condition (record/cover): NM / EX

Promotional copy. Gatefold sleeve. Insert included.

Catalogue number one. When Manfred Eicher started ECM in 1969 the first record he made was not a Nordic reverb exercise but a hard, insistent piano trio date by an American in European exile. Mal Waldron had been Billie Holiday's accompanist and had recorded with Coltrane and Dolphy before a breakdown in 1963 cost him his ability to play; he rebuilt it from nothing, and what emerged was this: obsessive repetition of small figures, enormous left-hand weight, and a refusal of ornament that sounds almost minimalist. Nothing on the label ever sounded quite like it again.

Original ECM pressing. Where the most influential jazz label of the last fifty years begins, and a superb record on its own terms.