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1981 · Album

Piano Solos

↑ Cedar Walton

Recorded 1981 · Clean Cuts
Piano Solos

Solitude and Conversation at the Keys

Piano Solos captures Walton alone at the instrument, thinking out loud without a net.

Cedar Walton's Piano Solos (1981) is a solo record, which means there are no collaborators, no sidemen, no arranger but Walton himself. What makes it distinctive is precisely that isolation. By this point in his career, Walton had spent years in rhythm sections—accompanying singers, anchoring hard bop groups, keeping time for leaders with bigger names. Here he steps away from all that and sits alone with the piano. The album works because he has earned the right to do it. His touch is conversational even without anyone to converse with. He thinks in chord changes and melodic phrases the way some pianists think in scales, and the solos feel like improvisation that remembers structure. Some of these pieces breathe; others move. None of them sprawl. Clean Cuts was a small label, and this was never a mainstream release. It reached people who already knew Walton's work—not a starting point for newcomers. But for anyone interested in his approach to solo piano, in how a working accompanist sounds when given the full stage, this record says something direct about who he was as a musician: a listener first, always.

Who's playing
Listen next
By Cedar Walton
Eastern Rebellion 1975
More Hard Bop
Places and Spaces 1975
Donald Byrd
Recording Info
Track listing
1Sunday Suite: First Movement / Second Movement / Third Movement / Fourth Movement11:45
230° To The Wind5:42
3Over The Rainbow4:12
4Clockwise5:31
5Cedar's Blues4:04
6I'll Let You Know4:42
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Further Reading
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Where next?

More by Cedar Walton
Eastern Rebellion 1975
This Is for You John 1987
Eastern Rebellion 2 1975
♫
Spectrum 1968
All 42 albums →
More Hard Bop
Places and Spaces 1975
Donald Byrd
The Main Attraction 1976
Grant Green
Blue Breakbeats 1974
Lou Donaldson
The Moontrane 1975
Woody Shaw
All 151 Hard Bop artists →

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