Jarenwattananon writes that this concert marked the first time that Coleman and Rollins had performed together. But it’s worth adding that Coleman and his music played a dramatic role in Rollins’s career. Though born in the same year, their careers proceeded very differently—at the age of nineteen, Rollins was already recording with such luminaries as Bud Powell and Fats Navarro (and, for that matter, the drummer Roy Haynes, who was on hand for the recent festivities as well), and he would quickly join bands led by Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, and Clifford Brown. Coleman’s career, however, had a long gestation—but his first recordings, in 1958, were astonishingly progressive; the impact of his 1959 recordings was utterly revolutionary. Rollins was already an unusually thematic improviser, a post-bopper who paid a special attention to melody and its variations; but Coleman, dispensing with the harmonic framework of bebop altogether, took that manner to its radical extreme. In 1962, Rollins hired for his band the trumpeter and drummer—Don Cherry and Billy Higgins, respectively—from Coleman’s seminal quartet, and his own playing became increasingly splintered, fragmented, even hallucinatory, as if reflecting his war within, the conflict between the modern postwar tradition of which he was already a longtime master and and the new ways of free jazz, which he admired and perhaps even envied, certainly learned from, but couldn’t entirely adopt.

At top is a clip of this band, from 1962; it opens with a fanfare by Cherry and soon offers Rollins a marvelous, unaccompanied cadenza. There’s a second part, in which Rollins offers a long, sinuous, searching uptempo solo. It took, I think, a couple of years before Rollins—who, by then, had doubtless been exposed to even more extreme varieties of the “new thing” (as from John Coltrane, in his later manner, or Albert Ayler)—seemed at ease with the roots of his musical identity, or came to integrate them more closely—and his brilliant 1965 performance in Copenhagen (which I linked to a year ago today), attests to it. His protean career, with its stops and restarts, its fits of self-questioning and its avid openness to the advances in the art—and with its endless energy and happy longevity—is cause for celebration.

P.S. Ben Greenman posted here today that it’s also Buddy Holly’s birthday; I don’t know of any Holly covers by Rollins, or vice versa.