Thesis and play: Cecil Taylor at the Whitney, 4/23/16

AP Photo/Barbara Woike

Much like the prior Cecil Taylor performance at the Whitney Museum, Saturday's night's concert began and ended with a poignant display of frailty: the 87-year-old artist, walking with a cane, being led to and from the stage by a small entourage. But what went down in between told a different story. Even more than the first show, Saturday's event was a confirmation of alertness, of vitality, of a man in full control of his expressive faculties. For around 90 minutes, Taylor's presence, his pianism, his poetry, his dramatic poise, and, crucially, his sometimes hidden but always present playfulness, owned the room.

Like the April 14 show, this concert was divided into two halves, but this time, there was no break or personnel change in between, a set-up that made for a more focused experience. More so than at the earlier event, there was a real sense of Cecil and his collaborators building something monumental together over the course of the night. On the surface, Cecil's ensemble here—a quintet with Harri Sjöström on soprano and sopranino saxophones, Okkyung Lee on cello, Jackson Krall on drums and Tony Oxley reprising his subtle electronics role—seemed a bit haphazard, a jumbled assemblage of various past collaborators and one new face (Lee). But in practice, they jelled almost instantly. There was no announcement that this band was an official CT Unit, but in practice, it absolutely was: Taylor was the unmistakable leader, but the group proved to be one of the more responsive and sensitive of the many ad hoc groups he has put together during the past quarter century.

As with the prior show, dynamics were the thing here. The concert began with an absolutely stunning episode of what I'll call Taylor's ballad territory. I'd argue that in his later years, he's reached a place of pure luminous certainty in his sparser playing that feels like a new benchmark in his work. The reflective moments have really always been there, but now they feel sort of laser-pinpointed, as though Taylor were snapping his fingers and transporting you to a realm of otherworldly reverie. Oxley was not really a full participant in the trio with Min Tanaka, but here, he approached the set with what felt like a renewed confidence. His contributions—whooshes and swipes of sound at the edges of the musical frame—were subtle but essential. Lee too proved absolutely integral. Near the beginning of the performance, she waded boldly into Taylor's serene soundworld with perfectly complementary arco accents.

The performance heated up, entering a choppier and more frantic zone. Taylor began to test out his various percussive tactics—there was a lot of flat-palm playing at this show, along with his trademark double-jackhammer two-finger runs. As he often has in the past, Krall seemed tentative at first, limiting himself to choked accents on bass drum and cymbal. But he got his footing and the music took on a rushing density. Krall in full flower is a booming, bashing, clearly bop-indebted player, and many of the louder moments of the performance seemed like sweaty, old-school sparring matches between him and the leader. Taylor's preference of the drummer from the '90s through the mid-2000s has sometimes seemed puzzling to me, but last night, his role made perfect sense. At his best, he brings out the rawer, funkier side of the Taylor endeavor, the part of the pianist that wants to get onstage, roll up his sleeves and spar with pugilistic glee—a part of Taylor's art that was on glorious display at both shows. (I don't think I've ever seen Taylor having so much obvious fun at the keys as he seemed to be during the New Unit set on April 14 and during the wilder moments of last night's quintet performance.) Sjöström too helped accentuate the nastier, scrappier sections of the set, especially when he brought out the sopranino—an instrument with a lovably obnoxious quality, as often heard in the Anthony Braxton arsenal—and really went for it.

The music made its way back and forth across the dynamic spectrum. Taylor would be slugging it out with Krall and then suddenly a space would open up and Lee would be right there to provide gorgeous bowed accompaniment. I'm not sure I can recall a Taylor band so readily equipped to traverse these diverse areas of musical inquiry in such rapid, responsive fashion. Both in Saturday's set and in the April 14 ones, the contrast between Taylor's torrential, tempestuous, Dionysian side and his delicate, exquisite, chamber-like one was especially acute; these days, he seems to be more determined than ever to explore the yin-yang principle that Sonny Sharrock so beautifully articulated: "I want the sweetness and the brutality, and I want to go to the very end of each of those feelings." And fortunately, the band from last night was on him like glue whenever he felt compelled to make the switch. There were moments during the New Unit set on April 14 when I feel like Cecil's sound had been swallowed up by his own band, but that never happened last night; even when they raged, the players let the leader lead.

