First publsihed here on Salon Blogs
The dominant view of greatness in a capitalist society (and let’s face it, the entire world is a capitalist society at this point) is that of the Triumphant Hero. The individual who overcomes adversity, defeats the elements, and is just plain better than everyone else.
But there are other ways to be great.
Take Mal Waldron, who died on Monday in Brussels. He achieved greatness by being the sulfur, not the match. He was the spark for a whole slew of Triumphant Hero types, from Billy Holiday to John Coltrane to Frank O’Hara, all of whom died young. He lived to be 77, though apparently he had to move in with our European friends to do it.
Mal Waldron’s GoogObit below shows how he served the art of Billy Holiday to John Coltrane, but it doesn’t mention the way I came to know Mal Waldron. I was an astonished poetry student when I first read one of the greatest poems in the American language, Frank O’Hara’s “The Day Lady Died”, which ends with the vision of Mal Waldron accompanying greatness.
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The Day Lady Died
It is 12:20 in New York a Friday
three days after Bastille day, yes
it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine
because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton
at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner
and I don’t know the people who will feed me
I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun
and have a hamburger and a malted and buy
an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets
in Ghana are doing these days I go on to the bank
and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard)
doesn’t even look up my balance for once in her life
and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine
for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do
think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or
Brendan Behan’s new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres
of Genet, but I don’t, I stick with Verlaine
after practically going to sleep with quandariness
and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE
Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and
then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue
and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and
casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton
of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it
and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of
leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT
while she whispered a song along the keyboard
to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing
From Lunch Poems, by Frank O’Hara, published by City Lights
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Mal Waldron, Composer of the Jazz Ballad ‘Soul Eyes,’ Is Dead at 77
December 6, 2002
By BEN RATLIFF
Mal Waldron, Billie Holiday‘s last accompanist and the composer of the jazz classic “Soul Eyes,” died on Monday in Brussels, where he had lived for about a decade. He was 77.
The cause was cancer, his European management company said.
Mr. Waldron’s long career as a pianist and arranger included leading his own bands around the world. For much of the last four decades he played and lived mostly in Europe, but his recordings with companions like Eric Dolphy, John Coltrane and Steve Lacy kept his ideas in the ears of American fans, especially other musicians.
Listening to Mr. Waldron was a fascinatingly dry, dark pleasure. He belonged to no particular school or style, and his curt piano style reflected that outsider status. He repeated short motifs endlessly, as if meaning to grind them into the keyboard; a stylistic descendant of Thelonious Monk, he pared down Monk’s already quite cropped melodic lines to percussive nubs. He focused his attention toward the lower half of the keyboard, and completely avoided sentimentality.
Toward the end of his life he had a soft, muffled keyboard sound, almost as if he were playing parlor music — but a kind of parlor music infused with bebop harmony and rhythm.
Mr. Waldron grew up in New York and graduated from Queens College with a bachelor’s degree in composition. His first recordings were with Ike Quebec in 1950, and later in the 50’s he joined Charles Mingus’s Jazz Workshop. By 1956 he had formed his own quintet and became a mainstay of Prestige Records.
Though the musicians were chosen by Bob Weinstock, the head of that label, Mr. Waldron was frequently called upon to create on-the-spot themes for albums by Gene Ammons, among others. Between 1956 and 1963, he appeared on more than 40 Prestige albums, including several by Coltrane, Dolphy and Jackie McLean. It was also during that period, from 1957 to 1959, that Mr. Waldron worked in Holiday’s band.
His ballad “Soul Eyes” — first recorded on “Interplay for Two Trumpets and Two Tenors” (1957), then magnificently recast by Coltrane in 1962 on the album “Coltrane” — was Mr. Waldron’s most famous composition and has been part of the basic repertory of jazz performers ever since.
He is survived by seven children and two grandchildren.
Like so many jazz musicians in New York, Mr. Waldron fell into drug use; he overdosed on heroin in 1963. His recovery came slowly, and he said later that he did not realize how badly the overdose had affected him until he tried to play in a recording session with Max Roach and could not remember much about the keyboard aside from the position of middle C. He made no recordings from 1963 to 1966, and had to teach himself how to play again, partly by listening to his own records.
While working at the Five Spot in New York, where he took part in some of the great live jazz recordings with the Dolphy quintet in 1961, he met Mr. Lacy, the saxophonist, who would be one of his most consistent colleagues. They specialized in duet performances, often playing the music of Monk and, together with the bassist Jean-Jacques Avenel, they recorded “One More Time” (Sketch) last January in France.
In 1965 Mr. Waldron moved to Europe, eventually settling in Munich. In the 1990’s he relocated to Brussels, where he kept up a career that often took him throughout Europe and to Japan and for a time to the United States, though less so during the last decade.
A brown cigarette between his long fingers was part of his image, along with his tuft of white hair. After many jazz clubs in the United States banned smoking in the mid-90’s, he seldom played in them.