Songs from 1954 to 1956
Sonny Rollins
Sonny Rollins brought Airegin, Doxy and Oleo to a Miles Davis session in June 1954, where he played tenor saxophone in the quintet. St. Thomas, based on a Bahamian folk song, and Tenor Madness, his 1956 record with John Coltrane, followed. This page follows the five from those records to Bobby Broom's Rollins tribute, recorded in 2025.
Through the years
- 1930s
The oldest record on this page is of a song Rollins did not write. Gershwin wrote I Got Rhythm for the musical Girl Crazy, and Red Nichols and His Orchestra record it in October 1930, one of the first jazz-style records of the song. Oleo, written in 1954, borrows its .
- 1940s
Kenny Clarke and His 52nd Street Boys record Royal Roost in September 1946, the earliest known record of the melody that Rollins later calls Tenor Madness. The tune is usually credited to Clarke.
- 1950s
Miles Davis picks three Rollins tunes for a June 1954 session, and Airegin, Doxy and Oleo are first recorded with Rollins on tenor. In 1956 Rollins records St. Thomas, which Randy Weston's trio cut as Fire Down There the year before, and Tenor Madness, the only known recording of him with John Coltrane. Davis brings Coltrane to Oleo and Airegin in 1956, and Lambert, Hendricks & Ross sing Airegin in 1959.
Miles Davis with Sonny Rollins Airegin · 1954Miles Davis Doxy · 1954Miles Davis with Sonny Rollins Oleo · 1954Randy Weston Trio St. Thomas · 1955Miles Davis Quintet Airegin · 1956The Miles Davis Quintet Oleo · 1956Sonny Rollins St. Thomas · 1956Sonny Rollins Quartet, with John Coltrane Tenor Madness · 1956 - 1960s
Rollins plays Doxy and Oleo live at the Village Gate in July 1962 with Don Cherry and no piano, Oleo for about 25 minutes. Others reshape the tunes: Wes Montgomery opens an album with Airegin in 1960, Oliver Nelson adds organ and vibraphone to Doxy, Dave Pike gives St. Thomas a Latin jazz setting in 1962, and Dexter Gordon plays Doxy live in Copenhagen in 1967.
- 1970s
St. Thomas is played in two settings in August 1972: Rollins closes a Helsinki concert with it, and Jim Hall on guitar and Ron Carter on bass play it as a duo at the Playboy Club in New York. Dexter Gordon plays Airegin in 1972 and Tenor Madness at the Zurich festival in 1975, and Hubert Laws plays Airegin on piccolo in 1974 over a very fast samba pattern.
- 1980s
Rollins and a player from his 1956 records come back to the tunes. Rollins plays Tenor Madness outdoors at Opus 40 in 1986, thirty years after the Prestige record, and Tommy Flanagan, the pianist on his St. Thomas, plays it again in 1983. Mark Murphy sings it as Down St. Thomas Way in 1981, The Manhattan Transfer sing Airegin in 1985, and Branford Marsalis plays Doxy in a trio in 1988.
- 1990s
Keith Jarrett's trio with Gary Peacock and Jack DeJohnette plays Doxy live in Newark in 1998, a recording ECM releases in 2018. Bassist Scott Colley leads Airegin on his 1997 album This Place, with Chris Potter and Bill Stewart. Tenor saxophonists Eddie Harris and Wendell Harrison open a live album from the 1994 Montreux-Detroit Jazz Festival with Tenor Madness.
- 2000s
Pat Martino and Keith Jarrett's trio both play Oleo live in 2001, at Yoshi's in Oakland and at the Montreux festival, and in December 2009 Lee Konitz plays it at Birdland with Brad Mehldau, Charlie Haden and Paul Motian. Doxy turns up in small, unusual lineups: Houston Person and Ron Carter play it as tenor saxophone and bass in 2000, and Roger Kellaway's 2006 live group has guitar, vibraphone and cello with no drums.
- 2010s
Brad Mehldau's trio records Airegin in 2011, and Fred Hersch's trio closes the first disc of a double album with Doxy, live at the Village Vanguard in 2012. Branford Marsalis's quartet adds Kurt Elling, who scats on Doxy, in 2015. Drummer Dion Parson, from St. Thomas in the US Virgin Islands, names his 2015 album after the tune, and in 2018 Stephen Riley plays it in a quartet with no piano, as some of Rollins's groups did.
- 2020s
Bobby Broom's guitar trio plays Doxy on Notes of Thanks, his tribute album to Rollins, recorded in Chicago on September 30 and October 1, 2025 and released in 2026. It comes seventy-one years after Rollins first recorded the tune with Miles Davis's quintet.