Sonny Rollins and Sonny Clark: Unissued Outtakes, 4 of 4 (+Bonus Freedom Suite Notation)

(Paying Subscribers. a transcription of all of Sonny’s sax playing on the “Freedom Suite” was published in 1958, in concert key. A copy of this rare document is at the bottom, to thank you.)

This is the last in our series of listening to the complete “session reel” of the only recorded meeting between Sonny Rollins and Sonny Clark, from the night and early morning of June 11 and 12, 1957. To find the first three essays, please use the Index. (To complete the album, there was another session on June 19, but outtakes from that one have not been available, if indeed they still exist.) For clarity, I’ll refer to the saxophonist as Sonny or Rollins, but I will always call the pianist Clark.

The fourth number that they worked on that morning was a Rollins original, “Cutie.” Sonny is known for writing short catchy tunes, and this one is no exception. I can’t get it out of my mind! But I seem to be one of the only people who even remembers it. It has almost never been recorded again, and one of the few albums that lists “Cutie,” by the Brazilian trio Três Bossa with Black American guests, is not that song at all, but Neal Hefti’s “Cute,” a much better known but unrelated piece.

Engineer Jack Higgins (for more about him and the recording studio, see the first essay in this series) says “Selection 4, Take One.” Rollins plays beautifully, and Clark’s comping behind him is especially melodic, but Sonny stops it and then has a discussion with the musicians about what he wants. It’s “off-mike” (too far from the microphone to be audible), but you can hear someone ask “All of it?,” and Sonny says “Yeah.” So it’s an incomplete take, but it has some real nice music in it:

Higgins “slates” Take Two. After Rollins, there’s a Percy Heath bass solo at 2:59. Clark takes over at 3:50, and Rollins is back with more melodic invention at 4:42. It’s a complete take, and a beautiful one:

The announcement for Take 3 is missing, but the take is here, below. It seems to be going great, but suddenly Rollins stops everything with “No, no, no.no, no, no….” (He can be heard doing this on other studio outtakes.) The tape is almost full, so engineer Higgins takes advantage of the break to take it off and put on a new one, or “reload,” and he advises the musicians that it will take “two or three minutes.” But we are lucky that so much of Sonny’s lyrical playing was captured before he ended the take. He is particularly adventurous from 1:55 onward. Let’s listen:

Next comes the master take, the one that was issued on the LP. Here it is below, in nicely mixed and mastered sound. Sonny is intensely lyrical, funky and expressive, all at the same time, with many memorable phrases such as at 1:43 and 2:23, and, when he returns after the bass and piano solos, at 4:51. Great stuff!

And so ends our session reel. There were in fact other titles recorded at this late night session: “Mangoes,” “Dearly Beloved,” and a solo saxophone version of “It Could Happen To You,” Sonny’s first solo sax recording, which typically would have been done after the other musicians were sent home. But no outtakes of these have been located. Still, I hope you have enjoyed hearing all the great unissued music that we do have from this fine album, and being able to follow Sonny’s process in creating it as well. I’ll see you again soon!

All the best,
Lewis

P.S. Paying Subscribers. keep scrolling down for the rare transcription of all of Sonny’s sax playing on the “Freedom Suite.”