Cedar Walton One Flight Down

They are thinning out: the ranks of pianists who can trace their lineage directly back to primary sources like J.J. Johnson, the early Jazz Messengers of Art Blakey, and the Jazztet of Art Farmer and Benny Golson. In the last few years, we have lost Tommy Flanagan, Mal Waldron, Roland Hanna, Dodo Marmarosa, Russ Freeman, Frank Hewitt, and, most recently, John Hicks.

Producer Bob Porter once said of Cedar Walton, "By the time he came to make his first LP's for Prestige in 1967, he was without question the finest unrecorded pianist in New York." That oversight has been rectified over the past 40 years. Walton's discography is now voluminous, encompassing sideman appearances with the primary sources cited above and legions of other major figures like Kenny Dorham, Lucky Thompson, Joe Henderson, Charles Lloyd, and Pat Martino. There have also been over 60 albums released under Walton's own name. Yet there remains an element of undervaluation to Walton's stock. Perhaps because he is so ubiquitous, so consistent, so tasteful, so comprehensive in his command of the post-Parker jazz language, it has been easy to take him for granted.

Walton is important not just because his résumé includes J. J. and the Messengers and the Jazztet, but because he is now, at 72, playing the most piano of his life. Anyone who doubts this claim is directed to the Billy Strayhorn medley herein, tracks 3, 4, and 5. Walton recorded "Lush Life," "Daydream," and "Raincheck" once before, on Lush Life, for the Discovery label, in 1988. The earlier versions are graceful and lightly swinging, employing modest key signature and rhythmic updates. They frankly pale in comparison to the encounters with these songs here, which are edgier, more complex, freer, and much harder. Walton can legitimately make the same claim as the protagonist of Bob Dylan's "My Back Pages": "Ah but I was so much older then/I'm younger than that now."

There is no obvious reason why the two tunes that open the album, "One Flight Down" (a hard-bop anthem with an irresistible hook) and "The Rubber Man" (with its witty, piquant melodicism) are not as famous as some of Walton's other original classics, like "Bolivia" and "Mosaic." They are the two tracks on which Vincent Herring joins on tenor saxophone (a new direction for this respected alto saxophonist).

It is rare for an album to lose a hot tenor saxophonist and become a piano trio date and immediately escalate in intensity. It happens here. That Strayhorn medley comes next, and it is the centerpiece and tour de force of the album. If "Lush Life" and "Daydream" are not always ballads, they are almost always vehicles for an existential encounter with loss and wistful yearning, respectively. But Walton's mood on this session, while it may countenance contemplation, is the furthest thing from pensive. He goes after these songs with take-no-prisoners aggression. The poetry of Strayhorn's "Lush Life," with its melodic lines that unpredictably extend or attenuate and its lovely harmonic turns, is only implicit in Walton's steely sculpture. Walton's touch on the keyboard has always been firm, but here it is ferociously percussive as if driven by a fervent inner pressure to communicate. (Yet even when he plays this hard, he does not hammer. He articulates and shapes each note's expression.) This "Daydream" is not in the least dreamy. "Raincheck" pops and snaps.

Walton does not generate all this energy by himself. His bassist, David Williams, has been with him for approximately 23 years. Walton has had long-term relationships with two bassists more famous, Sam Jones and Ron Carter, but his hook-up with Williams is deep. Williams' varied patterns and his propulsive yet fluid rhythmic drive is so embedded in Walton's music that it is hard to think of a bassist with a more profound influence on the sound of a great piano trio. Of his relatively new drummer, Joe Farnsworth, Walton says, "I used to see Joe in the audience a lot when I played in New York with Ron Carter and Billy Higgins. He is a drummer who has done his homework."

Don Sickler, producer of this session, makes a similar point about Farnsworth: "He is in demand because he is not one-dimensional. Drummers as flexible as Farnsworth are few and far between." Farnsworth, that is, possesses a sense of what a given musical situation requires, and he correctly perceives that what this album calls for is urgency. It is fascinating to compare his brushwork on "Raincheck" to that of Billy Higgins on Walton's 1988 Discovery album. Farnsworth is a major reason why the 2006 version sounds like "Raincheck" on steroids.

Three of the tracks were composed by people who played important roles in Walton's musical life. "Little Sunflower," with its minimal chord movement but its maximal modal funk, is by Freddie Hubbard, with whom Walton played in the Jazz Messengers in the early '60's. It has been in Walton's book for years. Wayne Shorter wrote "Hammerhead" when he was in that same edition of the Messengers. It is new to the trio's repertoire. ("It just came into my head one day," Walton says.) Sam Jones wrote the dramatic "Seven Minds" for a bass choir project. It is another piece Walton has played for several years.

Both Don Sickler and Walton have similar theories to account for the singular freshness and energy of One Flight Down. Sickler says, "The guys had been playing most of these songs on the road. There's no substitute for that. They felt relaxed."

Walton says, "One thing that helps is that these tunes have been worked. They've been played... I hate to say all over the world but it happens to be true." It is yet another paradoxical dynamic of the in-the-moment art form called jazz. The trio is able to make this music sound so new because, for them, most of it is old.

"Time After Time" happens to be 60 years old, and Walton and his band act like they don't know it's a ballad. Walton says he was playing a gig with David "Fathead" Newman a couple of years ago when Newman called the song. "When he counted it off at that tempo, I was just so delighted I never got it out of my mind." Walton simply kills "Time After Time." Jazz from such a classic tributary only flows naturally from players who are tapped into the stream at the source.

The thesis of these notes is that One Flight Down is a uniquely concentrated and valuable repository of the art of Cedar Walton, and this argument must not be concluded without mentioning another artist who is not getting older but better: engineer Rudy Van Gelder. He is now doing the best work of his distinguished career. He says, "This album is quite unique. It took me a while to catch on to what Cedar had in mind. He played differently than I've ever heard him play before. I think it's quite spectacular. I think I was able to help it along a little bit and make sure the CD sounded the way that Cedar intended."

"Help it along" he did. The visceral excitement that this album generates is not separable from its incisive, dynamic recorded sound. Van Gelder responds to Walton's intensity with intensity of his own, and he gets it all: the passion in Walton's fingers, the ferocious snap (and deepest overtones) of Williams' bass, the electric energy sparking from Joe Farnsworth's ride cymbal.

Liner Notes copyright © 2025 Thomas Conrad.

One Flight Down can be purchased here.

Contact Thomas Conrad at All About Jazz.
Thomas travels frequently writing about jazz outside the borders of the United States.

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