There are many impressive creative accomplishments in this series on artists making first rate albums over 40. But no one will ever match what Cecil Taylor did in 1989,at age 59: put out 11 incredible albums recorded the year before. Now granted, they are all live sets from a one month long festival recorded in Berlin with a collection of leading European improvisers- but still. I bought three of these albums in 1994 or 1995 on CD – one a duet with the drummer Tony Oxley called Leaf Palm Hand, one with the drummer Han Bennik called Spots, Circles, and Fantasy,, and one called Alms/Tiergarten (Spree) with the Cecil Taylor European Orchestra, a large ensemble of all the different players who had done smaller combinations with Taylor at the festival. My favorite was the set with Oxley, and it had a big influence on my musical imagination at that time.

I had seen Taylor live in Providence in 1989, with William Parker on bass and a drummer whose name I can’t recall. It was thunderous from start to finish. It was my first year away from home at Brown University and I went by myself, not having met many other record collector types there yet. In high school the previous year I had been working my way through the free jazz albums from the late ’50’s through the 1970’s.  My father had introduced me to Ornette Coleman in 8th grade, a personal favorite of his.  I had moved on to Sun Ra, Albert Ayler and others that had influenced a lot of the rock musicians I was listening to at the time, such as the MC5 and The Stooges. I had picked up copies of Taylor’s early albums Jazz Advance, Unit Structures, and Looking Ahead at Stereo Jack’s, a record store in Cambridge that focused on Jazz and had a very knowledgeable staff that taught me a lot. 

Jazz Advance was my favorite, even though it was less of a blow out affair than Unit Structures, which I could see had more to do with the Detroit proto punk that had led me to them. The liner notes to Looking Ahead referenced Taylor’s love of earlier players like Fats Waller and led me backwards in time to explore Waller, Ellington, Tatum and Morton. At the Providence concert the density of the clusters of sound was much greater than on any of the albums I had heard in high school. In 2025 makes me think of the onslaught of the massive clusters of data that are most valuable commodity of our digital age.  Taylor’s live set made the chord changes of the MC5 and Stooges songs sound like arcane walls their free passages were constrained by pushing against.  No matter how much distortion or dissonance or note bending they applied, it still sounded formulaic at times to me.  Those 1-4-5 mazes were simply not there at the Taylor concert.  

William Parker, whose albums as a leader I’ve listened to quite a lot since the mid aughts, moved his hands so quickly back and forth across the fretboard that I was impressed that he could still apply enough pressure to sound out the notes fully.  Taylor’s similar speed on the piano had a different range of motion – the bass having a wider vertical playing field as compared to the horizontal spread of the piano.  There was a cool symmetry to Parker’s hands moving up and down with some side to side thrown in, while Taylor’s hands danced side to side across the full width of the 88 keys like a festival of crabs partying in the moonlight on some deserted beach, bouncing up and down with a limited ability to defy gravity. Taylor wore a white windbreaker and reflective wrap around sun glasses, and had braided hair with beads that clicked against each other as his head moved in time with his kinetic playing.

Two things about the setting impressed me: the decision to eschew traditional concert venues, and the lack of concern with the size of the audience.  There were only about 30 people there.  I had read that Taylor had persevered in the face of a lack of popularity in the late ‘60’s and early ‘70s, with no studio albums between 1966’s Conquistador and 1978’s Cecil Taylor Unit.  The small crowd didn’t seem to concern the players at all, though of course it may have internally.  I often try and think of that when I feel disappointed that not more people show up to shows I play –  that if a giant like Taylor can keep going and focused on what he is playing to a sparse audience, mere mortals like us should suck it up.  

Those of us who were there sat in fold out metal chairs on the same floor as the musicians.  They played at what I recall to be a community center in South Providence, a majority black and low income neighborhood at that time.  Today it is majority Hispanic – but back then it was five years before NAFTA.  I had never been to that neighborhood before and it began to give me a fuller picture of the city as a whole as someone who had moved there to go to the University.  It would have felt quite different if the show had been at a concert hall on the Brown campus on the East side.  

A few years later I worked a part time job in South Providence for SWAP – (Stop Wasting Abandoned Property) – whose mission was to redevelop abandoned property into owner occupied low income housing.  It paid $4.25 an hour but it was one of the most interesting jobs I ever had – and not just because it taught me about the problems of South Providence.  Researching the ownership patterns and history of the vacant properties we were trying to convert taught me a lot about the financial predation of powerful people that create those problems.  Talking to bankers about loans for construction, seeing the repetition of who owned those vacant lots and what they would do when SWAP tried to make city blocks affordably habitable – all that made me think back to the dense barrage of notes I had heard Taylor play in the neighborhood a few years earlier.  Seeing the University President Vartan Gregorian make what felt like a cursory reference to work Brown students do in South Providence in his graduation speech made me think that whatever small positive impact my work at SWAP made was outweighed by the institutional gravity of how elite universities exploit the cities they live in with a thin veneer of plausible deniability provided by the low cost work study jobs taken by students such as myself.   

The dynamic range of the Berlin sets was much wider than what I heard from Taylor’s trio in Berlin, in part because there were many duets among them, such as the recordings with Oxley and Bennik. The duets sometimes start with feeling each other out, perhaps because they weren’t that familiar with each other.  As I listened to Oxley’s drumming, it made me think about the foundational pieces I had been taught as the drummer of my high school jazz band.  In that setting, I had been taught to keep the hi hat regularly hitting on the 2 and 4 of each bar with the ride cymbal keeping a steady stream of time throughout the pieces.  Snare and kicks were for occasional accents, something matching or introducing the melodic headers, or ushering them out the door as someone’s solo kicked in.

Here, the 2 and 4 were out the window – and the steady pace of the ride was out too.  Every piece of Oxley’s kit carried out the process of accenting and responding to Taylor’s playing – as if the role that had been assigned to the kick and snare in what I had learned in the high school jazz band was now universal. In turn. Taylor’s playing as the leader was often responsive to Oxley’s decisions too.  It left me with the impression of two people engaged in a dialogue that didn’t need to talk about a third person or topic.  As a child of English teachers who had gotten used to talking to others about issues through constantly referencing a shared text we were both familiar with, I liked how it felt like the flashlight had been turned away from the sheet music, the time signature, the tempo, the author, the history book.  The point of reference was the player on the bandstand with you. The Bennik duet felt that way too, but Oxley’s kit had more different percussion elements compared to Bennik’s kick, snare, hi hat set up.  I liked how that worked with Taylor’s range across the full range of the 88 keys of the grand piano.

For all those Berlin albums, the bass octaves of Taylor’s piano really stood out to me.  I hadn’t heard someone spend that much time at the very lowest register of that instrument before.  Still today it strikes me how different that bass sounds than bass instruments I’m more familiar with in today’s low-end centric genres – electric bass guitar, bass synthesizers.  There’s an integrity to what synthesists would call the ADSR of the low piano notes – the attach, sustain, decay, and resonance – that electric low end can’t match.  I had heard that clear low tone at the end of the Beatles’ A Day in the Life as a very young child.    But to hear it appear so regularly throughout Taylor’s tracks was, in the words of Ornette Coleman, Something Else!!!!

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