Archive

Mal Waldron: The Calling

The Japanese jazz critic and producer Masahiko Yuh recalled pianist Mal Waldron playing him Bitches Brew for the first time in May 1970. Sitting in the expatriate Waldron’s apartment in Munich, the pianist spun the album with no commentary, save for the occasional wide-eyed glance in his guest’s direction, as if to silently ask whether he could believe what they were hearing. Yuh noted that the title of the album Waldron began recording that September, what would become the Japan-only release Spanish Bitch, seemingly alluded to not one, but two Miles Davis classics. The acoustic Spanish Bitch does not really resemble Miles’s electric masterpiece from earlier that year at all. But you can hear some tentative rock shadings in the deconstructed cover of “Eleanor Rigby” and in the blocky (and disconcertingly unfunky) “All that Funk.” Mostly these come from rhythmic instincts of Waldron’s drummer, another expatriate American long ensconced in the German jazz and early fusion scene, Fred Braceful.

Spanish Bitch doesn’t entirely work. Perhaps this is why Manfred Eicher, for whom it was recorded, didn’t release it on his newly founded ECM label. (Bitch was intended as the follow-up to Waldron’s Free At Last, recorded in late 1969, the very first album released on Eicher’s fledgling label.) But the collaboration with Braceful opened a path to an album that would indeed make good on those first gleanings of electric jazz back in Waldron’s Munich flat.

In February 1971, Waldron and Braceful, joined by bassist Eberhard Weber and an American ex-GI organist named Jimmy Jackson, recorded The Call. This was to be the first release for Eicher’s new experimental jazz subsidiary JAPO records. Braceful and Weber were members of the Wolfgang Dauner Group just as it was evolving into the formidable Et Cetera, one of the leading lights of the nascent German fusion scene. Jackson, meanwhile, was a gigging soul jazz musician in Munich who had somehow fallen in with the Amon Düül crowd, playing the mysterious Mellotron-like “choir organ” on Tanz der Lemminge and Wolf City. Jackson had also played uncredited organ on Tangerine Dream’s debut Electronic Meditation. More than a decade earlier, Waldron had been the accompanist for Billie Holiday in her final years. A few years after that, he was part of Eric Dolphy and Booker Little’s legendary residency at the Five Spot. And now, aged forty-five and permanently living abroad, he found himself planted amidst the first stirrings of krautrock.

The Call is tripped-out space jazz of the very highest order. And if it hadn’t been virtually impossible to physically lay one’s hands on for the last fifty years (the only reissue has been the Japanese CD edition from 2006, and even these now sell for hundreds of dollars), The Call would be mentioned in the same breath as Lawrence of Newark and Love, Love in the empyrean of dank, psychedelic jazz. Comprised of two sidelong slabs, The Call centers on the interplay between Waldron’s demonic electric piano and Jackson’s kaleidoscopic organ. Waldron’s stuttering solo on the title track is a minimalist marvel of repetition and subtle variation. Jackson’s acid blues organ sounds more like Al Kooper than Jimmy Smith. Weber is funky as hell here, especially during his long, knotty solo on the title track, while Waldron vamps away. Braceful mostly stays out of the way and keeps everything humming, but even he gets a nice turn in the spotlight before the burbling riff returns. On the more exploratory B-side track, “Thoughts,” Waldron’s hypnotic, slightly droning solo is solid evidence why Matthew Shipp classes him in the “black mystery school” of pianists. Even after Jackson’s organ takes the lead, Waldron’s weird accompanying coloration continues to seep in. Weber gets a barbed wire arco solo in here, and a quiet, trenchant dialogue with Braceful.

The Call is poised right at the threshold of the kraut fusion explosion. Weber and Braceful would appear on the first Et Cetera album later that year. And then Braceful would go off to form Exmagma. Waldron and Jackson, meanwhile, would appear on Embryo’s indispensable Rocksession and Steig Aus over the next two years. The latter album even featured a lengthy, prog rendering of Waldron’s tune “The Call.” Eberhard Weber would, of course, soon become a dominant force on Eicher’s ECM in the later 1970s, with a decidedly different sound than his funky jazz-rock beginnings here. Waldron, meanwhile, never cut another record for ECM (or JAPO) again.

Still, his final word on the label is now recognized as a triumph, emerging from the improbable intersection of post-bop and krautrock, fusion and prog in early 1970s Munich. That The Call hasn’t received a proper reissue is almost criminal. 

Ben Sirota, Aquarium Drunkard