"Tenor Madness" is the legendary title track from Sonny Rollins's 1956 album, famous as the only recorded meeting between Rollins and John Coltrane, the two titans of the tenor saxophone in post-bop jazz. This blues in B-flat at approximately 180 beats per minute provides the framework for one of jazz's most celebrated tenor battles. Coltrane, who plays first, delivers seven choruses that reveal the intense, searching quality of his improvisation during this pivotal period, his lines probing the blues changes with a harmonic sophistication that foreshadowed his revolutionary work to come. Rollins follows with eight expansive choruses that demonstrate his mastery of thematic development and rhythmic invention, his solo building with the architectural logic that critics and scholars have long admired. Red Garland contributes four choruses of his signature piano style, blending single-note bebop lines with his famous block-chord approach. Paul Chambers closes with three choruses of bass that showcase his melodic conception and rhythmic authority. Recorded with Philly Joe Jones on drums, the session captures the rhythm section of Miles Davis's legendary first great quintet supporting jazz's two most important tenor saxophonists. The track has become a touchstone of jazz history, the only documentation of a pairing that jazz fans have debated and imagined ever since.
