condition (record/cover): NM / NM
Gatefold sleeve. Insert included. No obi
1965: Sonny Rollins makes his single studio statement for the house of Coltrane - On Impulse!, with Ray Bryant, Walter Booker and Mickey Roker in support and the tenor in commanding, quixotic mid-sixties form, aware of exactly whose label he was visiting and completely unbothered by it. "On Green Dolphin Street" and "Everything Happens to Me" get the full Rollins treatment: themes examined from every conceivable angle, phrases pulled apart mid-flight and reassembled upside down, the logic airtight even at its most mischievous; then the calypso sun breaks through on "Hold 'Em Joe" and the whole room warms ten degrees. His sixties records are stranger, funnier and more searching than their middling period reputation ever suggested, and posterity has been steadily upgrading them - this one, the lone Impulse! studio date, has a special place in the story: one giant on the other giant's home ground, sounding entirely like himself.
Impulse! edition, orange and black and essential.