This is the real deal, and Essential Jazz Classics is clearly the right label for such an intelligent compilation. Obviously it's not all quite as brilliant as Brilliant Corners, but that's here as well as is the entirety of Blue Note's Sonny Rollins Vol.2 with J.J. Johnson, where Thelonious (splitting the piano work with Horace Silver) appears on ‘Reflections’ and ‘Misterioso’. An even greater service is done by bringing together tracks formerly spread over several OJC albums, namely Monk's Friday The 13th session (with Rollins and the pioneer french-hornist Julius Watkins) and Rollins' ‘I Want To Be Happy’ quartet date, where Monk gets relatively little space because Sonny was so energised. There's a palpable sense of both leading parties stretching and discovering themselves, despite the 13-year age-gap, and these four groups of material are absorbing and irreplaceable. That's all they wrote together, but even the bonus material is of interest, with the young Rollins on Bud Powell's version of ‘52nd Street Theme’ and an airshot previously unknown to me of the Roach-Brown-Rollins group playing ‘Round Midnight’. Even those who already have much of this material may be tempted by this collection.