Alas, Reese does not explain his editing process — how he winnowed six boxes of material down to a 152-page book that still contains a lot of filler and close-to-meaningless verbiage ... As an editor, Reese writes sensitively about Rollins’s music but somehow never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity. His introduction does not mention Rollins’s drug use and other troubles. His endnotes are sparse.
The notebooks have many vital details, but it’s an open question whether they will reveal much to the reader. This is because they are details of saxophone playing that will be familiar to anyone intimate with the instrument but will likely be baffling to others ... His thinking about himself in the notebooks is self-critical, but there’s no direct line from this to the ideas that come out through his horn. But that’s the elusiveness of the great artists.
Evocative if occasionally enigmatic ... Though some readers may wish for more organizational cohesion, a sense of the artist’s complicated internal life and nearly religious dedication to his craft comes through powerfully and poetically.
