as his unmatched virtuosity on the tenor. The last time Rollins dropped out of sight was during the mid-Sixties; he was then playing with several musicians from Ornette Coleman's band and blazing new trails in intimate, and relatively unstructured, group improvisation. His return to public appearances this year was for many listeners the major jazz event of the decade. He looked and sounded rested and comfortable. He had gone back to playing blues and standards, was using a solid but low-keyed backup group and was as usual playing like nobody else.

Newk's is truly a classic style in that it channels the player's virtuosity into making eternal verities seem new. Sonny Rollins' Next Album offers as few surprises and as many rewards as a Bessie Smith reissue. The material ranges from a minor blues to a neo-rock excursion to a calypso to standards like "Skylark" and "Poinciana." Despite the creeping modernism of Bob Cranshaw's Fender bass and Rollins' soprano sax, the music has a kind of timeless strength rarely found on or off records these days. It matters not a whit that playing standards and sticking to the chord changes is somewhat unfashionable now. Rollins is the kind of artist who could play "Row Row Row Your Boat" and make it both memorable and unique.

The album's tour de force is "The Everywhere Calypso," a lineal descendant of Rollins' classic "St. Thomas." It's the simplest of calypso tunes, and Newk begins by playing it straight, his phrasing recalling the vocal inflections of calypso singers. Gradually he elaborates his song phrases into more complex but still idiomatic statements; almost before you know it he is simply roaring along, building rumbling cascades of notes that cross over the bar lines and impart new tensions to the steadily chugging rhythm. It's the kind of daring playing that takes absolute confidence and control, and not since Charlie Parker has anyone done it so well.

"Playing in the Yard" is Rollins at his funkiest; in fact, his gut-bucket tone (which occasionally recalls Ben Webster) and his rough, almost snarling lines are much closer to the work of rhythm & blues saxophonists like Big Jay McNeeley and King Curtis than anything on Newk's previous recordings. But interestingly enough, a habit of phrasing just slightly behind the beat, in the manner of Lester Young, also crops up. Consciously or not, Rollins has condensed a great deal of the h