If he had not left New York in the mid-1960s to live in Europe, the pianist and composer Mal Waldron might be significantly better remembered here today. But then again, he still might not.
Waldron, who died in 2002 and would have celebrated his 100th birthday last month, was one of the most creative jazz pianists ever to touch the keyboard, but he wasn’t a natural protagonist. With his slender brown cigarettes, ever-present chess set and professorial demeanor, he exuded gravitas — but not leading-man charisma.
He had accompanied some of the biggest names in jazz history (Billie Holiday, Charles Mingus) and counted others as his own side musicians (John Coltrane, Ron Carter), on his way to recording over 100 albums of his own and writing more than 400 compositions, including music for films, plays and dance performances. But his playing can feel mysterious and private, wrapped up in its own thoughts. It’s extremely rewarding for a patient listener, but because it is so intensely personal it can take a minute (or five) to get acquainted with.
In the title essay of his new book, “Black Mystery School Pianists and Other Writings,” the pianist Matthew Shipp identifies a hiding-in-plain-sight tradition of piano players — descended from Duke Ellington, Sun Ra and Thelonious Monk — who possess “an alternative touch,” and whose styles resist any “easily digestible paradigm” that might “be able to fall under the hands of a jazz student.” Naturally, Waldron is one of his prime examples.
In The Times’s obituary, from 2002, Ben Ratliff wrote of Waldron: “He focused his attention toward the lower half of the keyboard, and completely avoided sentimentality.” Mystery school, indeed. Ratliff also put out a book this year, “Run the Song,” and in it he devotes pages to the delights of listening to Waldron’s crooked, inscrutable style.
To get to know this oft-overlooked giant of jazz history, read on for favorite tracks recommended by Waldron devotees, and listen to the playlists included with the article. If you’re already a Waldron fan, don’t hesitate to leave your own choices in the comments.
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Mal Waldron Trio, ‘Rat Now’
Lafayette Gilchrist, pianist
As a young piano player, after I’d studied a lot of Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk and Bud Powell, I started wondering: Who are the pianist-composers who are the next step? Mal Waldron is one big answer to that. He mastered bebop, and he was in that genre — but his expression was so individualistic, he stood out. He always had a tight rhythmic pocket, but he was not tight with the pocket: His sense of pocket was so deep that it was free and open. Within that, he’d create these simple motifs and build on them — and before you knew it, man, this cat done opened up a whole world. It’s utterly fearless, it’s driven. And it’s all about the way he takes simple things and builds on them.
That heavy pocket is what attracted me to “Free at Last,” which he recorded in 1969 and became the first release from ECM Records. Most of the later stuff on that label has a really clean sound, but this thing was raw and funky. That’s another thing that I don’t think people associate with him enough: Mal’s one of those funky piano players, man. He played with the rhythm section, but he’s his own independent rhythmic entity within that. Mal sits on top of the rhythm; he sits outside of the rhythm; he can sit behind the rhythm if he wants to. When I hear his improvisations, I can hear his sense of adventure. He’s walking that tightrope with no net.
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Abbey Lincoln, ‘Straight Ahead’
Ran Blake, pianist and educator
I met Mal for the first time when I was a waiter at the Jazz Gallery in the early 1960s, when he, along with Max Roach, Abbey Lincoln, Booker Little and the rest of their band were there for six weeks straight, playing material from the “Freedom Now Suite” and what would become the “Straight Ahead” album. I didn’t really know them socially, but I waited on tables, and Mal was very kind. Eventually, he agreed to be my piano teacher. So I would go on the subway from Columbia University down to Times Square, and catch the train out to Flushing, where he lived with his wife, Elaine, and their children.
Mal Waldron is one of the major composers. “Left Alone,” which Waldron co-wrote with Billie Holiday, was the first of his compositions that I tackled. As a teacher, I’ve used that piece over the years in my long-term melodic memory course: It’s very simple but very beautiful. “Straight Ahead,” which he and Abbey wrote together, is totally different, and very complicated. We studied it together when I was at Mal’s house. It starts in one key, then goes to B-flat major, and hits this ambiguous chord. And then suddenly we hear an E-flat minor chord — how did that come in? He was an interesting thinker. Sometimes there was not a decipherable logic, but even his stream of consciousness was so profound. “Straight Ahead” is like that; it’s extremely complex, and I think it shows Mal’s genius.
