The day before Mal, Dance and Soul was recorded, Waldron had been engaged as a sideman for the Marty Cook Quartet featuring Jim Pepper for ENJA, the label that produced Red, White, Black & Blue at the famous Trixi Studio in Munich.

Chris Parker praises the rhythm section in the English magazine The Wire and outstanding pieces like "...'Dancing on the Flames', which features Waldron skipping, as if firewalking, through a delightful solo full of sudden splashes of colour and growling low-register patterns and the tender ballad 'Soul Mates' in duo with tenor player Jim Pepper.

The degree of personal attention, of feeling and transcendence, of total musical communication that pours over the listener is the best of melodic and creative jazz that you could ever get to hear today ... Mal Waldron's madly percussive moments of playing, like in 'Dancing on the Flames', in which his exalted manner of approaching rhythm, urged on by Betch's beat - sworn to his drums - and Ed Schuller's walking bass, can be relished alternately with the reserved gliding along in the brilliant 'A Bow to the Classics'."

in the German Jazzthetik states that, "The chemistry of this trio is brilliant" and talks about "Mal Waldron's hypnotic repetition of tones, percussive rebounding and his profound absorption in the nature of sound and rhythm - there's something almost religious about his piano-playing, quite different from the esoteric or aetherial.

Far removed from every sort of sporty virtuosity, he abstracts melody to a few quintessential notes and from these, outlines icons of unheard dynamics, sets forth short phrases like polished stones from a collection, playful, with just a few annotations.

(Germany, Kiel, Diabolo 10–1988) Daniel Chardon writes in Jazz Hot, France: "Mal, who can be identified apart from anything else, by his enchanting abracadabra, who has always been called a great Sorcerer, a master of hallucination and of trance ... who propels, most of all, Jim Pepper out into the light in this ballad!