Wow: I've only known these performances as bootlegs from Sonny's 1959 European tour -- I had no idea there was video of these. Very cool!
This for me is The Prime Sonny Rollins -- after this '59 tour, he took one of his legendary sabbaticals ... and he never played quite like this again.
Sonny has always been very self-deprecating about his playing, and around this time period some have said that he felt he needed to "catch up to" or somehow "address" what Coltrane and Ornette Coleman were doing. Branford Marsalis said in an interview somewhere that in a weird way Sonny never realized how great he was in this time period, and abandoned some aspects of this approach.
When he ended his sabbatical a couple of years later and came out with The Bridge, he was a different player -- still marvelous, but, for me, more "forced", more abstract, and less "natural."
I have some other boots from this '59 tour, and I treasure them, both as examples of impossibly great playing, casually devastating virtuosity, and as an end of an era.
Thanks for pointing these out, LiAm84!