Soul Eyes On the Prize

OK, I get that there's been a milestone passing, so if you want to soundtrack your moment of mourning, go here. I had this post planned for today so I am doing it.

Today would have been the 93rd birthday of one of my personal favorites, so I could do no less.

He began in the 1950s, accompanying Billie Holiday during her final years, and proceeded to a hard-bop career of his own after she passed.

But he too had his own struggles with the demon heroin, OD'ing in the early 1960s so badly he lost the ability to play music for a time.

When he cleaned up and returned, he scuttled the former lyricism of his style in favor of an angular, repetitive, almost minimalist approach.

He appeared on and recorded countless sessions, and is responsible for the very first albums ever issued on two seminal Jazz labels, ECM and Enja.

I listen to his records as much as any other artist.... and I have 20 TB of music in here.

There's just something magma-deep about the way Mal Waldron, born this day in 1925, handled a piano and its possibilities.

He passed away back in 2002, but his absence will never diminish his presence on my eternal playlist.

To celebrate, I worked on this (holy shit it's incredible) tape of his quintet performing a sizzling 80-minute set in Belgium in the '70s. This utterly brilliant and sadly unissued recording features trumpet master Manfred Schoof and Steve Lacy's spitting soprano sax spraying like fire all over the top.

Mal Waldron Quintet

Middelheim Jazz Festival

Antwerp, Belgium

8.15.1977

01 One-Upmanship/The Seagulls of Kristiansund

02 Hooray for Herbie

03 Snake Out

04 Russian Melody

Total time: 1:18:05

Mal Waldron - piano

Manfred Schoof - trumpet

Steve Lacy - soprano saxophone

Isla Eckinger - bass

Makaya Ntshoko - drums

could be a master or 1st gen cassette of the pre-FM reels

very slightly remastered and optimized by EN, August 2018

503 MB FLAC/August 2018 archive link

I did very little to this one, except restoring the missing opening phrase, resetting the track markers, and brightening it up a wee bit with the handy dandy Sound Forge 11 Graphic Dynamics tool. It's a tad hissy but I did not use NR because fuck that shit.

I shall return in mere days with yet more fodder for your face, but let's not let the sad news of the day distract too much from the 93rd birthday of Mal Waldron, one of the greatest piano players in the history of American music.--J.

8.16.1925 - 12.2.2002