Mal Waldron - Left Alone: Mal Waldron Live 1 (1974 Fontana Japanese Vinyl LP)

Mal Waldron - Left Alone: Mal Waldron Live 1 | Vinyl LP - 1974 Fontana Japanese Pressing (PAT-1061, Nippon Phonogram, limited edition)

Mal Waldron was Billie Holiday's regular accompanist from April 1957 until her death in July 1959. He played on her final recording sessions, wrote "Soul Eyes" for John Coltrane while working as house pianist at Prestige Records, and appeared on sessions with Charles Mingus, Jackie McLean and Eric Dolphy. In 1963 a drug-induced breakdown left him unable to play the piano or remember any music he had ever learned. He spent years relearning the instrument from nothing, and the pianist who emerged was different from the one who'd gone in: slower, more deliberate, built on repetition and accumulation rather than bebop's usual velocity. He left the US permanently in the mid-1960s for Europe, and Japan became one of his most important destinations. This 1971 concert at Yamaha Hall in Tokyo captures him with three of Japan's finest jazz musicians.

Side A is a quartet. Kohsuke Mine plays alto saxophone alongside Waldron's piano, Isao Suzuki's bass and Yoshiyuki Nakamura's drums. "Left Alone" opens the concert, the song Holiday wrote lyrics for on a cross-country flight and sang to Waldron when the plane landed. She never got around to recording it, always forgetting the sheet music. The first recording was Waldron's 1959 studio version with Jackie McLean on alto; here, twelve years later, Mine takes the melody in McLean's place, and Waldron's piano underneath has the weight of everything that happened in between. "Straight No Chaser" follows, Monk's composition played at a slow burn for nearly ten minutes. Side B strips to a trio: Waldron, Suzuki and Nakamura alone on "Right On" and "Thoughts," each piece stretching past twelve minutes with the patience that characterised Waldron's post-recovery playing.

This is the 1974 Fontana pressing (PAT-1061), manufactured by Nippon Phonogram as a limited edition in the '75 Attention! series.