DC Share Revival: Review: Mal Waldron Sextet

Rating: 90/100 - Genrés: Bebop, Hard Bop.

Mal Waldron’s Mal/2 (Prestige PRLP 7111) stands as a concentrated studio experiment from the spring of 1957 whose provenance and musical decisions reward intense listening and documentary scrutiny. The record was assembled from two Van Gelder sessions dated April 19 and May 17, 1957, and issued by Prestige later that year; those session anchors determine everything that follows: who plays where, which takes were later reassigned, and how the record was sequenced for public release. That dual-session design is the single organizing fact that explains the album’s alternating colors, the arranged weight of some heads, and the freer, blowing-room moments that punctuate its sides.

The calendar and personnel are simple in outline but subtle in effect: the April date fields a frontline of Bill Hardman on trumpet and Jackie McLean on alto alongside John Coltrane (tenor), Julian Euell (bass) and Art Taylor (drums) supporting Waldron’s piano, while the May date substitutes Idrees Sulieman (trumpet), Sahib Shihab (doubling alto and baritone) and Ed Thigpen on drums with Euell and Coltrane still present. That roster swap is more than roster trivia; it was a deliberate tonal experiment that Waldron used to deploy either a brighter alto/tenor contrapuntal texture or a three-horn block-voiced weight when Shihab dropped to bari. The per-take allocation of repertoire follows that split: some April takes later migrated to other Prestige/Status compilations while the May material supplies the bari-thickened tuttis and the lighter cymbal-honed standards on the issued LP.

The sessions were made in Rudy Van Gelder’s Hackensack studio — literally the family living room at 25 Prospect Avenue — a space Van Gelder himself described as “a fairly large living room. It was the living room of their house,” and which functioned as a compact, low-decay acoustic that encouraged close microphone placement and a near-field immediacy on record. That domestic setting was married in early 1957 to a new, custom multi-input console built by Rein Narma, a desk voiced for high-output condenser microphones and offering per-channel EQ that altered Van Gelder’s signal path in subtle but audible ways. Put together, the close mic technique, the room geometry and the newly upgraded console account for the remarkably direct trumpet and alto presence and Waldron’s percussive, slightly forward piano in the mono mixes — qualities modern remastering engineers and listeners still single out as characteristic of these late-’50s Prestige dates.

Those production conditions shaped Waldron’s arranging choices. On the April material, where the alto/tenor frontline predominates, Waldron favors spiky counterpoint and brighter intervallic interactions that lift the band toward classic hard-bop call-and-response textures; on the May material, Shihab’s bari lets Waldron compose three-horn block voicings that thicken the midrange and change the way soloists are heard against the ensemble. Waldron’s own compositional method on the session is consistent across both dates: the heads are often short, motif-based germs — two- to four-note figures or ostinato left-hand cells — that act as compositional magnets for solos rather than as long, through-harmonic canvases. That modular approach lets him assign standards to the role of textural experiment (for instance when he re-profiles a melody to be an ensemble statement) and his originals to the role of tight riff frameworks that double as blowing vehicles. The result is, in effect, an album that operates simultaneously as arranging laboratory and improvisers’ workshop.

Musically specific examples make these moves audible. J.M.’s Dream Doll, cast by Waldron as a slow, blues-tinged waltz and dedicated to Jackie McLean and his wife Dolly, uses the triple meter and Waldron’s left-hand punctuation to create conversational spaces where McLean’s alto and Coltrane’s tenor trade lyrical fragments; the mode of address is intimate, and the head’s economy forces soloists to make each idea count. Don’t Explain, a Holiday co-written item in Waldron’s orbit, refuses the usual solitary-ballad trope: Waldron fans the lyric line into close inner voicings and contrapuntal shading so that the emotional contour derives as much from voicing choices as from any single soloist. From This Moment On is reharmonized so that melody becomes a horn-ensemble event rather than a mere solo vehicle, while pieces such as One By One and Potpourri show Waldron’s flair for riff-based heads that supply punchy ensemble cues and tight shout endings while leaving soloists clearly demarcated space. Experienced listeners who parse the two dates hear this as a consistent compositional strategy: seed motif → repeated ostinato → selective expansion by soloists.

