(1967) Sweet Love, Bitter ***

With: Dave Burns (trumpet), George Coleman (alto saxophone), Charles Davis (tenor saxophone), Mal Waldron (piano), George Duvivier (bass), Alfred Dreares (drums)
Record date: March 23, 1967 (officially, but probably in 1965)

In 1967, Mal Waldron went into the studio to make his only recording for the famous Impulse! label. It’s a score for the movie “Sweet Love, Bitter”. A movie about a jazz musician that gets involved with drugs and booze, that eventually causes his downfall. When Herb Danska (the filmmaker) was thinking about who would be able to make a fitting soundtrack, he immediately thought of Mal Waldron. He was looking for a soundtrack that was having that dark and emotional feel, and what better choice would be Mal Waldron, who already had composed music for films before.

And that’s really what this is: a score for a movie. Nothing more, nothing less. That means the music is secondary to the movie. And that is something you can hear. Mal plays with a pretty great band here, but most of the music is composition only and there are not a lot of possibilites for any of the musicians to stretch out. The sparse solo’s that are played are ok, but the songs are very short, especially for jazz song. George Coleman is making an appearance on alto, while better know for his tenor playing. He has a couple of chances to solo, and he sounds pretty good. His huge vibrato make me think a bit of the classic alto players like Johnny Hodges and Benny Carter. Charles Davis is playing the tenor. He mostly play that modest background role, and here it’s not really different. Mal himself stays mostly in the background. The best song of the record is the opener ‘Lament for a Loser’: a moody Waldron original loosely based on his classic ‘Left Alone’. Coleman is in fine form here.

Impulse! never reissued the music on cd in Europe or the USA. Probably for the reasons I mentioned above. This is fine music but not more than that and not a very good chance to hear Mal’s developments. There are two versions on cd released in Japan only. Thank god the Japanese loved Mal so much: thanks to that there are a lot of reissues available from that country. Mostly in beautiful quality. I’ve got the 1972 Impulse! gatefold reissue on vinyl myself. Thin vinyl but fine quality.

It’s quite unlikely this music was recorded in 1967 as an attentive Organissimo board member noticed. The movie debuted in January 1967 so its a bit unlikely the music was recorded 2 months later. Also in the book ‘Living the Jazz Life: Conversations with 40 Jazz Musicans’ Mal himself says he returned to the US in 1965 to record the score.