The Grand Valse

The tune The Grand Valse is found on Booker Little's Quartet record on Time, BCD 1041. The same piece was recorded on the Frank Strozier date as Waltz of the Demons and at the Five Spot as Booker's Waltz.

You can see Paul Berliner's transcription of Booker's solo here. It is a high resolution GIF taking up 168K. See the original transcriptions and full analysis in Thinking in Jazz: the infinite art of improvisation, University of Chicago Press, 1994.

Berliner uses this solo to demonstrate truncation and contraction. He shows a phrase that Booker repeats with increasing density. I have sampled these 3 phrases, corresponding fairly closely to the 3 lines transcribed. They are short (about 5 seconds, 100K at 22kHz) mu-laws:

first phrase

second phrase

third phrase