Listening
To listen to this album for free, visit Way Out West @ Last.fm. To play a song, click the round play button to the left of the song name. Despite the strange ordering of track numbers on that website, all of the songs are available. They’ve just left off some alternate takes.
Nitty Gritty (Reference Section)
Recorded March 7, 1957. Line-up: Sonny Rollins (tenor sax), Ray Brown (bass), Shelley Manne (drums).
My Thoughts
In the week since I’ve started this blog, I’ve been pretty lost as to where I might begin. Folks, we’ve got A LOT of exciting ground to cover!
I chose this album for a few reasons. First, I wanted something that could be interesting for a large majority of my readership. I’m assuming that most of my readership knows little about jazz beyond having heard a taste of some of the biggest names (Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Duke Ellington, and if you have been involved in the Swarthmore music department over the course of the last few years, Thelonious Monk). For those folks, Sonny Rollins is hopefully new. For those of you who know more about jazz, you are likely to know Sonny Rollins, and even this album in particular. My feeling, though, is that this album is often overlooked. I hope that whether or not you know this album, it won’t be on your most-played list.
A second reason that I chose this album is that it goes against one of my personal biggest complaints about jazz. When I listen to too much jazz, I tend to think that it all sounds more or less the same. Truthfully, compared to some other genres, the stylistic range of jazz is a bit limited. Take musical theater as an example from the other end of the spectrum. Sondheim, for instance, composed one show that uses elements of Gregorian chant as well as Victorian era parlor music (Sweeney Todd), another that uses elements of many American folk traditions (Assassins), another that uses elements of ancient Japanese music (Pacific Overtures), and another that uses ballroom music (A Little Night Music). Most jazz, on the other hand, sounds like… well… jazz! It is often hard to identify a musical setting outside of that of a smokey jazz club (there are, of course, exceptions—I’m thinking of Duke’s Far East Suite, for instance). NOT SO, however, with Way Out West, which attempts to set its jazz sound in, well, the Old West. A large part of this can be attributed to the drummer, Shelley Manne, who imitates the sound of a covered wagon on the rims of his drums, in particular on the songs I’m Just an Old Cowhand (From the Rio Grande) and Wagon Wheels.
A final reason that I chose this album is because it is from my favorite sub-genre of jazz (hard bop). In the mid-’50s, there were a group of jazz musicians playing jazz that was quite simply great. The sound is characterized by a small ensemble (typically a quartet) that seems to strive for little beyond great music. The periods in jazz before and after the mid-’50s (bebop and free jazz, respectively) saw larger scale boundaries being pushed. Post bop music, however, was less ambitious. It doesn’t sound like it is trying to do anything “different”. Although a constant striving for “better” can be heard (more virtuosic instrumentalists, more independence of the rhythm section, new musical textures), the musical result is generally more laid back (less fire-y, less revolutionary) than in the surrounding periods. For me, post bop is like the apex of the art form. Musicians had figured out the basic rules that governed the music, they had found some ways of making interesting advancements, and they mostly just played what felt good.
One thing of note about this album is that it is a trio album. Typically, an outfit like this one would be complemented by a pianist or guitarist. The absence of a chordal instrument puts greater demands on each member of the trio. It also gives each of them increased freedom.
Listen especially to Sonny’s rendering of Solitude, a standard by Duke Ellington. If you are unfamiliar with the tune, I recommend you familiarize yourself with the melody as performed on the Duke Ellington / Louis Armstrong recording from The Last Summit:
All of Sonny Rollins’ embellishments of the melody sound so perfect. In many of the gaps in the melody, he plays riffs building up momentum to the next phrase. Listen to how he does the same thing during his solo. His solo remains poignantly close to the melody, at least not in phrase structure (hear his solo along with your recollection of the melody in your head, and you’ll find that his solo is really a commentary on the melody).
One last thing to mention as you listen to the album is that if you can’t hear the bass clearly, you really ought to listen on headphones or better speakers. Because of the absence of a piano, Ray Brown really takes the opportunity to interact with Sonny Rollins. Listen, for instance, to the call-and-response between bass and sax in the first 8 measures of I’m Just an Old Cowhand (from the Rio Grande) (after the drum intro) as well as its repetition around 40 seconds into the recording.
I know that I haven’t touched on much in this blog post. For the most part, I think the album speaks for itself. Spend a little time with it, and I hope you’ll enjoy it as much as I do.
Thanks for reading!
Dan
Great LP. I own it on vinyl; it was my father’s.
There seems to be some sort of romance between certain jazz artists and the “Cowboy” character that so many identify with. Perhaps it was the portraiture of the cowboys as depicted in film, circa 1950′s. The All-American pirate but with a pure heart for doing the right thing and winning the love of the people and ‘the girl’. The cowboy is a lone figure, adored, misunderstood, etc. I suppose one could say the attraction/connection is not far fetched…
…Further, the great jazz artists of the mid-west, namely Kansas City, were (in general) widely respected by the urban jazz musicians. With them was also an aura of intrigue. The music, too, had a different feel and groove, distinctly different from the East Coast pace. Artists like Count Basie, Walter Page, Lester Young and Charlie Parker come to mind.
Sonny Rollins was born and raised in NYC. What’s the attraction? Another name that comes to mind is Charles Mingus (born in Arizona, but raised in L.A.) His “Gunslining Bird,” subtitled “If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger, There’d Be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats,” depicts Bird on the open range, taking down villains. That can be found on “Mingus Dynasty” of 1959.
Just a little bit of word painting. Thanks for the blog post Dan.