And never more so than during the extended poetry/recitation/oration/etc. that closed the set. I wasn't keeping track, but I'd estimate that this lasted at least as long as the "main" performance, and I have to say that for the first time while attending a CT performance, I was not wishing for him to go back to the piano. I'd have to say that at this point in his career, when he gets on the mic and really takes charge, embraces his MC side, as it were, Cecil Taylor is just as captivating a vocalist and poet as he is a keyboardist. Last's night reading wasn't just accent or interlude; it was in some ways the meat and climax of the performance.

Taylor stood at the piano bench as he read, starting out in his now-familiar pan-disiciplinary avant-science-treatise mode. "Vegetative propagation," "mycelium of a fungus" (a theme that also cropped up on April 14), "amino acids," "hypotenuse," and so on. The words declaimed, insisted upon, occasionally elongated, growled, extended into a sort of stagily guttural song or abstracted into borderline-goofy glossolalia. (I think there is something in certain moments of Taylor vocal performances that both embraces and satirizes the practice of high-drama oration, but it's impossible to know how much the comedic element figures into his thinking.)

The band homed in admirably, creating a rich yet unobtrusive backdrop. Occasionally, Sjöström would growl in agreement or murmur along, as though playing an obbligato for a singer. Oxley slyly weaved in sampled snippets of Taylor piano when the maestro wasn't himself playing the keys.

About 15 minutes in, something strange happened. Taylor started to speak in sentences, paragraphs, rather than disconnected phrases. He started to tell a story, really. As best I can summarize it, his subject was the arbitrary nature of what we think of as gender, race and culture. It sounds high-minded, but what he was saying actually made a perfect, plainspoken kind of sense. He started out by talking about how the concept of gender was essentially chance-based in nature, the ideas of male and female determined in certain reptile species by environmental factors such as the temperature of the egg, and how the first human couple was perhaps made up of two females. (There's a lot to unpack here, perhaps related to the idea of Taylor as an unabashedly though still tacitly queer artist, with a fierce devotion to a sort of sacred femininity as embodied within the characters of his mother, the great female jazz singers, the spirit Erzulie, etc.; see also: this piece.) Then there was a discussion of how pigmentation, and thus race, was also environmentally determined, and again totally arbitrary. And lastly he went into a sort of prehistory of art, discussing cave paintings from Namibia, presumably these, and how they predated and prefigured the more famous European sites. If I were to risk a distillation of what he was getting at, it was the idea that Western, Eurocentric, patriarchal culture has it wrong. He was arguing for an Afrocentric, female-oriented (or at least gender-neutral)—I could also say fair or just or properly historically attuned—view of human history.

I'm perhaps putting this poorly (though hopefully not misinterpreting the message), but thematically, the talk—and by the end, that's really what it felt like, not in the sense that it was tedious, but that Taylor was spelling out a larger thesis rather than simply reciting words—had a real sense of purpose. As the speech went on, his delivery became softer, more musical. Less growling and more lilting. At various points, he looked out the window as he spoke. A sort of dreamy quality crept in, but at the same time the sense of coherence and conviction deepened. He began to punctuate his words with brief pounding episodes on the keys, played while standing, making him seem almost like a boogie-woogie showman. Then he picked up a drumstick and began to smack and prod the strings inside the piano. Final moments of pure play—impromptu, self-justifying sonic research—it seemed to me.

"Thank you all, that's it!" he said, abruptly wrapping up the performance. He encouraged his collaborators to bow and be recognized. He called for Oxley, almost good-naturedly razzing him—"Oxleyyyy." There was an immediate sense of mirth, and it was clear that this wonderful Whitney residency has been—its many moments of profundity, of visceral thrill, of weird mystification notwithstanding—fundamentally a playground. Not a frivolous space, but a forum of joy and exorcism and see-what-happens collaboration. I sincerely hope that Cecil can continue operating in this manner in the coming years, and that we'll all be privileged enough to witness the results.

Dealing with CT: 'Nailed' and beyond

Plenty of times, when listening to Cecil Taylor (either live or on record), I've taken notes, diligently trying to process what I was experiencing. I've listened to a lot of Cecil Taylor this week—all recorded, of course; to my knowledge the Maestro hasn't performed live since last year, when he dueted with Min Tanaka after receiving the Kyoto Prize. For much of that time, I've happily let my pen fall pretty much slack. My jaw, as well.

