The Book Cooks Saxophone Colossus: The Life and Music of Sonny Rollins from There would be no Sonny and Hawk at Newport ‘63. “So we did it in the studio,” [producer George] Avakian said. This led to more anxiety for Sonny. “I had my own feelings about being able to record with him – being on the same level, so to speak,” Sonny wrote. “I didn’t want to make a fool of myself, playing with the great Coleman Hawkins. So there was a little bit of trepidation, a lot of awe and respect.” The finances added to the tension: under Sonny’s contract, he was getting $15,000, Hawk $1,200. Hawk would get an additional $750 for the studio time, coming from Sonny’s RCA account. There were two days of recording scheduled, but according to Bley, Sonny didn’t show up for the first: on the Monday following Newport, at 9 p.m., everyone but him reported to RCA Studios. On Monday, July 15, Sonny finally showed up in Studio B and met Avakian, sound engineer Mickey Crofford, McCurdy, Bley, and Bob Cranshaw, who was subbing for Henry Grimes. “By that time, the rest of the band had been showing up every night and was put off each night by a phone call,” Bley said. “When I got there, they were fed up and exhausted.” Except Bley, who’d tipped the night watchman to call when Sonny arrived: “I walked in the door shaved, showered, and ready to play.” Hawkins got ready to play his way. “Coleman had his little flask, and they were having fun,” recalled McCurdy. “And I was having fun because just to be playing the rhythm behind these guys was a big thing. ... It seemed to jell almost right away.” “I’m convinced to this day that Sonny had waited a whole year until it was time to unleash those phenomenal solos on Sonny Meets Hawk,” Bley said. “It was like a prizefight, and I was trying not to get hit by blows that had gone astray.” Yet in a way, it was really Sonny versus himself. “When I played with Hawkins, I was trying to make a contrast between Hawkins and myself, really make a sound,” Sonny said. “I didn’t want to try and sound like him, because I could not sound like him anyway. It’s pretty hard to sound like Coleman.” During the recording session, Sonny struggled with this double bind of self-assertion – seem too little like Hawkins and negate a core part of his identity, seem too much like him and be eclipsed by the great man’s long shadow. In case Sonny couldn’t individuate himself enough, they employed stereo sound to put Sonny in the right speaker, Hawkins and Bley in the left, leaving bass and drums in the center. They began the night with two takes of “All the Things You Are,” but it only took eight bars for Hawk to see what he had gotten into. The rhythm section dispensed with the song’s standard intro line in favor of a chromatic derangement. Hawk came in on the melody unfazed, and Sonny’s dissonant improvised counterpoint couldn’t shake him. Over three choruses, Hawk played the changes with the vigor of a man half his age. “Yeah!” screamed Sonny. “Everybody was trying to expand perimeters,” Sonny said. “The idea was stretching that ‘rubber band’ so far that even though you were following the changes and at the same time following the ‘parallel universe’ of the improvised line, they were so closely related that I could skip from one to the other at any given second and do it with authority.” Bley thought of what the group did as “harmonic improvising,” in which “you are going from point A to point B, and it’s totally up to you what you want to do in that interval, so long as you leave point A and you arrive at point B.” Bley went far out on his “All the Things You Are” solo. To Grimes, Bley could “bend the notes” of the piano. The pianist’s solo on “All the Things You Are” took Hawk’s concluding statement into another dimension. Pat Metheny, who was only eight years old when Sonny Meets Hawk was recorded, would call Bley’s solo “the shot heard ‘round the world.” “Of course, I didn’t play the song at all,” Bley said. “Not only was I ‘elastically’ away from the song, I never really bounced back, and when I did for a moment, it would be startling. ‘Oh! He knew where he was!’ I always knew where I was, that’s what gives that kind of elasticity meaning.” Hawk did not know where he was, though, and it was only the second take of the night. But Hawk had a plan. “Hawkins came to me after the first tune and said, ‘Paul, do me a favor. For the chorus, when it’s my turn to play, lead me in. Give me a nod of your head.’” Sonny followed Bley, entering in the middle of the fourth bar with a soft tremolo. What he played was possibly even more radical – rhythmically, he was never quite on the beat; his phrases started and stopped at odd junctures; he played multiphonically, microtonally, way up in the altissimo range, and other times not at all. Then he was honking in the blues tradition. For four choruses, it was “All the Things You Aren’t.” “Sonny came in just after my solo and erased everybody because he loved confrontation,” Bley said. “With the fur flying between Hawk and myself, Sonny came in and said, “Oh yeah? You