One night - unless he really is the supernatural being he sometimes resembles - the 70-year-old Sonny Rollins may do what other venerable jazz heroes finally bow to the need for. That is, sit down between solos instead of prowling the stage, play shorter, concentrate on texture and tone instead of torrential saxophone soliloquys, and give other soloists more to do.
If and when that happens, Rollins will still sound like no other tenor saxophonist on the planet, including the thousands who have imitated him. But on his only UK date at the Barbican on Saturday, Rollins eschewed only one virtuosic spectacle of old - the unbroken, lung-punishing circular-breathing exercises that fuelled chorus after chorus of improvisation without intake of breath. Everything else was there - the bone-shaking low notes, the slewing momentum intermingling abstract playing with his familiar rugged, ironic lyricism and affection for cut-and-paste quotation - and, of course, the insistence that the improvising is the point. Rollins and his band played more or less exactly the same tunes as the last time he came, and most of the ones from the time before.
The show also started familiarly with the sense of Rollins's muse being a piece of gigantic, complex, heavy-industry machinery that needs to get the oil circulating at first - an impression reinforced by initially rather muddy and unmusical amplification. But his squirty, impulsive phrasing, braying wails, sonorous low-register rumbles and preoccupied passages were appearing by the arrival of In a Sentimental Mood. Trombonist Clifton Anderson, Rollins's front-line foil, was also introducing more of an edge and clip to his phrasing on a good solo on They Say It's Wonderful.
A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square, What a Difference a Day Makes and the inevitable Don't Stop the Carnival were the button-pushing turning points of the second half that finally brought almost the entire house to its feet. Rollins's tumult of sound snorted, bellowed and soared from the sax as he paced the stage to its edge and seemed disinclined ever to stop.
But both pianist Stephen Scott and Rollins himself played their solos of the night - long, percussive, hard-driving forays without a repeated phrase that wasn't intentional - on the fast, hard-bop classic Tenor Madness, the climax of the first half. That was really the 10 minutes or so in every Rollins show that stays roaring in your head until the next time.