To digress, I have these Cecil Taylor phases. They've been a fixture in my life for more than a decade (and an intermittent central theme on DFSBP). Periods where I need his music—often a certain phase or group—in my ears more or less constantly. Until this week, it had been a little while, maybe even a couple years, since I'd gone really deep with Cecil. What kicked off this latest listening jag was the troubling recent news of Taylor's swindling at the hands of a contractor. It's an outlandish story, one that would be absurdly comic if it hadn't happened to an 85-year-old man, let alone one who happens to be, in my opinion, one of the greatest artists who has ever walked the earth.

In keeping with my post last week, which only brought up the recent Sonny Rollins New Yorker flare-up so that I might do my best to dismiss it and deflect attention elsewhere, I feel the need to shoo away this real-world Cecil insanity. Let's hope and trust that he's getting the legal help he needs, and let's not fixate on the incident, reduce the man to a caricature—the batty eccentric he's being portrayed as. (Maybe I've been guilty of same.) Let's use the opportunity, rather, to get back in touch with his art, which is what matters.

So, the note-taking, or lack thereof. I just spent a restorative near-hour with "First," the 52-minute lead track on Nailed, a Taylor quartet record (with Evan Parker, Barry Guy and Tony Oxley) on FMP that, like a bunch of other Taylor FMPs, is available as a Bandcamp download through the noble efforts of Destination: Out. (I'm grateful to Seth Colter Walls for pointing me toward Melancholy, recorded a few days after Nailed—SCW singled it out as one of the more precise, coherent Taylor large-group recordings, and I fully concur.) While listening to Nailed today, walking around Crown Heights, I scrawled down just a few hyperbolic phrases: "Raining down of hell, or heaven"; "Nobody has ever come close to describing this experience."

I guess with that last one, I was thinking about all the times I myself had written about Taylor, and how much I'd read about him. (After flipping back through Howard Mandel's Miles Ornette Cecil during the past few days, I've been reminded that the lengthy CT section in this book is perhaps our definitive contemporary Cecil Taylor reference work—the key early-Cecil text being, of course, the lengthy CT section in A.B. Spellman's Four Lives in the Bebop Business—containing as it does both an honest critical grappling with the essential unknowability of Taylor's art, and a wealth of intermittently lucid interview material with the man himself, and with key collaborators ranging from Dominic Duval and Jackson Krall to one Max Roach.) And how inadequate all those words felt in the face of what I was hearing. Eventually I stopped writing phrases and began jotting down only time codes, denoting moments when, basically, I was in blissful disbelief. The other night, while listening to the equally marvelous Celebrated Blazons (another 1990 CT set available via the D:O/FMP Bandcamp, recorded a few months before Nailed; the band here is the divine Feel Trio, with Oxley and William Parker), I wrote, at one point, "How could this have occurred in, like, human life."

So you reach the end of words, the place where there is no substitute for the listening. And why would you want there to be? I have about ten time codes here referring to different sections in "First." Interestingly, many of them refer to moments that don't feature Evan Parker. With all due respect to EP, he almost seems like an onlooker during this performance. He's in the mix, of course (there's a nice Parker/Taylor duet section around the 30-minute mark), but he also lays out for long stretches. It's hard to blame him. The amount of sustained "Are you fucking kidding me?"–level intensity in this track is almost comical. During the trio sections, when Guy and Oxley are going full-tilt, which they are most of the time, you get this riot of sound, a flurry of sonic event. I've dialed up one of my notated time codes: the 26-minute mark. Taylor scampering across the keys with his patented frenzied whimsy, sounding simultaneously savage and mirthful; Oxley approximating wind whipping through a junkyard, furnishing a mist of thuds and scrapes and clangs; and Guy tearing through—or attempting to—the thicket of sound.

Collective mania around the 34-minute mark. All four players this time, racing and gushing. You can feel the Englishmen's desperation: "How long can this guy keep this up?" (A long, long time. I think it was in the Nailed CD booklet that I first read Oxley's classic quote, maybe my favorite thing ever uttered about CT: "To play with Cecil Taylor you need the stamina of an athlete and the imagination of a god.") There's a brief respite around the 40-minute mark, with Cecil ramping down, segueing into his classic murmuring warm-up/cool-down motif, which I think of onomatopoetically as bangada-banga… bangada-banga-banga. And then he can't resist speeding up again, going back in for one more assault. Again, Parker is laying out here. Guy is playing with the bow. Pure mayhem around 43 minutes, more flirtation with the warm-up/cool-down, and then the flailing madness returns. There is something so magical about the outpouring of energy in these moments. You can't get this anywhere else in life, this sort of incandescent freak-out. When it's musicians of this caliber doing the freaking out, and you get to pay witness, it's like seeing/hearing God. 

