proud when Levy incorporated them in Saxophone Colossus. But there’s a ton of material from our conversation that didn’t find its way to publication, and as I luxuriated in the music again, I resolved to share it with you.

If you support The Gig as a paid subscriber, you’ll find the full recording of this interview below, with a lightly edited transcript. Sonny was in fine spirits as we talked, and his recollection was sharp. The one thing he couldn’t provide was an up-to-date opinion on the recording itself, since he hadn’t listened back in probably 50 years. At one point I prodded him about this, and it produced an entertaining exchange. Consider it a bite-size preview of what you’ll encounter below.

Before We Dive In:

• Here again is the product page for A Night at the Village Vanguard: The Complete Masters. Remarkably, it’s one of two fantastic late-‘50s trio sets by Sonny Rollins to appear this year; Freedom Weaver: The 1959 European Tour Recordings likewise features the dynamic Pete La Roca on drums, for a portion of its tracks.

• The Tracking Angle, an audiophile magazine, has this review of the Tone Poet edition by Joseph W. Washek, who compared its sound quality with several other vinyl pressings, including a clean original BN 1581. “The sound wasn't just better. It was revelatory,” he writes, adding: “The music was more real, more live than I had ever heard it before.”

• For his time, his generous insights, and his congeniality, I want to extend my deepest gratitude to the great Sonny Rollins. Special thanks as well to his longtime publicist, Terri Hinte, who facilitated this interview (and whose name comes up at the outset of our talk).

If this is your stop, thanks for reading The Gig. Listen to some Sonny Rollins!