Customer Reviews

Cedar

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Pianist Cedar Walton performs on this recording in three settings: trio, quartet, and quintet. Whatever the setting with musicians like Kenny Dorham - trumpet, Junior Cook - tenor sax, Leroy Vinnegar - bass, and Billy Higgins - drums in the studio things are going to cook! Four of the cuts are Walton originals and he proves to be a talented composer as well. This is fine bop indeed!

Kenny Dorham is such an original and inventive player that it's impossible to hear too much of him on record (his last date as leader on a recording session was several years before this one). He's in characteristically good form--alternating fluency with minimalism, playfulness with tenderness--as usual the all-purpose, all-occasion trumpet master.

The piano sound, though a trifle "distant" and even out of tune, is a refreshing change from the usual Van Gelder mix on Cedar, creating ambience and space that's always lacking in the piano frequencies on the Blue Note dates. There's not only more "of" him on this session, but perhaps because of K. D.'s presence, there's more unpredictabilty, freshness, freedom, and even "sweetness" in his melodic concoctions. He's not his usual perfect, overly "programmed" self; in fact, this is one of the few times I've really heard him "blow" on piano.

Junior Cook was simply way under-recorded, so it's always good to hear him, even though he's obviously being kept under wraps on this occasion. He's perhaps a bit heavy-sounding and raw-edged, both a trifle tentative and trenchant in this fleet company (later he and Bill Hardman, who could more than hold his own with the "baddest" trumpet players of all time, would make a formidable, complementary pair in an underappreciated, under-recorded quintet), but I frankly prefer Junior for a change to the usual tenor house guests--namely Shorter and Henderson--from sessions of this period. If Mobley couldn't make the gig, just as well it be Junior.

Nice CD. I'm keeping it. (Unlike 5-6 Blakey dates with Cedar from the sixties that all sound the same.) Who can bet on this one seeing a reissue?