Buy Nailed if you don't already own it. Drop the needle at 45:40. Let this splatter of precision and brutality just happen to you. I don't know how to talk about music like this. I don't know why you would, unless you, like me, have an obsession with trying to process your own relationship to sound, or you, like me, are trying to encourage others to listen. In moments like this, the engagement of player and, ideally, listener, is total, the level of detail infinite. There is so much of that on Nailed, and on Celebrated Blazons too—and in the ’88–’90 zone of the CT discography generally, with all those divine European encounters. 

Some of the thorniest moments of Nailed come around 49 minutes. The velocity and density decrease here, but not the jagged intensity. All four players are taking their last stabs, measuring their blows instead of flurrying maniacally. And Taylor gets the coda. Around 51 minutes, he quiets for good, musing with consummate restraint. Guy and Oxley providing perfectly attuned accompaniment. There is less than a minute to go in the performance, but this last section is a mini mansion of mystery. All the wildness that's come before, slowing to a trickle. Just like the barrage that precedes it, this ending brims with purpose and precision. That is Cecil's gift to us: total concentration, total conviction, whatever the dynamic zone. He is always, always, always going for it. That is why I have collected his records and attended his performances obsessively over the past decade-plus. When I go and commune with CT, I'm never disappointed. We can't all live in that zone every day, but when you take the time out to really sit with this music, you feel a kind of solar heat. (And you might, as I have, worry that the man is aging and, selfishly, that you might not get to see him perform again…)

We have to appreciate him now—even in the wake of this week's insane real-world news, we have to refocus and remember what the point is: CT is still here. His music is a rich bounty. There's a ton of it. Dip into whatever period you choose—1978 and ’88–’90 seem to call out to me most often—and spend real time there. Put down your pen, your phone, anything that's getting in the way. Let words go; let time go; just deal with CT. It's one of the best feelings I know.

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Other treasures I've turned up during my current Taylor fixation:

*A 1970 live performance with Jimmy Lyons, Sam Rivers and Andrew Cyrille. CT's fierceness and frenzy here are almost unbearable. Till yesterday I had absolutely no idea that footage of this band (heard on The Great Concert of Cecil Taylor, from ’69) existed. The CT portion starts around 11 minutes in.



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*A genial, charming, lucid 2013 interview, in conjunction with the Kyoto Prize. Definite parallels with the lovely CT episode of Marian McPartland's Piano Jazz, which you can grab here. I've said before that CT is impossible to interview. That's unfair. He was impossible for me to interview, when I visited him in 2009 for the Time Out piece linked above. The truth, I think, is that he's simply selective re: whom he'll converse with linearly and warmly—certainly his right.

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*Some fascinating audio documentation—boots from a series of 1998 shows—of an unusual, short-lived Taylor quartet with vibraphonist Joe Locke, bassist Santi Debriano and drummer Jackson Krall, augmented in spots by Oluyemi and Ijeoma Thomas. (For an easy MP3 download, scroll down a bit in the comments and check out the links provided by "mew23.") The Locke/Taylor chemistry is really something to behold. Another fascinating oddity is the Taylor/Parker/Oxley meeting with Anthony Braxton. I think this group played a few times back in ’07; audio boots are floating around, though I can't find any active links at the moment. (Can anyone help?) There is this tantalizing snippet on YouTube:



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*A complete stream of Burning Poles, a live-in-studio performance (date uncertain—’90/’91?) by the Feel Trio plus percussionist Henry Martinez. I remember renting this ages ago on VHS and being somewhat baffled by the pacing—at that time, I wasn't accustomed to CT's famously circuitous invocations/introductions—but rewatching this morning, I was just extremely grateful that we have a proper video document of this band.



