Charlie Rouse – Two Is One (Strata-East, 2025)
Charlie Rouse Band – Cinnamon Flower: The Expanded Edition (Resonance
Records, 2025)
By Lee Rice Epstein
In December of 1960, saxophonist Charlie Rouse recorded a lovely, engaging
quartet session, issued the following year under the unassuming but hip
title, Yeah. After a couple of blowing sessions that preceded it,
Yeah is arguably the first look at Rouse as the warm-toned,
ingenious artist who would emerge almost a decade later from Thelonious
Monk’s quartet. The opener is Gene De Paul and Ron Raye’s classic “You Don’t
Know What Love Is,” taken at a relaxed tempo. A palpable
evening-at-the-nightclub vibe flows effortlessly from the speakers and
carries through the rest of the album. Any listener hearing Yeah as
their on-ramp to Rouse’s discography would be forgiven an expectation of a
stack that sits comfortably alongside contemporaneous Wilkerson, Gordon, and
Donaldson records.
And yet, shortly after, Rouse stopped recording as a leader for a decade,
instead spending the bulk of the 1960s as a core member of Monk’s quartet.
To say Rouse learned much from Monk both feels true and also underplays how
much Rouse brought to the quartet. In the 1950s, he recorded a set of albums
with Julius Watkins under the name The Jazz Modes, a rich and inventive
pairing of French horn and tenor sax. Rouse’s talent for creating rich,
unexpected tonal palettes paired well with Monk’s talent for composing
equally unexpected harmonic clusters. Rouse (and of course Monk) understood
that playing with Monk didn’t necessitate playing like Monk. In equal
measure, they accentuate and lift the other, not unlike Cecil Taylor and
Jimmy Lyons.
In 1974, when Two Is One was released on the independent label
Strata-East, it’d be hard to say what most longtime listeners of Rouse would
have thought. Thankfully, with Strata-East albums coming back in print, we
have the luxury of looking back now and seeing the through-line connecting
Rouse’s 1950s experiments with those of the 1970s, where electric guitars,
bass, and cello dip into and out of funk, swing, and bossa rhythms with
ease. Stanley Clarke’s bass is magnificent, and with Airto Moreria there’s
something of a Return To Forever meets downtown soul vibe that works
brilliantly. It’s as effortless a session as Yeah from ten years
earlier, and just as stylistically and tonally interesting as Jazz Modes.
The band stretches out pretty well on every number, and then comes “Two Is
One,” eleven minutes of soulful, driving funk. The drummer here is David
Lee, who was backing Sonny Rollins at around the same time, and who has a
great touch on the drums, knowing exactly how to push the song along, while
leaving space for Rouse to flex on his solos. With a wave of saxophonists
leaning in and overblowing at the time, Rouse emphasizes phrasing set off by
brief moments of silence to pull in the listener. The result is simply
fantastic, one of the finest in Strata-East’s nearly unbeatable catalog.
And then there’s Cinnamon Flower. Coming back to Rouse in a moment,
one of the more fascinating aspects of the album is Bernard Purdie, whose
flawless timing and feel is often compressed into only minute-long clips
highlighting his eponymous shuffle. Here, however, he’s all over the set,
brilliant and grooving; it tells a much fuller story of his skills than any
Steely Dan Behind the Music ever could.
The set of songs on Cinnamon Flower are composed and arranged by
either pianist Dom Salvador (known for his part in samba funk breaking out
during the 1960s boom) or guitarist Amaury Tristão (maybe best known for
championing bossa nova’s introduction to the States). Under Rouse’s
leadership, the blend of samba funk rhythms with bossa nova accents is a
dazzling, hypnotic groove. Wilbur Bascomb, Jr., plays electric bass on most
of the album, with Ron Carter subbing in for Milton Nascimento’s incredible
“Clove and Cinnamon (Cravo E Canela)” and Tristão’s “A New Dawn (Alvorada).”
One of the most exciting elements of Rouse’s music is how smoothly the band
mixes tempos and styles; again, while it’s not merely an extrapolation of
Monk’s music, you can hear how ten years with the maestro would have opened
Rouse up to even more possibilities than he’d explored previously.
And while the Two Is One reissue sounds fantastic all on its own,
for Cinnamon Flower, the vaults have been raided, with the entire
album presented in its original, unedited format. For anyone keen to play
out a this-or-that game of comparing recordings, this is a perfect
experience, where the original album remains as-is, and the additional
studio versions (recorded at Sound Ideas by Resonance’s own George Klabin)
play out just as beautifully. There are subtle yet striking differences in
the opener, “Backwoods Echo (Sertão),” one of Salvador’s contributions and
lengthier “Clove and Cinnamon (Cravo E Canela).” And of course, the best
part of all is hearing more of Rouse, whose legacy seems to continue to grow
as more of his records are rediscovered. Here’s hoping there are some live
sessions from around the same time yet to be heard. It’s hard to believe,
but even after twenty years of regular gigging, the ’70s were a high peak
for Rouse, when his playing was as lush, dynamic, and imaginative as ever,
and the band was eager to journey alongside him.