There’re endless stories of children rebelling against their parents in any way that might trouble the older set. Hippies’ children might go off and buy a suit so that office jobs fall into their laps. There’s even the son of Dead Moon’s husband and wife duo who's a lawyer. Of course, if your dad’s only job since roughly the mid ‘60s was to play guitar, a briefcase might be a welcome change.

Either way, that broad concept of rebellion could be applied to jazz players who mostly performed as sidemen, but occasionally earned a shot at leading some dates. And since I already mentioned hippies, it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to figure bop innovators as the hippies of their generation – it was all certainly confusing to the Duke and Louis. Within that crop of weirdo stalwarts, though, Thelonious Monk stood out. While there won’t ever be another Charlie Parker of Dizzy Gillespie, there can’t be another Monk. The world wouldn’t allow it.

So unique was the man that even the profile of him sitting at the keyboard is iconic. He was responsible for a litany of compositions that today fill pages in the American song book. But along for most of the ride was a sax player named Charlie Rouse – who in these blog pages has been a frequent target for my disappointment.

Playing with Monk for a bit of a decade, Rouse performs on some of the most interesting dates that the pianist ever led. So it should follow that when given the chance to organize a recording date, the results, with Rouse at the helm, should have been mind expanding. They weren’t – a few were even bad. But one might figure that Rouse didn’t want to traverse all that difficult music on his own dates if on a nightly basis he performed with Monk. That’s only a guess, but it kind of makes sense.

As I’ve tried to survey a breadth of the guy’s work, Yeah! eventually came my way. And while the disc, recorded in 1961, is leaps and bounds beyond Bossa Nova Bacchanal, which followed the next year, it’s still a pretty staid effort.

Split evenly between covers and original compositions, Yeah! at least has a chance at not lulling listeners to sleep – of course opening the album with a cover seems like a bad idea, but that’s how it goes. That opening number and the album’s other covers don’t do anything for the legacy of this sax player. But only during a few passages on his originals does Rouse relate any playing that could be seen as related to his time with Monk.

“Lil Rousin'” is almost a soul jazz number. It’s not funky, but it swings hard and finds Rouse out front pushing his ensemble as hard as anywhere on the album. Unfortunately, listeners don’t get to hear anything resembling this fire again until “Rouse's Point.” It’s all hard bop. But even as the song doesn’t revel in anything new – especially considering the time that the date was recorded – Yeah! still counts as the sax players strongest date under his own name. Just stick to those Monk discs, though.