SONNY ROLLINS — Horn Culture (review)

SONNY ROLLINS — Horn Culture album cover Album · 1973 · Hard Bop Buy this album from MMA partners
4/5 ·
Sean Trane
Recorded over three months in 73 in a NY studio, this steaming jazz-funk album’s line-up actually Rollins’ working (and instrumental) band and it sounds like these guys are a well-oiled machine grooving on along to the sideral and sometimes staggering cruising speed. Apparently there was an abundance of material, because the album nears the 50-mins mark. In the band, one can recognize Walter Davis on keys, Crenshaw’s bass, Mtume’s percs and the unknown (to moi anyway) Masua on lectric guitar and f course the giant Rollins-coaster to take you for a ride, the whole thing produced by the now-legendary Orrin Keepnews.

While the opening pictures In The Reflection is superb up-tempo funk piece, the following Saïs is an amazing 12-mins piece that could find space between Alice, Carlos, Pharoah and even Miles, but the English wave is not far away with Traffic or Nucleus. Indeed themed-tempo is very reminiscent of the Winwood gang (not least due to Masua’s electric guitar), but has a typically spiritual touch that you could find in Santana as well, partly because of the presence of Mtume’s congas. The following Notes could be for anybody else than Eddie, it wouldn’t make much a difference, it sounds absolutely orgiastic.

Opening the flipside, the syrupy Bless The Child can’t shake it’s Billy Holiday tag, which ruins the album’s cohesion, as would to a lesser extent later on Good Morning Heartache, which while rather standardly enjoyable, tends to overstay its welcome, because we tend to want to have a more representative album closer, but to no avail Something along the 9-mins+ Love Man turns to a jazzier funk-fusion that anything across the disc’s wax, where Masua’s guitar could be of McL or Alvin Lee (Undead), but it’s definitely in line with the album.

Apparently the first of Rollins’s new musical directions (the chronological discography of jazzmen is always much more complicated than that or rockers), this is exactly the type of JR/F album that this writer appreciate, but it’s too bad that the flipside dissipates the opening side’s excellence.

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