Mal Waldron With Eric Dolphy And Booker Ervin - The Quest (1966 Japanese Prestige Vinyl LP)

Mal Waldron With Eric Dolphy And Booker Ervin - The Quest | Vinyl LP Stereo - Japanese Prestige Reissue (SMJ-7077)

Waldron was Prestige's house pianist through the late 1950s, the man who supplied the written material that kept the label's fast-moving sessions from collapsing into loose jam dates, and who wrote "Soul Eyes" for John Coltrane. He had also spent two years as Billie Holiday's regular accompanist, from April 1957 until her death in July 1959. By June 1961 he was recording under his own name with the pick of New York's players, and The Quest is the most ambitious of those dates. The compositions are all his, and they are built to test the band. "Warp and Woof" is a blues in 5/4. "Fire Waltz" is in 3/4. The harmonic language sits somewhere between hard bop and the avant-garde without committing to either, which is exactly where Dolphy and Ervin do their best work. Dolphy plays alto on six of the seven pieces, spiky and unpredictable, launching into "Status Seeking" with real force. Ervin sticks closer to the preaching blues vocabulary he had developed in Mingus's band, and the contrast between the two horns is the album's engine. Waldron himself stays largely out of the way, laying down the melodic foundation and leaving the spotlight to the soloists.

The instrumentation is the other reason this record stands apart. Ron Carter plays cello throughout, not bass, and Joe Benjamin handles the bass chair. Carter's arco and pizzicato lines give the ensemble a chamber quality that becomes explicit on "Warm Canto," where Dolphy switches to clarinet and the whole piece drops into something closer to written concert music than to a Prestige blowing date. Three weeks after this session, Dolphy took "Fire Waltz" into the Five Spot with Booker Little for the recordings that became At the Five Spot, with Waldron again at the piano. The album has had an odd afterlife: because Dolphy's reputation grew faster than Waldron's, later editions were sometimes reissued under Dolphy's name, occasionally retitled Fire Waltz.