So why isn't Rollins more celebrated?
Perhaps it's because of his propensity to take some time away: After all, Rollins disappeared from the charts at the peak of his powers for three years beginning in 1959, legendarily to workshop his sound on Manhattan's Williamsburg Bridge, and then again in the late 1960s.
Or maybe, it's because Rollins never did completely disappear, somehow avoiding that inevitable twilight: Unlike the romantic, though so often ultimately tragic heroes of his genre, Rollins has lived to a ripe old age. I always thought that was the difference in the popular conception, say, of Dizzy Gillespie versus Charlie Parker.
Through embryonic triumphs as part of the early '50s-era Max Roach-Clifford Brown Quintet (speaking of those gone too soon), 1956's "Saxophone Colossus" (featuring his eventual standard calypso "St. Thomas"), the well-regarded '60s score for "Alfie," important 1970s output for Milestone on through to the Grammy-winning performances of 2000's "This Is What I Do" and 2004's "Without a Song (The 9/11 Concert)," Rollins has remained transcendent, if perhaps never truly revered.
Recording for six decades, it seems, has its drawbacks.
"Road Shows" and "In Vienne" are, then, a new chance to revisit one of jazz's genuinely underrated figures, to hear again what makes Rollins the most important living heir to the gumption so closely associated with, yes, the gone-too-soon Coltrane.
And in the perfect setting: Rollins has always truly inhabited the stage more completely than he did any studio, unleashing time and again something jazz writer Stanley Crouch rightly described as "emotion, memory, thought, and aesthetic design."
You're reminded just how completely Sonny Rollins remains right here with us.
Still as fierce and relevant. Still at it.
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