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Interviews
Myron Walden: Eclectic Reedman
Edward Bride
Ed hails from Pittsfeid, MA.
Not surprisingly, his initial "lessons" were based on recordings, and that's where Bird enters the picture. He taught himself to play alto while listening to Charlie Parker. "I did not come from a household that played jazz. When I was younger, 7 or 8, my mother would hear The Carpenters on the radio, and I was at home with them as I am with jazz today. This was what I was connected to."
An uncle was so moved by the music of Charlie Parker that young Walden became curious. "I gravitated towards that; from that moment on, I have almost removed myself from the music that I grew up with. Charlie Parker was my inspiration." Not just for a musical style, but for a career choice (to the extent that any artist really has a "choice"). "I knew that that was what I wanted to do."
It didn't exactly come easy. As a boy in Miami, the local public school had no music department; but a sympathetic teacher, touched by the child's desire to play the saxophone, encouraged him to take home an old alto saxophone from the school storage closet. By studying Charlie Parker's album art and listening to his uncle's record, Walden actually taught himself to play.
At the age of 12, his family moved to the New York area, where his first formal instruction came at the Harlem School of The Arts' after-school program. He attended LaGuardia High School of Music and the Arts in New York City and, after graduation, attended the Manhattan School of Music, graduating in 1994. The previous year, he won the prestigious Lincoln Center Charlie Parker Competition. A listener thanks his lucky stars for that uncle's passion for Bird.
One might wonder where Myron Walden would be today, if he'd been stuck with The Carpenters. "All I had was the Parker recordings, and maybe a Paquito D'Rivera recording. And, I don't know how I came up with it, but I also had a Kenny G recording. Eventually, my uncle brought a Sonny Stitt recording around. And that was all I knew, those four or five recordings. I wasn't hearing jazz at home. I didn't know jazz fans, except for my uncle. He wasn't there every day, so those records were really all I had."
In making choices about playing records, he never put on the Kenny G album. And he rarely, if ever, put on Paquito D'Rivera. What really moved him was Bird. "It's difficult to express the influence of others. But in a way, instead of my uncle taking the lead in a conversation with me, it was Charlie Parker taking the lead. So, Charlie Parker had that influence on my uncle, and it certainly transferred to me."
School of Hard Knocks
Lessons came from every corner. Besides his self-instruction and after-school training, he learned by visiting clubs, and by attending yet another school, one that is called "hard knocks." Here's one class that he particularly remembers: In high school, he would hear Jesse Davis play every Friday and Saturday at a New York club called Augie's (now known as Smoke). Whether there was snow, rain, no matter the weather, he found a way to be there. One night, "Jesse came over to me, figured I played something, and he invited me to play. 'That's the only way you're going to get to it, is to play it.' I did my best, but wasn't very good."
Usually, an audience will encourage a new player, but this time, a woman nearly destroyed his spirit. "I realized that people had paid their money to get in and have a professional encounter, and I didn't play very well. But, I felt good that I had at least tried. Then, this woman came over and said I sounded terrible, that I shouldn't be playing, and she ranted on and on; at the end, I was in tears."
Davis came over to Walden and could see that what she said was troubling him. "You did the right thing," Davis told Walden, "this is how you develop your chops. Don't listen to her, just keep coming back. I'll let you sit in, whenever you come here." Although he has never forgotten that woman's crude critique, it's Davis' handling of the situation that helped him through it, and provided a life lesson as to how to treat up-and-coming musicians.
In these younger years, he credits Vincent Herring as being a strong influence on his developing sound. "In a way, Vincent adopted me. I spent days at a time with him. He watched my behavior, my outward being. As I got older, it became clearer that personality finds its way into the art. A boisterous person plays that way; a quiet person plays softer, slower, and so forth. This isn't a hard-and-fast rule, but an honest person will reflect their personality in their art."
Walden didn't have much money, and Herring gave him lessons, and reeds, "and took me to clubs; when he ate, I ate. When I was with him, it was like his little brother. I could go on and on about how he encouraged me; he would show me by example. I cannot express how grateful and appreciative I am, to this very day. He didn't have to do that."
