http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/m ... -jazz.htmlAugust 26, 2013
The Glorious Cedar Walton
Posted by Richard Brody
Bad news arrived last week while I was out of town—the death of the pianist and composer Cedar Walton, at the age of seventy-nine. His name has always been a watermark of quality, and of particular qualities, for any recording he’s taken part in, as leader or sideman. Walton had a blend of power and swing, modesty and complexity, hearty tradition and fervent innovation. He joined the drummer Art Blakey’s sextet in 1961 and, together with the trumpeter Freddie Hubbard and the tenor saxophonist Wayne Shorter, made it, for the next three years, one of the best ensembles in jazz. Blakey’s sheer force was joined to a true group concept—his younger band members composed works of a brooding intensity that joined modern post-bop modality (as pioneered by Miles Davis) to a bluesy, R. & B.-based feeling. The band’s music emerged with a ripping progressive edge and an exultation in sheer dark heat that sounded like the streets and distinguished it from more transcendent, conceptual, or restrained versions of modern jazz. Instead, the trio seemed more linked to the new funk of James Brown and Motown.
Walton’s first recording with Blakey was a live set, from August, 1961, that came out as part of the second volume of recordings called, drolly, “Three Blind Mice” (an arrangement of which was played with surprisingly un-jokey fervor). This clip, from 1963, gives a clear sense of the band’s exhilarating level of intricate aggression—and also includes a long interlude, from the thirty-first through thirty-eighth minutes, devoted to Walton, who plays solo and in a trio with Blakey and the bassist Reggie Workman. Walton delivers a florid ballad that snaps into an irrepressible up-tempo bounce. At minute forty-six, he thrillingly pierces Blakey’s drum fury while adding another layer of tension to it.
I have a special love for hearing piano trios (i.e., with bass and drums), and, in later years, Walton made many recordings in that format. But in Walton’s case, there’s a particular joy in hearing him play behind horn soloists, as in the obscure 1967 recording by the trumpeter Donald (Blackjack) Byrd. On this tune, “Eldorado,” Walton sticks close to the rhythm of the melody but seems to be hearing inside the heads of the soloists (especially the tenor saxophonist Hank Mobley—I wish their interplay had gone on for several more choruses). In his own solo, he used the insistent rhythm to loosely tether freewheeling inspirations until he meshes gears in a sultry, straightforward blues jaunt.
In 1986, in this concert from Japan (seen in the above clip) with the alto saxophonist Jackie McLean and the trumpeter Woody Shaw, Walton, in his superb solo, does something similar: taking off from a bluesy strut, he breaks into an overflowingly melodic mode and touches base with swing before spinning out piquantly out-of-phase chords and teeming note-torrents.
Walton was as significant a composer as he was a performer. He played on the tenor saxophonist Clifford Jordan’s quietly majestic, even modestly era-defining, 1973 recording “Glass Bead Games,” and contributed two compositions to the session—“Shoulders” and “Bridgework”—which are two of my all-time favorite jazz compositions, ones that exemplify their time and capture the essence of jazz moods while also posing an awesome challenge: to improvise on themes that are already perfect.
The very status of that great album (I’ve got the CD but fondly recall the double-LP from Strata-East, an exceptional, short-lived, artist-run record label) tells a remarkable and troubled story, of the glory and curse of “jazz” itself. Some musicians dislike that word (Ahmad Jamal distances himself from it, Nicholas Payton utterly repudiates it), but the underlying question is the range of musical styles that jazz implies. Walton’s latter-day music wouldn’t have been out of place in his performances from more than fifty years ago. The recording with Jordan—coming, as it did, at a moment when both the avant-garde and pop-tinged fusion were getting the bulk of attention (the former, from critics; the latter, from audiences)—is a summing-up of a post-bop manner that had already become traditional. This self-consciously historicist distillation, with compositions dedicated to elder greats, make a claim for that manner as newly yet definitively classical.
All art forms reach their point of crisis, regarding their own conventions and the acceptance of the public. The prospect of further progress depends on a self-conscious reassessment of the art’s history, and the open field of radical possibilities leads to a congealing of taste around earlier styles that arose in response to specific conditions that no longer exist. But the trends of an art form are one thing, the lives and experiences of artists another. Walton negotiated just such a divide with integrity and invention, which doubles his place in the music’s history.
