PALM SUNDAY

For some insane reason the universal powers - that - be chose Palm Sunday, April 11th, as the perfect day to inundate music-loving Detroiters with no less than five full-scale concert productions.
Sonny Rollins at the Showcase, Grover Washington and the Brecker Brothers at Masonic, Joe Cocker at Cobo Hall, Odetta and the Music of the Black Church at Music Hall, and an all-star spectacular headlining Donald Byrd and the Blackbyrds at U of D filled out the evening like no other in recent memory. Our frenzied editor, pressed into service as M. C. for the Sonny Rollins concert, hallucinated the sight and sound of two palms slapping all over town on this mystical night, and forthwith solicited reports from a full handful of noted concertgoers to give you, dear readers, a fulsome taste of the sweets of the evening before all its echoes fade out of sound. But let our editor himself start you out on your tour:

Sonny Rollins
At The Showcase
By John Sinclair

Tenor Saxophone Colossus Theodore Walter "Sonny" Rollins returned to the Motor City for the first time in almost fourteen years to turn the Showcase Theatre inside out in a mighty display of invention, creativity, and boundless musical genius. Drawing on his incredibly rich experience (Sonny will mark his 30th year as a professional musician in 1977) and speaking through his horn with all the confidence and power of the world's greatest living tenor saxophonist, Rollins drove the hard-core crowd half mad with joy and delight as he tore through song after song from his immense jazz repertory. Midtempo, ballad speed, fashionably funky, raging up-tempo romping and stomping, or dancing lightly over a Caribbean lilt, Sonny Rollins took care of every kind of saxophone business there is in a stunning, two-and-a-half-hour performance, and by the time he was finished there wasn't a disbeliever left in the house.

Now 46 and at the height of his creative powers, Rollins has been highly esteemed in jazz circles since his initial recordings, with Babs Gonzales, Bud Powell and Fats Navarro, in 1948. After serving apprenticeships with Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, and the Clifford Brown/Max Roach Quintet into the mid-fifties, Sonny established his reputation as the tenor saxophonist of the period with a series of recordings in 1956-58 for a variety of labels, including Saxophone Colossus (Prestige), Freedom Suite (Riverside), Way Out West (Contemporary), and 'Live at

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Sonny Rollins
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the Village Vanguard (Blue Note).

Then he astounded the jazz world by renouncing the recording and performing world for two years, emerging in 1961 with a series of albums for RCA-The Bridge, What's New, Sonny Meets Hawk - and then the Don Cherry/Billy Higgins band (viz. Our Man in Jazz, RCA) before giving it all up again as soon as the six-LP RCA commitment was completed.

Since then Sonny has moved in and out of the limelight several times, re-emerging after each "disappearance" with a new, up-to-date approach and enough resolve to get it recorded and out on the road.
His current incarnation goes back to 1972 and Sonny 's association with producer Orrin Keepnews at Milestone Records, a musical partnership which has thus far borne scant fruit, leaving Rollins in the unhappy position of trying to get work without the benefit of a commercially (or even artistically) successful recording. A giant in artistic stature yet a relative pauper in financial terms, Sonny must still prove himself to generation after generation of young jazz fans, trying to secure a wide enough audience to be able to keep working and recording while pursuing his saxophonic vision.

What about that vision? Sonny's present conception remains deeply rooted in his own fertile past- his reworkings of "Sonnymoon For Two" and "St. Thomas" were among the strongest performances of the night - while he continues to reach for the quickening pulse of popular black taste, fashioning his incredible improvisations over a series of mechanical funk-groove-soul backing tracks n the manner of Grover Washington, Benny Maupin (who's on Sonny's latest Milestone release, Nucleus), and (lord forbid!) Torn Scott.

Backed by the energetic, multi-faceted drumming of Eddie Moore and an otherwise inadequate rhythm team of Mike Wolff, piano; James Benjamin, bass; and Robert Kenyatta, congas, Sonny simply overwhelmed his lightweight accompanists with the sheer weight of his immense, mindboggling solos, soaring beyond their pitiful fumblings for a groove and rising to heights of tenor saxophone glory rarely even dreamed of these days Utilizing a microphone taped to the bell of his horn and plugged into the house sound system, Sonny roamed freely around the Showcase stage, twisting, turning, and prowling at will, pouring out an endless steam of brilliant improvisational music which left the astonished crowd gasping and cheering to the very end.

Now if Sonny could get some players who understand what he's attempting to say - and there are a few of them around Detroit he would do well to try out -  he could have the baddest band in the land as well.
Until then, we'll take his tenor saxophone, and just as much of it as we can get!