guys won’t even know what room you are in when I get through.’” Then Bley nodded to Hawkins, who came in right at the top of the chorus to take it out. To fit it on the LP, Avakian opted for a fade-out, trimming several minutes. Next, they recorded the ballad “Lover Man,” with Hawk dominating through understatement as Sonny sustained a note more than an octave above the tenor range for several measures. On “Yesterdays,” Hawk ended his solo on a tremolo; Sonny seemed to veer into mocking territory, playing an exaggerated tremolo for the first twelve bars of his solo. Next was “The Way You Look Tonight,” with Sonny playing the head with a pronounced vibrato, further imitating the Hawkins sound. Over twelve and a half minutes, Sonny shifted back into a harsher, mostly vibrato-less sound, playing with a halting stutter before exploding into wildly inventive eighth-note runs. Hawk simply played Hawk, as lyrical as ever. On the trading section, Sonny dropped his imitation entirely – the contrast could not have been starker. When the take ended, Sonny paused, then kept playing a cappella. “It’s long enough,” Hawk said, coughing under Sonny’s noodling. Hawk tried to get Sonny’s attention; Sonny took the horn out of his mouth. “Huh?” he said. “I can’t understand how ... one thing,” Hawk continued. “You take all you have ...” Hawkins told Sonny a quiet anecdote. “Ah, you crazy som’bitch,” Hawk said. He was going to drop some knowledge on his protégé. Avakian came in. “Sonny,” said Avakian. “This is fine provided one side of the LP is twenty-eight inches across.” Next up was “Three Little Words.” Sonny often included it in his sets as a tribute to Pres, but Hawk had also recorded it. Sonny took it at least as far out as he did on “All the Things You Are.” Then Hawk dropped all pretense and showed he could play as loudly and inventively as Sonny, without sacrificing lyricism or swing. After one line, Sonny couldn’t contain himself. “Whoa!” He gradually shifted back to his stately subtone. “We tried to get somethin’ shorter,” said Hawk. The take was twelve minutes long. “Can you do it short?” shouted Avakian. “Oh yeah,” said Sonny. “Five choruses.” After he reiterated it, Hawk just laughed. On the first take, McCurdy played brushes; Sonny wanted sticks. “Stop, stop!” Sonny shouted. On the third take, Sonny was frustrated: “Okay, stop! Stop! Stop. Let’s get the RHYTHM together!” On the next take, Sonny had trouble getting into his solo. Hawk flew in with total composure, playing fortissimo. On the trading section, Sonny parroted some of Hawk’s lines, seeming to invert and extend others, as he had done to Coltrane on “Tenor Madness.” Yet he somehow remained deferential to Hawk, letting him establish the ideas Sonny embellished upon. And then Sonny threw in a quote from Irving Berlin’s “Cheek to Cheek” – playing a tune made famous by Pres, standing bell to bell with Hawk, he truly was “in heaven.” After that quote, Hawk began playing staccato hits in the low register, seeming to cede the floor to Sonny as the tune just kept going. It was a ten-minute take, well more than the promised five choruses. “Now you see what you got to do, don’t you?” Hawk called to Avakian. “I’m glad it was a short one,” said Avakian sarcastically. “Splice all in between, that’s all. Get in there, listen to it, and splice,” Hawk said. And it was then that Hawk delivered his lesson to Sonny. “You got to feel that beat, man,” said Hawk. “You gotta feel that shit. That’s the important groove. You’ve got to feel somethin’ in your heart. You know what I’m talkin’ about?” “But it depends on the record,” said Sonny. “You gotta feel!” “It depends on the record.” “Not only on the record, man – anything,” Hawk said. “When you play. You can feel it. You can feel somethin’, whether you’re in here or you’re playing to some people out there! If you’re not feeling that ... that shit was goin’ on, but I just wasn’t feelin’ the shit, man!” Sonny let it sink in. “That’s our music,” said Sonny. “Beautiful.” Even out there in a parallel universe, they had to feel the beat. And Hawk was not feeling it. That summer night in 1963, Sonny saw that he didn’t have to try so hard to assert his identity. Just like Hawk, he was always already himself. And there was another lesson. Logic is not enough – you’ve got to feel that shit. It was getting late. “Let’s make a good shorty – two, two, two, and one,” came the voice from the booth. So over two choruses of “Three Little Words,” Sonny dug down deep and played what he felt. He dropped the Hawkish vibrato and the air of self-consciousness. Hawk played his choruses with authority, followed by a trading section where Sonny seemed to really communicate with his idol. “That’s good,” said Avakian. It was just over five minutes. It wouldn’t end up on the final cut of the album; Sonny being Sonny, it wasn’t good enough. He didn’t like McCurdy’s cymbal work. They laid down one more take. “Well,” came the voice from the booth, “let’s go home.”
© 2022 Aidan Levy
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