Mal Waldron - Steve Lacy: The Mighty Warriors

Producer/jazz detective Zev Feldman is still at it, ferreting out unreleased recordings from jazz giants of the past and releasing them with buffed-up sound quality and first-rate packaging. Long lost recordings from pianists Bill Evans, Thelonious Monk, Art Tatum and Ahmad Jamal have seen the light of the twenty-first century, thanks to Feldman, as has newly discovered music from trumpeter Chet Baker. Now it is pianist Mal Waldron (1925 -2002) and soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy's (1934 -2004) turn, with The Mighty Warriors. The two-disc set comes from a 1995 concert at De Singel Arts Center in Antwerp, Belgium.

Both Waldron and Lacy expatriated from the United States. Waldron made the move to Europe in the mid-1960s. Lacy moved to Paris in 1970. The pair worked together and recorded together often. Waldron has the distinction of participating—as the leader—on the first ECM Records release, Free At Last (1970).

Waldron and Lacy are often considered free-jazz guys. There may be some truth in this, but both were melodists of the first order; their music—together and apart—was approachable and adventurous. Waldron, like Monk and Andrew Hill and Bud Powell, was a stylist who sounded unlike anyone else. John Coltrane gets a lot of credit for popularizing the soprano sax, but Lacy was there before him on this, releasing three albums before Coltrane came out with the groundbreaking My Favorite Things (Atlantic Records, 1961).

The Mighty Warriors is Waldron and Lacy in a quartet setting, joined by drummer Andrew Cyrille and bassist Reggie Workman. The players sound loose, "going for it." The first disc is relatively concise, with four tunes, each running between six and seventeen minutes. The opener, "What It Is," comes from Waldron's pen. It is a rambling seventeen minutes. Waldron lays down a mesmerizing rhythm; Lacy—his sound dry and robust—searches. Cyrille and Waldron lay down a controlled stumbling bustle of a backdrop. Lacy wrote the twelve-minute "Longing." His horn complains about his unfulfilled desire, then shifts into the prettiest of reveries. Tracks 2 and 4 are Monk originals, "Epistrophy" and "Monk Dream" lift the music away from a brooding atmosphere, adding a welcome touch of familiarity and playfulness to the set.

Disc 2 of The Mighty Warriors moves closer to free jazz, with two extended cuts, "Variation of III" and "Medley: Snake Out/Variations on a Theme by Cecil Tayor," both clocking in at the twenty-five-minute mark. The latter opens like a full-frontal assault, fierce and percussive. The former sounds like a traveler lost in a foreign land. It opens with Workman's lonely arco bass that leads into a marvelous otherworldly musical hesitation that stops and starts.

Waldron and Lacy did not boast the highest of profiles. Their moves to Europe, away from the bigger record labels, and the New York City clubs, were probably partially responsible for this. Their talent and innovative approach to making music was of the highest order and can be experienced on The Mighty Warriors.