Customer Reviews

To My Queen

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

An absolute classic. Walt Dickerson always manages to draw sensitive and inspired playing out of his bassists and George Tucker plays the best session of his life. Andrew Hill and Andrew Cyrille complete the excellent rhythm section. Adventurous but never angry, modern jazz that sounds great in the background but more than bears up to close and repeated listening.

"To My Queen," (1962), Dickerson's fourth recording for the Prestige label's New Jazz imprint, features the vibes player in a quartet setting (not a trio, as indicated by Amazon's listing). The adventurous band includes Chicago pianist Andrew Hill, bassist George Tucker and the great Andrew Cyrille on drums (one of his frst recordings). The set is remarkable for its title composition which runs for 20 minutes and is episodic in its compositional scale; there is nothing else in modern jazz like it. Dickerson was at this time just beginning to exhibit the influence of John Coltrane; he remains to this day the leading example of the Coltrane ethos in his approach to improvisation. This is a must-have recording for all serious jazz enthusiasts!

Well if not THE KING he was one of the kings on Vibes in a a post Milt Jackson world.And this is his masterpiece.Much of his latter stuff is also very good and adventurous but here he catches a perfect sound between hard bop and the "new thing".I think David got it right here.If asked for a big band vibe favorite I would go latine with the "Swingin' Swede" Cal Tjader on "Saul Sauce" but for a small group this LP and Bobby Hutcherson's "Oblique" are my favorites.Not everything Walt Dickerson did on his extensive Steeplechase recoding was as good but they are worth checking out (I like his Walt Dickerson 1976 released on Whynot).But "To My Queen" and his recoding of the soundtrack "A Touch Of Blue" are the most famous pieces he did this being the best.RIP Walt
Chazzz

I did buy this cd full of expections because a lot of people judge this album as one of the best and most important jazz recordings of the sixties (wow, calm down guys!). After some listening sessions I think this is a real overrating. "To my queen" is surely an interesting album with good moments in it, but I feel it a little flat and sometimes even unemotional. I would not consider this album so important. On the contrary it is surely negligible. The first tune which is what all the guys point out as an incredible thing is a seventeen minutes exploration on some pedal notes. In the end it's a modal thing that has some fragments that at least are not even linked. Actually they seem different pieces of music badly glued together. Honestly it doesn't seem so great to me. It is vague, flat ... this tune does not even have a clear direction. What's great in it? What does it wants to say? What's the point? I can't understand ... At some points the guys's playing is even weak. The atmosphere remains more or less the same in the two standards interpretations that follow. "How deep is the ocean" is an eleven minutes rendition and "God bless the child" is way shorter (only three minutes). The line up is interesting. You don't have saxes or trumpets, you have a common trio plus Walt's vibes. I repeat, I was expecting a lot from this album and not that I'm actually totally disappointed, simply this album didn't match my high expectations. Maybe I was expecting too much. Consider that I'm not a newkid in the Jazz field. I own thousands of jazz albums, I'm a jazz player myself. This album is good (three stars and a half for me) but it is one of many. I don't see all that special quality in it. Sorry, I would dedicate something a lot better than this music, "to my queen".