LPCDreissues: Looking forward to the past

This album contains one of Sonny Rollins's triumphant recorded performances of the 1970s. Rollins's band at the 1974 Montreux Jazz Festival was a youthful, high-energy outfit, full of vigor and charging rhythms. Sonny had the huge partisan audience enthralled and it responded with sustained and vociferous approval of everything he and his men played, including the novelty guest appearance of Rufus Harley, the jazz bagpiper. But the masterpiece that July night was a lovely old song that a mind less inventive than Rollins's might have rejected as a jazz vehicle. Sonny used Edward MacDowell's "To a Wild Rose" for some of his most engaging melodic improvisation. It contained a cadenza that is a marvel of construction, suspense, and beauty; superb Rollins.
Track listing: The Cutting Edge, To a Wild Rose, First Moves, A House Is Not a Home; Swing Low, Sweet Chariot