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*Again, I'm in disbelief that this exists: a video from CT's 1974 Montreaux Jazz Festival performance, which would be released as Silent Tongues, simply one of Taylor's greatest recordings. The balance between abandon and deliberateness that, to me, defines CT's work has rarely been captured so well. The passage that begins at 9:27 blows my listen—listen to how Taylor sets up this repeated figure, a two-handed run up the keys, and then mutates it, first answering with his patented declamatory left-hand pounds and then upending the call-and-response structure with a tempestuous flurry. Then at 9:50, he begins this sort of see-saw motion between a version of the aforementioned chilled-out warm-up/cool-down figure and these manic action-painting outbursts. Throughout this clip, the clarity and speed of execution are astonishing. As I've described above, later CT has its own magic, but during this period, he seems superhuman.

 

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More:

*All the Notes (full-length documentary by Chris Felver from about ten years back; as accurate a portrait as you're going to find of what it's like to actually spend time in CT's presence; essential)

*Imagine the Sound trailer (incredible 1981 doc w/ CT, Archie Shepp, Paul Bley and Bill Dixon; see the full film at all costs)

*CT live in studio, 1968 (w/ Lyons, Cyrille and Alan Silva, the band from the album Student Studies)

*CT w/ the Art Ensemble of Chicago (need to give this one a good, hard listen, along with the record this group made together)

*2 Ts for a Lovely T on Amazon MP3 (less than $12 for a download of the entire 10-CD box?! I've heard a few discs of this limited-edition Feel Trio set, and the thin sound quality—drastically inferior to, say, Celebrated Blazons above—has always turned me off. But at this price, I can't resist giving it another shot.)

*Q'ua: Live at the Irridium [sic], Vol. 1 (another reconsideration; I've sometimes been on the fence about CT's mid-’90s–through–early aughts working trio with Dominic Duval / Jackson Krall trio, but this one is sounding awesome to me at present. Pluses: rich recording quality; Krall's organic, swinging feel—so different from Oxley's alien sound factory; engaged, sympathetic playing from Duval and soprano-saxist Harri Sjöström.)

CT@80 // Big Skye

[Note: Visit Destination: OUT and/or Triple Point Records for an important late-breaking CT development.]

Happy 80th birthday, Cecil Taylor! (There is some dispute over his actual DOB, but I trust the authorities.)

The commemorative gig--seemingly billed as a poetry/piano set--occurs on Saturday. And I'm almost certain I heard on air that WKCR will play CT from noon to 9pm today.

I've got little to add right now other than to say that attending a wide array of CT shows has been one of the real highlights of my time in NYC over the last decade. I find his music inexhaustible and endlessly fascinating, something I can't say about very many artists in any medium. I've written about him extensively on this blog and elsewhere; here are a few of those pieces:

*Interview/profile in Time Out NY, along with some after-the-fact musings re: this somewhat trying encounter with one of my musical idols, August '08

*Review of Taylor at Village Vanguard with Tony Oxley, July '08 (Links to earlier CT coverage on DFSBP can also be found in this post.)

*An attempt to unpack CT's signature piano moves, including "The Lick," February '08

*A review of CT's most recent NYC solo concert, a show that may provide the blueprint for what goes down on Saturday, August '08

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Also, Crack the Skye officially dropped yesterday. As predicted, my initial obsession with this one has dampened a little since I first heard it, but I'm still mightily impressed. Check out my Mastodon piece in last week's Time Out NY--in which bassist vocalist Troy Sanders unpacks the album's elaborate narrative underpinnings--as well as a separate mini-feature, where Sanders reveals (!) his five favorite concept albums of all time.

It Cuts Through: A Tony Oxley mixtape

I heard Tony Oxley with Cecil Taylor at the Vanguard about three weeks ago on July 15, 2008, exactly one month after Oxley's 70th birthday. When I think back on the show, what strikes me most is how *little* Oxley played and yet how he still had a completely equal role in shaping what went down. Over the years he's evolved into a wizardly player whose two great features, as I see them, are superb rhythmic choicemaking and--and this is the biggie--a combination of timbral exoticism and timbral clarity. In other words: In any given composition--think of that term spatially--he knows what tiny detail will enhance the overall layout, exactly where it ought to be placed and exactly what it ought to look like so as to catch the eye. The latter is crucial, Oxley is a master TIMBRALIST, a curator of only the oddest, most ear-catching sounds, the ones that--in his words CUT THROUGH a given piece of musical matter. (Take a good look at the kit above: tiny hi-hats, plastic woodblocks, mutant cowbells, little bongos: yielding a symphony of metallic groans and wispy clicking, all combining not into something so boring as a Drum Set, but into a groaning, clicking, swishing, rattling contraption, approximating a uniquely poetic and subtle sort of entropy.) Honor rock musicians too late in their lives and they may be onto some lackluster twilight, but as I've seen in the past year checking out Muhal Richard Abrams, Sonny Simmons and Bobby Few, the best improvisers and jazz players only improve over time. (I remember my lifebro Jeff once saying that to me and years later, I'm agreeing with him in a big way.) Oxley is such a dude, majorly, and hence my attempt to make sense of a very diverse and heavy-duty discography:

