Sonny Rollins - Way Out West

CRAFT • 1957

Recorded in Los Angeles in 1957, the jazz legend’s classic album—the first to use the now-standard saxophone-bass-drums trio—looks like a novelty and sounds like transcendence.

by Natalie Weiner


Sonny Rollins doesn’t fear the familiar. He’s persistently original, yes—those lucky enough to see him live before his deteriorating health prevented him from playing remember a “limitless” improvisor, one of jazz’s best. It only takes a cursory listen to what we now know were his final albums, the live Road Shows series, to hear how inventive the now 87-year-old jazz legend could be. Even now, unable to blow the horn that made him a colossus, he told Vulture last year, “I can’t get rid of [musical ideas]. It’s just a little trial that I have to endure.”

But even in his last concerts, he was still performing some of the same standards he injected so much life into throughout his seven-decade career—including those that appear on 1957’s Way Out West, an album that looks like a novelty and sounds like transcendence. The project, one of Rollins’ canonical recordings, has gotten a 60th-anniversary reissue in the form of a two-LP box set which includes previously unreleased outtakes and some in-studio dialogue. (A digital version is also available.) All these years after its release, Way Out West still shows Rollins’ unique ability to revere his musical heritage without losing his edge. Old songs, new sound.

read more at: https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/sonny-rollins-way-out-west/