My friend Clay stopped by one afternoon. "I was over at the studios rehearsing with the group," he said, "and I ran into Newk. He said he had rented a studio to rehearse. So I kept waiting for his band to show up, but there wasn't any band. He just went into the studio and played by himself for three hours." I asked how he sounded. "Man, he sounded great."

Newk is, of course, Sonny Rollins, the master saxophonist who used to practice under the Brooklyn Bridge late at night and whose periodic "retirements" from music are almost as well-known 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 history of the tenor saxophone into this one unpretentious tune. In this vein, "Poinciana" and "Keep Hold of Yourself" might be considered as comments on Coltrane. For a long while during the Fifties Rollins was the influence on the tenor, while Coltrane was a "bright new star" whose work still showed traces of Rollins and Dexter Gordon. One wonders how pervasive Coltrane's influence would have been if Rollins had stayed on the scene, rather than disappearing as he did from records and public view. It is quite probable that Trane, who unlike Rollins always felt the need to air his ideas and who kept evolving and changing, would have had the same kind of meteoric rise, but it is certainly true that Rollins left him a clear field.

It seems ironic that Rollins' first recording on the soprano saxophone, "Poinciana," must inevitably be compared to Coltrane's ground-breaking work on that instrument. It must be said that Rollins has not quite surmounted the soprano's intonation problems. But it is equally apparent that his work on the smaller horn owes more to his tenor style than to any extraneous source. Rollins favors the instrument's mellow lower register, while Coltrane liked the high, pinched, oboelike range. Trane liked blazing flurries of trills and harmonics while Rollins plays a note at a time, carefully sculpting his architectural phrases around the silences which are, in his work, as important as the notes. Finally, while Coltrane simplified the chord changes to standards like "My Favorite Things" in order to create a modal, semi-drone feel, Rollins delights in using all of "Poinciana's" chords through his performance. As for "Keep Hold," it is harmonically similar to early-Sixties Trane outings like "Bessie's Blues" and there are occasional rising phrases which bring the Coltrane of that era to mind. But each artist influenced the other, and this similarity should not be construed as a sign of borrowing. Often Rollins sounds like other players simply because his influence has ranged over the last two decades and been so pervasive and inescapable.

The supporting players are not stylists of Rollins' caliber (with the possible exception of drummer Jack DeJohnette), but they take care of business. The interplay between pianist George Cables, bassist Bob Cranshaw (who was along on what is for me Rollins' greatest album, Our Man in Jazz) and DeJohnette on "Yard" is marvelous, and the other drummer, David Lee, contributes excellent brushwork and a personal conception of accentuation to the tracks on which he replaces DeJohnette. But Rollins is the dominant force. He is such a clear, conscious player that one can follow his lines of thought as they interact with the recurring cycles of chords and phrases. This is what bebop was all about, and it is not Rollins' fault that the same approach in lesser hands has become mechanical and stereotyped. With Newk at the helm, the quality of the music is all that matters, and Next Album is a quality album from beginning to end. (RS 123)

BOB PALMER