On an alternate take of John Coltrane’s Giant Steps in April 1959, the pianist simply sat out the solo, not because he lacked the chops but because his genius was for building foundations so solid that the giants around him could fly. Cedar Walton, born in Dallas in 1934, got his first lessons from his mother Ruth, an aspiring concert pianist who took him into local jazz clubs, and absorbed Nat King Cole, Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell, and Art Tatum. At the University of Denver he was steered from composition into a music education degree, which turned out to be an accidental masterclass in how every instrument in a band room actually works, and late-night Denver jam sessions with Charlie Parker and John Coltrane convinced him his future was on the bandstand.

This episode traces his path from Birdland to an Army band in Germany alongside Leo Wright, Don Ellis, and Eddie Harris, his 1958 recording debut with Kenny Dorham, the Jazztet with Benny Golson and Art Farmer, and his three years in Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, where he joined the same day as Freddie Hubbard and wrote Mosaic and Ugetsu. It follows his years in the Prestige Records house rhythm section, a year accompanying Abbey Lincoln, the electric funk band Mobius, arranging Etta James’s Grammy-winning Billie Holiday tribute, and the decades-long trio with Billy Higgins and Sam Jones known as the Magic Triangle, which grew into the collective Eastern Rebellion. Walton was named an NEA Jazz Master in January 2010 and died in Brooklyn in August 2013 at 79.

• How a music education degree taught Walton to voice horns so three players sounded like a mini orchestra
• Why the Army draft functioned as a government-funded incubator rather than a career killer
• What a reliable sideman and a house rhythm section actually have to do in the studio
• The hive-mind mechanics of the Magic Triangle and how they paved the road under a soloist’s harmonic left turns
• Bolivia, Firm Roots, Holy Land, and Mode for Joe: the living songbook students still wrestle with today