And Finally, Cecil Taylor, who celebrates his 83rd birthday today.
This record has an insert with notes in Japanese.
The text which follows are my own musings.
Among the avant-garde jazz composer/performers to begin working in the mid to late 'fifties, it is Cecil Taylor who blended his jazz influences (Horace Silver,Bud Powell,Oscar Peterson,Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk and Mary-Lou Williams) most thoroughly with the influences he evidently gathered from the contemporary European "Classical" idiom. (Much as Ellington had done a generation or two before him).
In this live performance the influence of, and the similarities between, Taylor's improvising and Boulez's composing in Sonata No.2 can be heard at times (if only in the great intervallic leaps and the swift dynamic changes), and one could easily add Cecil's name to the list of virtuoso pianists whose work can be seen as reaping the soil sewn by composers like Boulez.This is,of course,In addition to the rich soil of the jazz music which is indispensable to him.
Taylor's solo method generally relies on development of motivic cells, stated at the outset,and which gradually expand and become more complex and highly charged, sometimes contracting back to something like their original state at the end, and at other times ending abruptly, in mid stream.
Taylor's technique does not rely on independence of his two hands so much as contrary motion between them in great block chords and an alternating full-armed hammering and jabbing attack on the instrument in his single-note flurries.
As was said above of Bela Bartok, Cecil Taylor uses the piano like a percussion instrument in much of his high-energy work.
Cecil Taylor-Live In Tokyo
Side One:
a1-Lono-Choral Of Voice (Elesion)
a2-Lono
Side Two:
b1-Asapk In Ame
b2-Indent-Half of First Layer, Second Half of First Layer
Cecil Taylor-Piano
(1)
