In one of the short interviews included in these engrossing live recordings (mostly in Sweden, but also West Germany, France, Switzerland and the Netherlands) from a 1959 European tour, Sonny Rollins tells Swedish television that rather than being the creator of a new style is “just in the experimental stage”.

The words are telling. From the experimentation did come something new. Rollins pushed saxophone vocabulary to the highest levels of creativity through his inexhaustible ideas with regard to phrasing and tonal ingenuity. He made lines dance, whirl, swoop, soar, growl and grimace, and his shifts of pitch, as in the supremely cheeky completion of the melody of ‘I Told Evr’y Little Star’ is a perfect example while the chafing dissonance on the theme of ‘St. Thomas’ shows an effortless straddling of post-bop and avant-garde schools.

Backed by bassist Henry Grimes, and various drummers, from Pete La Roca to Joe Harris (Of Dizzy Gillespie fame) to the great bebop innovator Kenny Clarke, the saxophone colossus has the requisitely flexible support to both play ‘in ‘n’ out’ on standards and originals that have lost none of their freshness 65 years later.

On both vinyl and CD, Freedom Weaver also includes an elaborate booklet with rare photos by Ed van der Elsken, Jean-Pierre Leloir, Bob Parent and many others; liner notes by jazz scholar Bob Blumenthal, and new interviews with Rollins himself, as well as Branford Marsalis, James Carter, Joe Lovano, James Brandon Lewis and Peter Brötzmann. The top-notch mastering is by the legendary engineer Bernie Grundman.