Merely by setting foot on stage bearing a tenor saxophone and scattering a few clues to his signature calypso, St Thomas, Sonny Rollins does enough to make a London jazz festival crowd feel privileged to be in the same room. The 82-year-old Rollins – hailed in the 1950s as the new Charlie Parker; virtuoso partner to Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane and Miles Davis – is the man who has so successfully elevated in-the-moment improvisation that his actual repertoire, and even the skilful partners in his bands, seem almost immaterial.
Rollins was stunning on his 2010 LJF visit. Tonight, he occasionally wrestled for the capricious logic that guides his long, spontaneous odysseys, even irritably admonishing himself a couple of times ("Sonny Sonny Sonny, get yourself together!"). After playing JJ – a fierce ballad of alternating quivering long sounds and staccato bursts, which is dedicated to the trombone star JJ Johnson – Rollins stood brooding during extended, mid-concert solos from his own elegant trombonist, Clifton Anderson, and an increasingly transported Kobie Watkins on drums. But the brightly punchy Nishi and a full-pelt, double-time ballad took him close to his stride. By the inevitable Don't Stop the Carnival, Rollins was shuffling to the front of the stage – white mane waving, broad shoulders wriggling – to blast out the famous hook as if trying to blow the audience into the foyer.
Rollins is well known as a self-sufficient musician, and so is the Brazilian guitarist, pianist and composer Egberto Gismonti – the "piano player that plays guitar", as he puts it. The tumbling, colliding streams of melody, harmonic depth and tonal range of Gismonti's guitar-playing – and the vision with which he has fused Brazilian music, classical music and jazz – made his rare London solo show at the Queen Elizabeth Hall a tour de force.
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