Embedded in the music is a transitional snapshot of John Coltrane. The tenor work on these dates sits in the compressed zone immediately before his more continuous multinote flurries became widely recognized; critics would soon call that approach “sheets of sound,” a phrase coined by Ira Gitler in 1958 to describe the dense, multinote cascades Coltrane was exploring. Coltrane himself commented on the experimental quality of those emergent techniques, telling Gitler in 1958 that, “Now it is not a thing of beauty, and the only way it would be justified is if it becomes that. If I can't work it through, I will drop it.” Hearing Coltrane on Mal/2 is therefore instructive: you can hear the balance between long, arching statements and sudden concentrated runs and stacked arpeggio motifs, a set of habits being tested in real time inside otherwise conventional chorus forms.

The rhythmic and timbral contrasts are equally decisive. Art Taylor’s April ride cymbal delivers a hard-propulsive propulsion that presses soloists into punchier phrasing, whereas Ed Thigpen’s May brush-and-cymbal finesse creates a lighter, more elastic medium-tempo feel that invites rhythmic nuance in comping and solo lines. Trumpet colors shift between Bill Hardman’s incisive bop attack on April takes and Idrees Sulieman’s rounder, burnished tone on May dates; those timbral choices let Waldron choose whether a head should sound bright and contrapuntal or low-centered and block-voiced. Julian Euell’s bass, steady and tonally centered across both dates, acts as the record’s gravitational center, preferring harmonic anchoring and rhythmic clarity over flashy motion and thereby clarifying both Waldron’s ostinato designs and the drum contrasts. The ensemble decisions are not happenstance but an orchestrated set of options that Waldron explores in sequence across the two sessions.

Beyond the music, the documentation and afterlife of these takes matters to scholars and collectors. Prestige treated these April and May masters as modular assets, and two April leftovers — Blue Calypso and Falling in Love With Love — were later issued on the Status imprint as part of The Dealers (Status ST 8316) before being restored as bonus material on modern CD editions; this repackaging practice means that anyone reconstructing Waldron’s spring 1957 book must cross-reference PRLP 7111, the Status release, and later reissue appendices rather than assume the original LP contains every take. For the physical objecter, first pressings exhibit familiar Van Gelder runout signatures and mono-era deep grooves; modern audiophile presentations attempt to honor those pressings by keeping the signal-chain faithful to the original tapes. In 2023 Craft Recordings revived the Original Jazz Classics series and issued Mal/2 as an all-analog AAA reissue cut by Kevin Gray and pressed on 180-gram vinyl at RTI, a production chain chosen specifically to foreground the session’s clarity and microdynamic interplay for contemporary listeners.

Primary witness testimony confirms the human and technical textures sketched above. Rudy Van Gelder recalled the practical reality of his Hackensack site. That domestic geometry, and the way Van Gelder placed microphones to minimize ambient smear, is audible on the finished masters and remains a crucial variable when comparing Hackensack dates to later Englewood Cliffs sessions. Mal Waldron himself described aspects of his late-1950s life context — including how he came to work with Billie Holiday and how songs such as Left Alone were born on the road — telling interviewers that “She wrote the words and I wrote the melody. We were on a plane going from New York to San Francisco.” Those firsthand remarks anchor the record in a social and musical web that includes Holiday, the Prestige house band world, and the itinerant realities of 1950s jazz life.

Taken together, the technical chain, the double-session plan, and Waldron’s compositional method explain why Mal/2 resists a single-word pigeonholing. It is not simply a hard-bop blowing session, nor is it an exercise in orchestration alone; it is a compact experiment in how short musical seeds can be arranged, voiced and then treated differently by slightly altered horn rosters and time-feel choices. The aesthetic choices yield a record that rewards repeated, careful listening: identifying the seed motif, following Waldron’s left-hand repetition and displacement, and then tracking how each soloist either obeys, fragments or superimposes against that germ becomes an analytic pleasure. In other words, Mal/2 is both laboratory and portrait — an arranged suite of small experiments that document players who were themselves moving toward new methods of melodic density and formal compression.

You might also like the review I wrote for Ted Heath and His Music & Edmundo Ros and His Orchestra - Heath vs. Ros: Swing vs. Latin (1964).

Tuesday, August 12, 2025

Review: Mal Waldron Sextet - Mal/2 (1957)

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