Vol.2, released in 2011, focused on his breathtaking 80th birthday concert at New York's Beacon Theater in 2010, where he played with lots of friends and guest stars (including one mind-bending duet with Ornette Coleman). Road Shows, Vol.1, which came out in 2008, covered a wide swath, with Rollins fronting a variety of bands, from 1980 till just the previous year. When he started releasing selected tracks, the anticipation was enormous: it's well known that Rollins, a ferociously self-critical artist, can't stand listening to his performances so if he found these tracks decent enough to share with others, they must be great. A decade ago, he started listening to old concert tapes—some made by his own sound crew, some taken down by a bootleg collector named Carl Smith. Rollins famously dreads the deadness of studios, so it's no surprise that some of his best albums, I think, have been live dates ( Our Man in Jazz, A Night at the Vanguard, and a standout from the otherwise spotty 1980s, G-Man). Certainly it's the album that most closely supplies the sensation of a live Sonny Rollins concert—or the best moments of several live Sonny Rollins concerts, which is what the whole Road Shows series is meant to be. Road Shows, Volume 3 (on Okeh Records) might be Sonny Rollins' greatest album ever.
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