Content area
Full Text
Pianist Cedar Walton was a seminal figure within the 1960s hard bop community, working alongside such iconic jazz figures as John Coltrane, Art Blakey, Kenny Dorham, J.J. Johnson and Lee Morgan to name a few. In 2012 I interviewed Walton about the life and times he experienced during the late 50s and early 60s that many consider one of the most fertile, explosive and controversial periods in jazz. Walton found himself pursuing a career as a jazz pianist and composer in the middle of it all. "I've always thought of myself as a practitioner rather than as an innovator because I've always been surrounded by so many geniuses to play off of my whole life."
Cedar Anthony Walton, Jr. was born on January 17,1934, in Dallas, Texas. He was attracted to music through his mother who played piano and sang popular songs at home. "My first contact with music was in the early 1940s. My mother, Ruth, was a piano teacher who enjoyed songs like I'll Be Seeing You and Time After Time and could sing and accompany herself on the piano. By 1944, I was ten years old, we had the radio on all the time and my mother loved jazz but couldn't believe musicians like Duke Ellington could actually play without reading music. When I began developing as a jazz pianist, she was amazed at what I could do. I started off making up songs by emulating some of the popular records of the day, mostly by pianists like Art Tatum, Earl "Fatha" Hines, Nat King Cole and people like that."
His passion for music was fueled by the concerts his mother would take him to around Houston, seeing the likes of Duke Ellington, Hank Jones, Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins, Ray Brown, Buddy Rich and Oscar Peterson live on stage.
"I'd have to admit that I was pretty excited about pursuing a career in music after experiencing all that." In fact, Walton would eventually reconnect with most of the musicians he had been inspired by early on. "In the late fifties, I was scheduled to play with Lester Young in Brooklyn at a place called the Continental Club. I went up to his room at the Alvin Hotel on 57th and Broadway where...