Mal Waldron - Breaking New Ground (1983 Japanese Baybridge Vinyl LP)

Mal Waldron - Breaking New Ground | Vinyl LP - 1983 Japanese Baybridge (KUX-180-B)

Mal Waldron was one of the darkest and most distinctive pianists in jazz, a percussive, hypnotic player who had been Billie Holiday's last accompanist and Charles Mingus's pianist before a breakdown in the early sixties forced him to relearn the instrument from scratch. Breaking New Ground finds him in 1983, long settled in Europe, doing something genuinely unexpected: taking the pop and film music of the day and running it through his own sensibility. The band is superb, Reggie Workman on bass and Ed Blackwell, Ornette Coleman's great drummer, on drums, and the three of them turn familiar material inside out. The highlights are the ones you would least expect. The MAS*H theme "Suicide Is Painless" becomes a churning, driving groove, and Satie's "Gymnopédie", all space and stillness, sits perfectly with Waldron's own feeling for silence. Elsewhere he tackles Michael Jackson's "Beat It" and Stevie Wonder's "You Are The Sunshine Of My Life", which are more of a gamble, daring rather than fully convincing, but never dull. It is a record with real character, the sound of a serious musician refusing to stand still.

By 1983 Waldron had become one of the great expatriate figures in jazz, based in Europe and recording prolifically for labels on both sides of the world, and Baybridge was one of the Japanese labels that gave him room to follow his curiosity. This trio is a large part of why the record works: Workman and Blackwell were both veterans of the music's most adventurous corners, Workman out of John Coltrane's band and Blackwell out of Ornette Coleman's, and they meet Waldron's dark intensity head on.

This copy is the 1983 Japanese original on Baybridge, made by Teichiku Records, catalogue number KUX-180-B.