Today is Cedar Walton’s 80th birthday anniversary. He died on August 19 at age 79. Walton was born in Dallas and attended high school with a class that included future legends James Clay and David “Fathead” Newman. He said that records by Art Tatum, Bud Powell, and Charlie Parker, and seeing Duke Ellington at the Texas State Fair, gave him a sense that there was a “world out there to escape to.”
He eventually sat in with Ellington in the mid-fifties (a commercially fallow period for Duke), and described the experience to Ethan Iverson. “I was stationed at Fort Dix. The band was playing in the afternoon in what looked like a big armory…I was about to ship out to Germany, and my buddy was shipping out somewhere, too. And we were there in our uniforms. And we dared ask him to sit in. And he said, ‘Yes.’ He had a spinet; I have a feeling he wanted to escape that for at least a few minutes.
“It was a high bandstand and on the way up he said, ‘Now go easy on those keys, young man.’ Such an elegant person…”Duke Elegant.” So we played “What Is This Thing Called Love?” My friend sang. I can remember, the bass was here, the band was straight ahead of me from saxophones out. And down there was my man singing at the mic. And they made up an ending. When we got close to the ending it sounded sort of like what we used to call the “clambake ending.” And on the way back down, Duke, in his Duke-ish way, said, ‘I thought I told you to go easy!’ That’s an experience that just stays alive in your system.”
When Iverson interviewed Walton in 2010 and told him he was “the first great jazz pianist” he ever saw, Cedar expressed surprise and asked how old he was at the time. Iverson said he was in junior high school. Walton didn’t miss a beat: “If the bug’s gonna bite you, it’d be then.” Iverson’s blog, Do the Math, is essential reading, and his feature on Cedar is a case in point. It’s been updated since August with interviews with his longtime sideman, bassist David Williams, and with an astute protege, pianist David Hazeltine. In addition to what Cedar’s Ellington encounter reveals about the informal, musician-to-musician, oral tradition of jazz, Williams’s story about how the Trinidad native got on a bandstand for the first time in New York is equally telling. Iverson calls the updated feature, For Cedar Walton. Link to it here.
(David Williams, Cedar Walton, Willie Jones III)
I caught the Walton bug when I first heard him on Jimmy Heath’s Triple Threat, then picked up on his work with Art Blakey in the ’60’s. Cedar was a member of one of the most celebrated editions of the Jazz Messengers, the sextet that included Freddie Hubbard, Curtis Fuller, Wayne Shorter, and Reggie Workman. I’ll never forget seeing him in the mid-70’s at Boomer’s with the amazing quartet that featured Clifford Jordan, Sam Jones, and Billy Higgins, an experience that felt like I was sitting at the center of the jazz universe. The feeling was similar when I saw him years later with Higgins and David Williams and Jackie McLean. Here’s great footage of a 1986 performance by Jackie and Cedar, Williams, Higgins, and Woody Shaw of Sonny Clark’s “Cool Struttin’.”
I last saw Cedar in 2011 at the Polish National Home in Hartford with Williams and Willie Jones III, and prior to that on the day of Norman Mailer’s memorial service at Carnegie Hall in 2008. It made for a quintessential New York day to go from the SRO gathering celebrating Mailer’s daring brilliance to Walton’s first set with Javon Jackson, Christian McBride, and Jimmy Cobb at Iridium. The pugilist in Mailer would have endorsed their muscular lyricism. Walton also had a tender spot for superior ballads like “Skylark,” which he first recorded with Blakey and played throughout the years.
While Cedar remained a prolific recording artist and ubiquitous figure on the New York scene, I tried not to take him for granted. When Marian McPartland died at age 95 a day after Walton, it suddenly gave me a benchmark for calculating how much longer it would have been good to have him around. Cedar was a pacesetter, and we’ll miss him all the more for that aspect of his leadership. As David Hazeltine puts it in the interview with Iverson, “In the history of jazz, he was one of the greatest pianists. At the end, it was him and Barry Harris, and now we only have Barry.”
Walton’s premier recording with the quartet he called Eastern Rebellion was made in 1975 with Higgins, Jones, and tenor saxophonist George Coleman. It’s never been far from my turntables at home or work, especially for its opening title, the exhilarating Walton original, “Bolivia.” Hear that here, and check out this version by Cedar with Milt Jackson, Ray Brown, and Mickey Roker. Thank you, Cedar Anthony Walton, Jr.