Search - Walt Dickerson :: To My Queen

One of the Seminal Recordings of the Early '60s

David Dann (davidann@catskill.net) | Catskills, NY | 09/27/1998

(5 out of 5 stars)

""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!"

There's a lot better music that waits "my queen"

Jazzcat | Genoa, Italy Italy | 09/20/2004

(4 out of 5 stars)

"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"."