Cedar Walton RIP

[Gentle Giant]

Cedar Walton died just after 3am this morning at his home in Brooklyn. He was 79.

Haven't found much more yet.

[Mike Schwartz]

Reverberating all over the jazz world ....a wonderful player, composer, ambassador, and all around class act.

This recording features frequent running mate Billy Higgins and also the late Bob Berg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJ8_vtqYvV4

[uli]

RIP, Sir!

now playing

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dwpph2h8jD8

[moldyfigg]

That's a big loss. I was fortunate enough to seen a number of times, he was one of the best.

[bluenoter]

all around class act

Knowing very little about him but having heard a few albums on which he appears, I always thought of him as a class act too.

R.I.P.

[Ron Thorne]

I was just about to start a thread when I found this one.

What a shame. He was, without question, a shining example of good taste, and a jazz ambassador.




08/19/13
Cedar Walton Dies at 79
Good taste and elegant power defined veteran pianist's style

By JazzTimes

Cedar Walton, a pianist whose good taste and straightforward elegance as an improviser complemented his considerable strengths as a small-combo arranger and melodic composer, died today at his home in Brooklyn. The death was confirmed by producer and concert presenter Todd Barkan, a longtime friend. Walton was 79.

Walton was something of an institution on the New York club scene, and his imposing cv included time with Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers in the ’60s, when the band also included Wayne Shorter and Freddie Hubbard, as well as alternate-take recordings of “Giant Steps” and “Naima” with John Coltrane. Among his best-loved and most enduring compositions is “Bolivia.” He was named a Jazz Master by the National Endowment for the Arts for 2010.

JazzTimes is currently working on a full obituary to post later today.


NEA Bio Page




R.I.P., Cedar Walton~

[Ron Thorne]

WKCR is featuring a Memorial Broadcast in honor of Cedar Walton until noon tomorrow, August 20th.




Click here<

[Ron Thorne]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyLLT17fbwA

[hornplayer]

WKCR is featuring a Memorial Broadcast in honor of Cedar Walton until noon tomorrow, August 20th.




Click here<

Hears some of that broadcast on my way to the airport this morning.

What a huge loss. What a lovely man.

[Dickran (ran)]

Preface: This is my 3rd attempt to post on this thread , so if it comes out later that there are more then one please accept my redundancies.

This bit of news has hit me hard. When I first ventured into the world of jazz it was Cedar and Billy Higgins who I followed and learned from. I learned from him to appreciate time and space , the free flowing of ideas within a concept of a piano , bass and drum. I don't think I've ever seen any one pianist live more then I have Cedar and every one was grand. And not to limit it to just a trio , I had seen him in so many different set ups , everyone , all of them were great.

If I were given one word to describe him it would be: Elegant.

Out of all the great pianists that I love , if given the chance to emulate anyone player my preference would have been Cedar. This cat could swing.

RIP , my friend , thank you.

[Mike Schwartz]

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/m ... -jazz.html

August 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.