Sonny Terry Folkway

A coupling of the harpist's first and third LPs for Stax's Enterprise subsidiary and the best spot to inaugurate a Little Sonny CD collection. 1970's New King is mostly instrumental and places Sonny in a funky, contemporary setting; 1973's Hard Goin' Up was his best album for the firm, benefitting from excellent material spotlighting his vocal talents in a soul-slanted format.

Blue Note Records has announced an April 26 release of Sonny Rollins A Night at the Village Vanguard: The Complete Masters, a special Tone Poet Vinyl Edition of the legendary saxophonist’s tour-de-force live trio album. The expanded 3-LP set, which can be ordered now on the Blue Note Store, marks the first time Rollins’ complete recorded performances at the Village Vanguard on November 3, 1957 will be made available in a single vinyl package. The collection is also available as a 2-CD set and on all digital formats.

A fantastic album as a leader from Sonny Red - a saxophonist who never got much chance to record under his own name, but always gave us something special when he did! Sonny recorded famously with Donald Byrd and Curtis Fuller in the 60s - but here, he's in an even hipper 70s mode of his own - a bit modal, a bit spiritual - in ways that make the whole album feel like some of the best 70s efforts on the Black Jazz label, with a righteous quality we might never have expected in Red a decade before! Sonny blows tenor, alto, and flute - all of them with a sharp, soulful edge - and he works here in a fantastic quartet that includes Cedar Walton on piano, whose own shadings give the record a lot of depth - plus the great Billy Higgins on drums, and Herbie Lewis on bass.

It's unequivocally nice to have Little Sonny back in harness after a long recording hiatus, but the harpist's comeback offering suffers from backing that feels too mechanical to really do his supple harp justice. A little more earthiness would have suited the project much better.

Recorded in 1957, Sonny's Crib features a front line of Curtis Fuller, Donald Byrd, and John Coltrane with Sonny Clark on piano, Art Taylor on drums, and Paul Chambers on bass. Truly still a bebop recording, done a full year before the landmark Cool Struttin' session, nonetheless the set produced some awesome readings of classic tunes, like the opener, "With a Song in My Heart," with one of the knottiest Byrd solos ever. As Chambers and Taylor up the rhythmic ante and Clark comps with enormous chords in the background, the entire line solos, but it is Byrd's that is stunning in its complexity - though Coltrane could play bebop as well as anybody…

The Stax empire wasn't exactly renowned for its legion of blues harpists, but Little Sonny found the Memphis firm quite an agreeable home during the early '70s (he even appeared in the label's grandiose concert film, Wattstax, albeit very briefly).
Little Sonny, whose birth name is Aaron Willis, is a product of Detroit's blues scene. He moved to the Motor City in 1953 after growing up on his dad's farm in Alabama (his mom gave him his nickname). When Little Sonny wasn't working local haunts with John Lee Hooker, Eddie Burns, Eddie Kirkland, Baby Boy Warren, or Washboard Willie (who gave him his first paying gig), he was snapping photos of the patrons for half a buck a snap…