Flowers from Charlie

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.