It Cuts Through: A Tony Oxley mixtape

(The title I've chosen comes specifically from this brief but outstandingly detailed interview with Oxley. The inquisitor, Alyn Shipton, comments on the incisiveness of the percussionist's sound choices and Oxley responds with a perfect summation of the philosophy behind his maverick timbralism and exotic homemade kit:

"Cutting, it cuts through; no matter what you're doing it will cut through. So I think a lot of drummers should think about that because when they're playing time and they're shoving this on the wherever, usually two and four..., it really needs to have a different sound and the cymbal they're playing on in order to mean anything. And you can't blame the engineer can you...? Maybe you should think about that before you get to the studio or before you start to record, think about it in terms of music rather than reproduction.")

The mix is ten MP3s in a zip file, with ID tags ideally formatted for iTunes use. It's a long compilation, but I hope, worthwhile and illustrative especially of a few basic principles of Oxleyana that--before I started investigating further--weren't clear to me even as a longtime fan of his work. Here are annotations and the tracklist follows:

1) Most freejazz/freeimprov fans know Oxley as THE BEST collaborator, the one who somehow can inspire giants as diverse as Cecil Taylor, Bill Dixon and Derek Bailey to some of their best playing. In the realm of free improv, it would be hard to think of a player who has helped so many different musicians to sound incredible. So yeah, his approach is so subtle and supportive that it's easy to overlook that he's also an amazing *bandleader*. Through his important major label (yeah, weird right?) works of the late '60s and early '70s, through his Incus works of the decades that followed, he showed himself to be an outstanding deployer of improvisers. Many of the works on records such as Ichnos or Tony Oxley (a.k.a. 1975's Incus 8) don't necessarily sound like fully fleshed-out compositions, but there is a very present sense of a guiding hand, of a predetermined conceptual frame that gives Oxley's leader records an edge over a lot of just-show-up-and-hit freeimprov sessions. On the mix, "Never Before or Again" from the aforementioned self-titled record is a great example of this. Oxley was drawing from essentially the same pool of players as another incredible percussionist/free-improv-shaman of the time, Spontaneous Music Ensemble's John Stevens, but he was charting his own path. Both were engaged in a space race of sorts: Whose ensemble could listen hardest? Whose could leave the most space? Whose could most closely approximate the movement of a single organism? (Stevens may have won the top prize on SME's Karyobin, but all the entries as prizeworthy in this particular bout.) Oxley's bandleading efforts grew sparser over the years, but check out The Enchanted Messenger from '94, where he leads a whole orchestra in some expertly plotted jam-outs (Though I could do without Phil Minton's free-scat vibes, personally.). It's not represented on the mix, but it's out there to be heard.

2) The Tony Oxley most of us stateside folk know--i.e., from the high-profile collaborations with Taylor, Dixon, etc.--could only be described as alien, nongenre, off the grid, etc. But it must be remembered that the man is also a JAZZ drummer. The mix includes "Pete the Poet" from the early John McLaughlin date Extrapolation (1969), which is also Oxley's first studio date--interestingly, his first record is with Ronnie Scott, live at the famous British jazz club that bears Scott's name. Anyone checking this out who's a fan of progressive '60s jazz will tell you: Oxley sounds *exactly* like Tony Williams here, right down to cymbal timbres and snare sound. Maybe he's a little stiffer, but I'd've been fooled hearing this blind. He's not using his--as fellow Oxley enthusiast Steve Smith termed it--mutant kit there, but check out "Body and Soul" on the mix, a collaboration with saxist Tony Coe. Oxley's swinging away in traditional ballad mode but using those inimitable Oxleyan alien sounds that can't help but cut through. Visual evidence of Oxley playing straight-up jazz on the mutant kit is here:


3) Electronics are a big deal to Oxley, not just seasoning. Check the awesome 1971 solo "Oryane" on the mix to hear how he subtly moves from acoustic to plugged-in playing. By the '90s--listen to "Quartet 2"--he was working with majorly hi-tech sonics. He doesn't play any of the electronics on that track, but he's chosen collaborators who know how to wield the juice.

