Sonny Rollins – Way Out West (1957)

“Concord Music has remastered and reissued a set of jazz landmarks from the Original Jazz Classics catalogue – with highlights including Thelonious Monk’s short but sensational relationship with John Coltrane, Art Pepper’s encounter with Miles Davis’s 1957 rhythm section, and Dave Brubeck’s pre-Take Five wakeup call, Jazz at Oberlin. But Sonny Rollins’s 1957 Way Out West (whose cover features Rollins dressed in a suit, tie, gunbelt and 10-gallon hat against a backdrop of cactuses and cattle bones) is one of the most influential. Hearing it was Courtney Pine’s induction into jazz sax, and many others tell the same story. It comes from a prolific period for Rollins, and features Ray Brown on bass and the west coast drummer Shelly Manne. The cover shot and some of the titles (I’m an Old Cowhand, Wagon Wheels) suggest a send-up, but Rollins has always loved conjuring rich narratives from cheesy material, and after the intro to Cowhand he’s off on one of his odysseys of seamless runs and biting accents over Brown’s driving pulse. He’s luxuriously wayward on Duke Ellington’s Solitude and swaggeringly productive on the uptempo Come, Gone – the album’s standout episode, represented here in two takes. Marc Myers’s new liner notes don’t add much, but if you squint you can read Lester Koenig’s absorbing original for the 1957 Contemporary Records release.”
Guardian
Pitchfork
W – Way Out West
Discogs (Video)
YouTube: Way Out West 43:22