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Mal Waldron and Steve Lacy, ‘Epistrophy’
Matthew Shipp, pianist
In an essay I wrote titled “Black Mystery School Pianists,” I place Mal in this tradition — which is a line of pianists that present an alternative aesthetic to history by being iconoclasts — by use of angular phrasing, harmonics, different variations of touch, etc. In the essay I identify Monk as the founding father of the school but emphasize that everyone else in this tradition did not “sound like” Monk, and usually did not play his tunes; they usually played their own music. With that being said, it is interesting hearing Mal play a Monk tune. Monk’s tunes are an obstacle course few pianists solve; personally, I’m not sure if they’re really meant for pianists other than Monk to navigate. So how does Mal get into Monk’s space time? Well, there is respect for the contour of the Monk composition, but Mal brings his own distinctive personality to it. He never tries to force the idea of Monkisms on you, or acts like he should get Brownie points because he can evoke Monk. The dark harmonic aspects are just as natural for Mal’s sense of harmonic color as they are for Monk — so it does not take much to execute the translation from Monk world to Mal world. In his solo Mal adopts some aspects of Monk’s geometry, but the looping shape of the phrases is all his. Waldron has developed an adaptation of a jazz minimalism that is distinctly his own, though you can hear how the genesis of some of the ideas might come from a type of phrase Monk would do. But once it filters through the Waldron minimalism blender, it is a new creation, maybe with no prototypes.
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Mal Waldron with Eric Dolphy and Booker Ervin, ‘Duquility’
Angelica Sanchez, pianist
Mal Waldron always surprised me. His compositional language was expansive, and his harmonic sense always drew me in. Waldron was rooted in tradition, but for him tradition meant constant innovation. He was never afraid to try something new. One of my favorite Waldron albums is “The Quest,” which he recorded in 1961 with Eric Dolphy, Ron Carter, Booker Ervin, Charlie Persip and Joe Benjamin. “Duquility” is my favorite track on the record. Carter’s use of cello opens the ensemble to a wider range of textures and colors, and Mal takes a beautiful, soulful, almost minimalist solo.
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Mal Waldron, ‘Dans La Cuisine D’Alibi’
Robin D.G. Kelley, historian
I fell in love with Mal Waldron first as an accompanist with Eric Dolphy, Charles Mingus, Jackie McLean and Billie Holiday, and then as a leader, solo pianist and in duos with Steve Lacy, Marion Brown, David Murray and Archie Shepp. His compositions, from his modal vamps such as “Snake Out” and “Hurray for Herbie” to his gorgeous “Left Alone,” are genuine classics. Listen to any of these songs and Waldron will have your heart. But I chose “Dans La Cuisine D’Alibi,” a medium-tempo waltz recorded with the bassist Reggie Workman and drummer Ed Blackwell on his 1983 LP “Breaking New Ground.” It departs a bit from his other compositions by incorporating more harmonic movement, but one hears the characteristics that make Waldron singular: well-crafted melody, repetition and lyricism as building blocks for improvisation, an impeccable sense of rhythm. Workman once described Waldron’s playing as percussive, and it shows. The LP is also a departure for its inclusion of pop songs by Michael Jackson, Stevie Wonder, and Earth, Wind & Fire. And with a rhythm section made up of Workman and Blackwell, they could make Erik Satie swing … oh, wait, they do!
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Mal Waldron and Jeanne Lee, ‘Fire Waltz’
Fay Victor, vocalist
I first met Mal Waldron when I was living in the Netherlands. Mal played at the Bimhuis a lot, so I got to see Mal there in quintets, in trios. And the very first time I saw him, in 1998, Jeanne Lee happened to sit in with him. I didn’t even know who she was. I’d be lying if I said I immediately thought it was the most amazing thing I’d ever heard. It was more like, What is this? It was very mysterious. And they seemed to have this beautiful connection; I felt like a true conversation was happening between them at a master level. The duo record they made together, “After Hours,” is one of my favorites, although it doesn’t often get talked about. After getting to hang out with him some, and listening to her a lot, it seems to me they were both very intellectual people, but they each carried that in a soft way. You feel it, you sense it, you hear it, but it’s not pushed in your face. When they play together, you hear this real spatial sense they have, each allowing the other to come in and then respond. I think that’s what I learned from them: not to preconceive what I should do, but to truly respond in the moment to what another player is saying, as in a good conversation.
