The legendary saxophonist shines on Road Shows, Vol. 1, an endlessly surprising live album that almost never was

Fans, musicians, and jazz scholars all agree: when it comes to melodic invention, nobody's better than Sonny Rollins. Inspired by such similarly loquacious saxophonists as Coleman Hawkins and Charlie Parker, Rollins made his initial impact when, just out of his teens, he joined Miles Davis's band in 1951. Ever since, he's been known for improvisations that twist and turn in endlessly surprising ways—and for a good example one need look no further than “Blossom”, the third track on the jazz legend's new collection of live recordings, Road Shows, Vol. 1.

The Rollins original is an upbeat burner with a slight Latin tinge, and in the early going the tune is dominated by Mark Soskin's two-fisted piano solo—a nice outing for the little-known keyboardist. Bassist Jerome Harris contributes a cool restatement of the theme, Soskin returns with more explicitly salsa-esque chords, and then, after a tumbling bridge, Rollins takes over for what turns into a hectic six-minute ride, his lines spiralling ever upward as his intensity mounts. On and on he goes, leaping from R & B–inflected shouting to crystalline bop phraseology to wild outbursts that approach abstract sound in their feral intensity—and at the end of this live recording, the crowd explodes.

The place? Sweden, in 1980. The season? Late fall. And despite the chilly Scandinavian temperatures, it's clear that everybody in the room—band, bandleader, audience—has broken a sweat. It's a remarkable recording, yet both tape and tune could easily have been overlooked had it not been for an odd and undeniably ironic sequence of events.

“I can't really remember that performance,” says Rollins, reached at home in upstate New York. “I didn't even remember the song. It was something we played briefly with that particular group, and it wasn't played again. It was something that I had more or less forgotten about.”

That's understandable: Rollins has written scores of tunes during his 60-year career. Some, such as “Oleo”, “Doxy”, and “St. Thomas”, have become jazz standards; others, like “Blossom”, have fallen by the wayside. But an underground network of tape traders and collectors has been working to preserve the saxophonist's legacy, sometimes against Rollins's wishes.

The version of “Blossom” heard on Road Shows, Vol. 1 comes, along with two other tracks, from the collection of Carl Smith, a businessman and jazz scholar whose surreptitious recordings so angered the Rollins camp that Sonny's late wife and manager, Lucille, once threatened to confiscate his tapes should he be caught red-handed with a DAT machine. In a further irony, Smith had never really been a Rollins fan until encountering him in concert in the year 2000.

It was, as Smith explains over the phone from his summer home in Maine, a life-changing experience. “What I heard on the stage was something entirely different, with so much more improvisation and, well, freedom—emotional and artistic freedom—than I'd ever heard on any of his records,” he reports. “I remember turning to the fellow next to me and saying, ”˜We are in the presence of greatness—and I don't mean past greatness, I mean right now!' ”

Smith began to acquire as many Rollins recordings as he could find, and his own tape of Rollins's first appearance following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks—which the saxophonist witnessed from his Manhattan apartment—was used on the Grammy-winning release Without a Song: The 9/11 Concert.

“After my wife passed on, I got a more benign attitude towards these things,” says Rollins. “He [Smith] made me understand that these weren't bootlegs; they weren't being sold. These were mainly records done by collectors, and they were not being copied and sold. All of these things sort of softened my attitude, so I finally met Mr. Smith, and together with some of my own archives, we came out with Road Shows, Vol. 1.”

Rollins adds that he's not at all averse to having other ears—including those belonging to his trombone-playing nephew Clifton Anderson—go over his concert tapes for possible release; he hates listening to his own work.

“I'm making progress,” he says wryly. “I'm getting so I can listen to these things without wanting to stab myself or something.”

That's entirely in keeping with what the saxophonist told me in a 2007 interview: he considers himself “a becoming musician” rather than an old master. It's a notion he revisits with a degree of relief once we're done discussing his new record label, Doxy, and the Road Shows release. “I don't get a big kick out of commerce,” he admits, noting that, at 78, he's more concerned with continuing to learn his horn. The profoundly philosophical performer also says that music is his daily meditation—something he means both metaphorically and literally.

“When I was in India, my swami over there said, ”˜Well, Sonny, your path is the path of a karma yogi,' ” Rollins explains. “And he said that a karma yogi works without thinking about or expecting the fruits of his work. It's just about doing. And, you know, that's pretty true. Thinking about our own gain doesn't really work in the big scheme. So giving it up, in any way that's meant, gets down to the nub of what it's all about. Once you get to the point where you know that ”˜Hey, it's about giving,' you've made it.”

Rollins is still giving it up on-stage on a nightly basis, for which we should be grateful. But let's save some gratitude, too, for the dedicated archivists who have made it possible for us to hear what he'd rather ignore: the fruits of a life in music, lived on the very highest level possible.

Sonny Rollins plays the Orpheum Theatre on Monday (June 29).