Valse Hot is a jazz tune written by Sonny Rollins and first recorded in 1956 with the Clifford Brown-Max Roach Quintet. It appears on the Prestige album Sonny Rollins Plus Four, released in 1956, and is performed in a hard bop style as a lively jazz waltz in A-flat major. The original session features Rollins on tenor sax with Clifford Brown on trumpet, Max Roach on drums, Richie Powell on piano, and George Morrow on bass. Rollins wrote Valse Hot while he was a sideman in the Brown-Roach group, and the Plus Four session helped establish him as a leading bandleader. The album is notable for its blend of Rollins’s original compositions with the dynamic Brown-Roach quartet, and it foreshadowed the tragedy that would soon follow with the deaths of Brown and Powell within months of the recording.