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Charles Mingus, ‘Pithecanthropus Erectus’
Giovanni Russonello, writer
There are so many ways to hear Mal Waldron — as a composer, bandleader, soloist, masterly duetist. Another is as one of the weirdest and finest sidemen to play the jazz piano. While he was being exposed to a broad tract of the music’s classic bandleaders in the mid-1950s, when he was Prestige Records’ house pianist and resident composer, he was also playing with Charles Mingus’s Jazz Composers Workshop. It was here that his canny counterintuition and sense of musical color found their most expansive habitat. I think Waldron has a lot to do with the fact that I return more often to “Pithecanthropus Erectus” than to any other Mingus LP. In the middle of the quintet’s wild, dilating sound is Waldron, letting his chords ring out with just one stroke each, sometimes paring down to two-note lines, cluttering things up and then hiding. Recondite, crinkled, philosophical at every turn, his playing brings Mingus’s writing into a deeper conversation with its own brilliance.
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Idrees Sulieman, John Coltrane, et. al. (featuring Mal Waldron), ‘Soul Eyes’
Andrew Cyrille, drummer
Mal used to play with a strong sense of anticipation and suspense, so that you had to expect what was coming — and then what was coming was usually a big surprise. He’s a very fluid player, in terms of the peaks and the valleys of his dynamics. When I started playing on a professional level I would sometimes hear Mal perform, and I’d say: Gee, I don’t like the way this guy is playing, he kind of just repeats himself! But when I got the opportunity to work with him, to my surprise, those bits he was repeating would actually feed me things that I could reply to — in a way that, more typically, a drummer would be feeding things to other players. Monk’s music is similar, in that it can also be that rhythmical, so that drummers can play in between the notes.
“Soul Eyes,” one of his best-known tunes, is a beautiful ballad. Most times, compositions are written from some material inspiration; you translate the material into musical notes. With “Soul Eyes,” he was probably looking at somebody that gave him a warm feeling. Now, how do you identify the soul? It’s a spiritual thing. It’s something that comes from inside another person that makes you feel a certain way. It’s the vibrations they’re giving you. I don’t know who Mal was looking at, at the time when he decided to write a piece that represented this person, but I can get that feeling of what he saw just through the music.
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Mal Waldron Trio, ‘Love Span’
Ben Ratliff, former Times pop and jazz critic
In later years the feeling of night grew almost total in Mal Waldron’s music, but in “Love Span,” from the 1959 piano-trio album “Mal/4,” the sun is merely setting hard. Waldron must have absorbed the ballads Billy Strayhorn wrote for Ellington, with their unusual harmonic movement and lonely sound-world. Whatever “love span” means can only be felt intuitively, and Waldron wrote strange and poetic titles, but the word “span” might connect the tune to Strayhorn’s “Chelsea Bridge”; it also suggests the suspension mechanics making the slow and unpredictable 32-bar theme cohere. Without making a show of it, without demonstrating “anxiety” or “sadness” in bold strokes as a lot of jazz did at the time, the song gets closer to the complex contours of real emotions than ballads usually do.
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Mal Waldron and Max Roach, ‘Monk’s Dream’
John Szwed, jazz historian
How do you celebrate the 70th birthday of a great pianist like Mal Waldron? Book him for a performance and invite a drummer to play with him. That is what deSingel arts center in Antwerp did on Sept. 20, 1995, when Max Roach joined Waldron for a concert that was recorded and released as “Explorations … to the Mth Degree.” It’s not the best-known record of either of their careers, but it’s one of their best. Waldron was a strong, percussive pianist, and Roach, no shrinking violet, could also whisper and sizzle and play melodies on his drum set. Only seven of the 30 pieces played that night were known compositions; the rest were all improvisations. Their encore was “Monk’s Dream,” on which Roach at times kept a steady rhythm flowing, but more often he repeated, punctuated or underlined what Waldron had to say, for this was truly a musical conversation. At times Roach anticipates what Waldron is about to play, at others he states the melody, while Waldron drops chord-bombs or cymbal-like tinkles at the upper end of the keyboard. It was two musical geniuses and an audience having fun.
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Mal Waldron, ‘Beat It’
Ethan Iverson, pianist and writer
Unlike many of his more polished peers’, Mal Waldron’s legacy continues to resonate, partly because fans can group him with minimalism, jam bands or other non-jazz aesthetics. His best music also has a darker side. H.P. Lovecraft’s horror word unnamable might be appropriate: The piano playing seethes and burbles without coming to a climax. Waldron is one of my most important influences, and one favorite record is the 1983 trio disc “Breaking New Ground” with Reggie Workman and Ed Blackwell, a concept album featuring pop hits of the day like Michael Jackson’s “Beat It.” I first heard this record when it was new, and it is one reason I immediately felt comfortable playing rock covers 20 years later in the Bad Plus. Somewhere there’s a video of me at 16 playing this album’s arrangement of “Suicide Is Painless” on Wisconsin public access TV; in time I could explain, “Our version of ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ is as if Mal Waldron played a Kurt Cobain song.”
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