4) Oxley doesn't even need to actually hit anything to bend space-time. Check out "Cavern of the Snail for Cello and Cymbals," where Oxley bows and scrapes metal and conjures weird sine-wave mania.

*****

Here's the tracklist. Most links are to entries in this outstanding Oxley discograpy, where you can find all personnel and recording date info. All sessions are Oxley-led, unless otherwise noted. I'd suggest ordering the tracks manually if they don't show up in your player in this sequence:

1) Trio 2 (1977), from February Papers

2) Pete the Poet (1969), from John McLaughlin's Extrapolation

3) Thorn Apple (1998), from Alexander von Schlippenbach and Tony Oxley's Digger's Harvest

4) Never Before or Again (1972), from Tony Oxley (Incus 8)

5) Oryane (1971), from Ichnos

6) Body and Soul (1983), from Coe, Oxley and Co.'s Nutty

7) Quartet 2 (1992), from The Tony Oxley Quartet

8) Article Four (1991), from Paul Bley, Gary Peacock, John Surman and Tony Oxley's In the Evenings Out There

9) Cavern of the Snail for Cello and Cymbals (1974), from The Tony Oxley Alan Davie Duo

10) Crawlspace (1998), from Bill Dixon's Papyrus Volume II

*****

Further listening:

*The Taylor collaboration is crucial but unwieldy on disc: Most of the time you're dealing with long, unbroken performances. Check especially Looking (Berlin version) and Celebrated Blazons, in my opinion the finest documents of Taylor's Feel Trio with Oxley and bassist William Parker. Regrettably, the sound on 2 Ts for a Lovely T, a ten CD box set of that band, absolutely sucks, with the bass sounding like a miniature violin at best. No body or presence whatsoever. The two listed above though are massive and mindblowing.

*The Taylor/Dixon collaboration encompasses probably the best recorded documentation of either player's core concept. You won't hear Bill Dixon or Tony Oxley sounding more gorgeous than they did on Soul Note in the '90s. "Crawlspace" from the mix is a great example, but so is anything from Vade Mecum, a marvelous, marvelous record. Berlin Abbozzi, from '99, reprises the trumpet-bass-bass-percussion format of that session in a live setting w/ different bassists. Sound isn't as sumptuous, but it's a very cool disc.

*Cecil Taylor/Bill Dixon/Tony Oxley, the Victo record that launched 1000 contentious blog posts. Weirdly controversial record, but my view is that it's just a really solid session and not entirely unexpected given those three men's recent output. Let yourself get used to Dixon's heavy use of delay and you'll start to feel the vibe.

*I'd very much recommend the early major label discs not represented here, "The Baptised Traveller," recently spotlighted by Destination Out, and "Four Compositions for Sextet." They're both excellent and if you like the organized freedoms you hear on "Never Before or Again," this is right in that sweet spot (and Baptised even features unison "heads" in the normal jazz sense).



*****

As a bonus, check out a cool Oxley sesh on FMP courtesy of the WFMU blog.

And don't sleep on Oxley's marvelous visual art. I read a theory once that Dixon and Oxley's hookup was so complete in part b/c they were both also accomplished painters; no offense to Dixon, whose art is rad, but Oxley is sorta beyond. I'd totally buy one of these. Some paintings are viewable here. Gorgeous stuff, as you can see:

Conversant: Taylor/Oxley at the Vanguard

I've heard Cecil Taylor live at least six times before tonight, maybe more. In fact the inaugural post on this blog, back in October of '06, featured some words on a solo Cecil show (the only one I've seen) at Merkin Hall. I also wrote a more formal review of a Taylor trio set--with Henry Grimes on bass and Pheeroan akLaff on drums--later that same month and then this past February I mused on a slightly different trio lineup I caught (William Parker was in for Henry Grimes). I guess what I'm getting at is, I keep going, trying to catch at least one set every time he plays. Tonight--I almost can't believe I'm typing this because I've waited so long to see this match-up--I went again, this time to hear Cecil in duet with... yeah, Tony Oxley. At the Village Vanguard. Truly, truly, this was something.