Drew Shanefield
Excellent post
Oh man, Rollins has to be the greatest unaccompanied soloist on the instrument I have heard. Definitely as far as hearing chord progressions in his head and painting them in a non-obvious but so coherent way. That intro to “Come, Gone” is divine.
Thanks for bringing this album to my attention. I may actually begin listening to jazz!
I am excited to start listening to this album–but I think I need to hook up some “better speakers,” as you suggested. I can barely tell that there IS a bass playing! Bad MacBook, bad.
Katie!!
try listening with headphones. Should be a bit better at least!
Dan
Thanks for the post, Dan. I don’t know if you’re taking requests, but I’d love to hear your thoughts on Oscar Peterson’s “Night Train,” which you burned for me so many years ago and said “Play like this.”
Thanks.
So Dan, Sonny Rollins completely aside, I’d have to quibble with your assertions on musical theatre vs. jazz, and of jazz “all sounds more or less the same.”
First of all, there’s no contest between jazz and musical theatre. Jazz is just music. Musical theatre is by definition, part music and part something else (theatre). The music is serving a greater good, and has to be bent, folded, and mutilated to achieve the larger purpose. Jazz has to do *all* it’s work with just music. The subtleties within each instrument are enormous, and the sounds created within each band vary greatly.
Within any musical period, the music often sounds similar from piece to piece and performance to performance. Take any classical composer’s solo piano compositions and at first it sounds the “same.” Live with each of them for a while and it’s easy to feel the differences. But, if I was to compare just the LPs you’ve posted on to date, to think that Sonny and Albert sound the “same” is ludicrous on it’s face. To pick a few out of hat: Teddy Wilson and Cecil Taylor, Johnny Hodges and Ornette Coleman, Louis Armstrong and Miles Davis, Duke Ellington and Sun Ra.
For unaccustomed ears, new musical genres are often hard to penetrate and distinquish. It took me six months of working all day at a country music station to even admit to myself I was listening to music. It was three months of engineering an avant-garde jazz radio show to figure out that I hadn’t scratched the LPs beyond playability. Any newbie to jazz has a hard time readily pulling the differences up in their ears. Stick with it a while, you’ll hear what I mean.
Yep, Fred! of course! as you say, with any genre (and the same is true outside of music), it takes familiarity to be able to pick out the distinctions between works.
and I know enough about jazz to know what I like and what I don’t like. It has been a long while since I’ve personally thought it all sounded the same.
Still, though, aesthetically, it DOES occupy a relatively narrow range compared to some other genres. Specifically jazz from the ’30s to the early ’60s. There are, of course, millions of small things that happened to make the music different (who would confuse bop with modal), but at least the majority of it has some commonalities that go a long way as far as evoking different sonic worlds. Walking bass, traditional quintet lineup (rhythm section, trumpet and tenor), head-solo-head format, etc. The music, for sure, is dynamic and varied in a lot of different ways. But, it is often accused of all sounding the same, and there is, I think, at least SOME truth to that. It changes in the ’60s of course, and the influence of world music on the genre (as early as in the bop era) is certainly relevant too, and Duke’s cotton club tunes sound different from Art Tatum or Bird or even Duke’s later suites, sacred works, and so on. But… I don’t know… there is still this narrow aesthetic umbrella underlying much of it…
…And Way Out West makes a stab at getting away from that, painting a vivid picture of a DIFFERENT setting. It doesn’t sound like a smokey nightclub, even though it uses many of the traditional jazz elements. I don’t know exactly what is responsible for it… but the man painted a unique picture with this album. And for me, in that regard, it stands out, along with Duke’s Far East Suite and maybe a few others.
thanks for your thoughts, Fred! Did you know the Ayler album as well? I like his other stuff too, but I wouldn’t have had an ear for it without Goin’ Home (and also My Name Is Album Ayler, which also helps bridge the free jazz stuff with material I’m more comfortable with). Once I saw where he’s coming from though, the gospel stuff in, say, Ghosts on Spiritual Unity, hits home a lot more clearly!
Dan
I agree with Fred that it isn’t fair to compare jazz to musical theater, which is not really a genre of music as much as a separate medium for performance art, more defined by its format than by the actual qualitative music involved.
I think the broadness of the jazz palette compares favorably to other major music genres. For example, take a 30-year slice of European Classical music and try to make the case that it is objectively more varied than jazz.
Thinking about the setting evoked by the music strikes me more as a measure of our cultural perceptions of jazz than as a valid benchmark of its actual qualities. To me, all Classical music evokes a concert hall in Europe, regardless of the “pastoral” tinges of Copeland or the otherworldly shimmering of Debussy.
Ultimately, the casual listener inevitably notices the general sounds (instrumentation, tempo, recording quality, etc.) before they recognize qualitative differences in any music. Hence, all bebop, piano music, rap, dixieland, country, punk, techno, free jazz, avant-garde, rock n roll, Anthony Braxton, etc. sounds the same to the uninitiated.
p.s. That last example was a joke. I’m a nerd.
we see how rollins is meta-emblematic in this sense, and how jazz defines and complicates itself around him: way out west is everything you come not to expect from a canonical jazz album, and it is still as canonical a canonical recording can be. sonny is more than ‘jazz dinosaur’ or ‘elder statesman;’ his career is the history of thematic improvisation and in this sense he ‘is’ jazz. Likewise, he is more than we know or understand no matter how close we listen, a reminder that as much as he is the definition of his genre, his genre is defined along lines that themselves resist definition.
re- the ellington recordings, solitude etc; see that these are like his famous take of ‘body and soul,’ where the solo is conscious of the last relevant solo that until then ‘defined’ the track. he plays with hodges or hawkins ‘in absentia.’ try listening to his solos cued up at the same time as another one!