On Steinway

by Thom JurekOn Steinway was originally recorded in 1972 and issued on LP only in Japan on the independent Teichiku imprint. It contains four selections, all of which were composed by Mal Waldron. The pieces here are not Waldron's most adventurous, but that's just fine, because what's on offer is delightful. The opener, "Portrait of a Bullfighter," is compelling for its use of Latin rhythmic figures, and its transition into a ballad about halfway through. Waldron's use of a limited chromatic palette makes the piece taut yet dynamically fluid. "One for Bud" is Waldron's tribute to the pianist who influenced him most. It employs Powell's right-hand technique of creating long single-note runs, but Waldron imposes his own notion of phrasing, arpeggio, and scale while once more keeping a firm grip on the chord figures of the left hand. The most beautiful of these pieces is "For Erik Satie," in which the pianist employs a single-chord vamp for its entirety, while engaging mysterious, elliptical lyric figures in the melody. A ballad, it employs Eastern scales and modes in places, and the use of silence and space is pure Waldron. The set closes with "Paris Reunited," the longest thing here in which folk melodies, French popular tunes, and bebop are interlaced in swells of notes before shifting chromatic gears in the middle toward something moodier and melancholy, to the point of near elegy before coming out the other side into a swell of pastoral emotion. In sum, this is a fine and curious date; it showcases the pianist using the Steinway as a compositional element in his tunes and puts a different side of his mercurial musical personality on display.