The Big Rochade

by Thom JurekHere is the American septuagenarian pianist teaming up with a decades younger Transylvanian saxophonist creating a series of duets that are both timeless and spooky in their intensity and brooding sonance. Nicolas Simion is perhaps not so well know as the voice of the Carpathian saxophone he should be, and as a jazz composer in Eastern Europe of some renown. Waldron, the ex-patriate New Yorker, needs no introduction, nor does the story of their meeting. The evidence is here beginning with "Open Windows," a slower than slow blues with a pedal point right in the first few bars. Simion plays out over it's edge, and takes both the mode and the harmony and turns it back on itself as Waldron's long, open notes and stilted chords open onto the field of mystery in Simion's playing. While almost everything contained here is original material, composed either by one or the other of the protagonists -- or jointly -- there is a lovely, airy reading of "Monk's Dream." It's a longish piece, over nine minutes, and what is so remarkable is Waldron's revisioning of the harmony in view of intervallic space; he shifts accents just enough to create crevices where he feeds an extra seventh or minor sixth depending on where Simion is. For Simion's part, he slides between being down in the track and soaring above it, singing a different kind of blues with legato phrasing and middle register vibrato moves that keep the center of the tune from coming in to roost. In the meantime Waldron quotes from gospel and folk songs in his solo, brining Monk himself full circle. Other standouts include the jointly composed "Search for Euridice," with its minor key modalism, and Simion's "Slovakian Folk Song," that sends him swinging deeply into the history of his region as Waldron plays an aggressively elegant counterpoint as a scalar study in melodic invention. This disc is a joy, top to bottom.