As its title indicates, this is not so much a biographical documentary as a portrait, shot at Waldron's 70th birthday celebrations in Antwerp in 1995, and juxtaposing performance excerpts in duos with Max Roach and Jeanne Lee, and a quartet with Steve Lacy, Reggie Workman and Andrew Cyrille, along with brief interviews. Of these, Waldron himself is circumspect, perpetually smoking a cheroot, impeccably dressed and occasionally revealing; Jeanne Lee warm and precise; Cyrille garrulous; Lacy respectful; Roach a useful link to the tradition from which Waldron emerged.
Waldron notes that he initially chose piano over saxophone because it suited his introverted personality (you can hide behind the keyboard). And that gets at something of the beautiful paradox of his music--a music that's so insistent, so clear, and so purposeful; that a music of at times such emotional heft, gravity, pathos and weight can be produced by someone who sits at the keyboard at times seeming barely to move his fingers. Accompanist, first to Billie Holiday, then to Abbey Lincoln, Waldron knows how to weight the nuances of every line, and in turn of every note in the line--and of the spaces between those notes. For Lee, Waldron hears each chords as a line, thinking orchestrally; in turn, each song becomes a world.
As Roach notes, Waldron emerged from the group of composer-pianists--Monk, Cecil Taylor, Hasaan Ibn-Ali, Herbie Nichols, Randy Weston--whose conception was writerly as muc as improvisation--Lacy in turn links this back to Ellington. A certain weight inheres in the music of all these musicians. Brief comments reveal world of social injustice -- Waldron recalls the enforced competition in which hundreds of Black musicians played for slots in ten clubs, turning against each other, being passed over for white musicians and harrassed by cops whenever they stepped out of the club for air; believes that Billie Holiday would have survived in Europe, where her drug habit was treated as an addiction to be helped and cured, rather than America, where it was treated as a criminal problem. Jeanne Lee puts it more starkly: during the Cold War era and its afterlife, if you were or are an artist in America you have to make excuses for being alive. Or Reggie Workman: you play your way out of trouble, and that's what any music that means anything does. Waldron calls his own music a search--and think here of his track and album titles: The Quest; The Call; The Opening; First Encounter--a means of playing in order to find out. Cyrille suggests that Waldron, full of jokes, has a particular kind of wit that translates into the music; wit, too, is about discovery, about playing with the known and with the given, a social form that develops a particular personal stamp or style. Wit serves too as a means to cement bonds through teasing and testing, through laughing to keep from crying, from subverting and challenging and continuing to live. In that sense, though Waldron's music so often seems to be about 'toughness' or a tragic pathos, it's wit that enables it to hold together, enables it to filter the trauma of drug addiction, mental breakdown, the experience of racism, the deaths of friends, of being Black in America, all those experiences that inform his distinctive repetitive pulsations, the lugubrious, spacious, reserved drama of his ballds, the fine hue of his dissonances. Music is a repository of knowledge, at once historical and personal, circumspect and revealing.
How much of that is revealed in the documentary is open to question. Those searching for new information about Waldron won't learn all that much; this feels more like an official, warm-spirited tribute, than an in-depth exploration, and one could wish that some of the concert performances were extended. In particular, there's not much sense of how radically Waldron's music changed following his mid-60s, post-breakdown comeback and relocation to Europe: the sheer energy, ferocity and length of those epic performances can't be stressed enough; there really is nothing like it in jazz. The relation between bebop and free jazz is another important element--and Eric Dolphy, surely one of Waldron's most important collaborators, gets nary a mention. One gets the sense of a film made on or for a particular occasion, using the serendipity of the attending musicians to provide a snapshot rather than a full picture. But, in Waldron's case, a snapshot is hardly to be sniffed at.
Waldron notes that he initially chose piano over saxophone because it suited his introverted personality (you can hide behind the keyboard). And that gets at something of the beautiful paradox of his music--a music that's so insistent, so clear, and so purposeful; that a music of at times such emotional heft, gravity, pathos and weight can be produced by someone who sits at the keyboard at times seeming barely to move his fingers. Accompanist, first to Billie Holiday, then to Abbey Lincoln, Waldron knows how to weight the nuances of every line, and in turn of every note in the line--and of the spaces between those notes. For Lee, Waldron hears each chords as a line, thinking orchestrally; in turn, each song becomes a world.
As Roach notes, Waldron emerged from the group of composer-pianists--Monk, Cecil Taylor, Hasaan Ibn-Ali, Herbie Nichols, Randy Weston--whose conception was writerly as muc as improvisation--Lacy in turn links this back to Ellington. A certain weight inheres in the music of all these musicians. Brief comments reveal world of social injustice -- Waldron recalls the enforced competition in which hundreds of Black musicians played for slots in ten clubs, turning against each other, being passed over for white musicians and harrassed by cops whenever they stepped out of the club for air; believes that Billie Holiday would have survived in Europe, where her drug habit was treated as an addiction to be helped and cured, rather than America, where it was treated as a criminal problem. Jeanne Lee puts it more starkly: during the Cold War era and its afterlife, if you were or are an artist in America you have to make excuses for being alive. Or Reggie Workman: you play your way out of trouble, and that's what any music that means anything does. Waldron calls his own music a search--and think here of his track and album titles: The Quest; The Call; The Opening; First Encounter--a means of playing in order to find out. Cyrille suggests that Waldron, full of jokes, has a particular kind of wit that translates into the music; wit, too, is about discovery, about playing with the known and with the given, a social form that develops a particular personal stamp or style. Wit serves too as a means to cement bonds through teasing and testing, through laughing to keep from crying, from subverting and challenging and continuing to live. In that sense, though Waldron's music so often seems to be about 'toughness' or a tragic pathos, it's wit that enables it to hold together, enables it to filter the trauma of drug addiction, mental breakdown, the experience of racism, the deaths of friends, of being Black in America, all those experiences that inform his distinctive repetitive pulsations, the lugubrious, spacious, reserved drama of his ballds, the fine hue of his dissonances. Music is a repository of knowledge, at once historical and personal, circumspect and revealing.
How much of that is revealed in the documentary is open to question. Those searching for new information about Waldron won't learn all that much; this feels more like an official, warm-spirited tribute, than an in-depth exploration, and one could wish that some of the concert performances were extended. In particular, there's not much sense of how radically Waldron's music changed following his mid-60s, post-breakdown comeback and relocation to Europe: the sheer energy, ferocity and length of those epic performances can't be stressed enough; there really is nothing like it in jazz. The relation between bebop and free jazz is another important element--and Eric Dolphy, surely one of Waldron's most important collaborators, gets nary a mention. One gets the sense of a film made on or for a particular occasion, using the serendipity of the attending musicians to provide a snapshot rather than a full picture. But, in Waldron's case, a snapshot is hardly to be sniffed at.