So why do I keep going? I've seen my share of disappointing Cecil sets, believe me. Four years ago in July of '04 I caught what I think was the debut of Cecil's thankfully short-lived trio with Albey Balgochian on bass and Jackson Krall on drums. Krall is not the most arresting drummer, but perfectly competent. Balgochian on the other hand... I won't go there. Suffice it to say that this performance--at Castle Clinton--and another one by this same band at the Blue Note--can't locate the date but I think it was '05--were really, really frustrating and it was very easy to pinpoint why.

But tonight shares the distinction--with the solo Merkin set, which so, so took me where I wanted to go--of being the most satisfying Cecil live experience I've had yet. And it summed up why I keep going back, at least in part. It is truly awesome, and exceedingly rare, in our current (urban) world to behold a performer so entirely devoted to concentration, to nearly unbelievable levels of sustained attention and construction. You find this with the truly elite improvisers such as Cecil and Evan Parker (and with Now giants such as Mick Barr). You'll find your attention wandering--as most people's does, no matter how interested you are in something--and you'll snap back and realize: Dear God, Cecil's still at it!

And tonight Oxley was too. The duo has a long history, dating back to '88 (Steve Smith offers a refresher in this week's Time Out NY). Early duets gave way to the justly celebrated Feel Trio with William Parker on bass and then to a more recent trio with Bill Dixon on trumpet. Part of me wishes Parker would sit in for some of this week's Vanguard run--after all, he is, presumably, just across town--but I'm really not complaining.

The two men were a little late emerging--the lights dimmed and then they let the suspense build. Then out they came from the back room, Cecil in his customary do-rag, plus a highly set reddish leather belt, tank top and what can only be termed a little white capelet draped over his back. Oxley in a white t-shirt and droopy black cardigan. They played for roughly an hour and change. One piece of 40- or 50-something minutes--with mini rest spells but no definitive ending until the final one--and one of about 10. Oxley was playing his customary hodgepodge kit--this time with a foot-pedal bass drum, which I believe is often absent from his set-up--outfitted with bongos, small toms, plastic woodblocks, small china cymbals, bells and something that looked like a gigantic rusty cowbell.

Those are the facts, really, but the reality, for me, was more in the shape of the improvising. Many Cecil improvisations of the last 20 years or so take a sort of plateau form, starting sparse and then heating up--either gradually or not--to a point of boiling, where they tend to remain for some obscene length of time, until they slope back down into the original sparseness and end there. Not a plateau structure at all, this set was much more like a series of undulating waves. It had extremely intense crescendos, but they were fleeting. The music never hit that full-throttle stride that many Cecil sets achieve. To someone who came to gawk at Cecil's freak-out tendencies, this might have been disappointing, but I was thrilled. Truthfully Cecil's marathon sets, especially with his less sympathetic groups such as the Balgochian/Krall trio, can often overstay their welcome, as though he plays long past the point when his sidemen have anything left to say. This conversation with Oxley, though, could seemingly continue forever: It wasn't a contest, it was more like a game, testing out various degrees of intensity, but never allowing density and volume to take over. In short it was a marvelous combined feat of concentration, a set completely devoid of cruise-control free jazz, i.e., that so-intense-for-so-long-that-it's-completely-numbing-and-exhausting quality that's almost become an inherent fact of this area of music-making over the years.

By design, Oxley makes brief sounds, quick on the decay, slashing the china cymbal or rolling furtively on a little tom. If you've never heard him, it's like a chandelier tinkling in the breeze, except the chandelier is made of plastic, taut animal skin and jagged metal. The sounds are pointillist, tiny, parched, cryptic. And as a performer, he gives nothing away, completely stonefaced, except when he glances over to give Cecil a sly grin. There is no coasting whatsoever in this man's playing. He is comfortable with silence. He has no interest in what Anthony Braxton has termed the mythology of the "sweating brow"--the idea that apparent physical exertion in a performance automatically signifies aesthetic intensity. Oxley is *not* an intense performer in the traditional sense--the only way I can describe his demeanor onstage is "casual." He flits, pauses, taps, pauses, scrapes, jumbles, pauses some more. It is anti-momentum soundpainting, a study in dryness and precision.

And there was no argument from Cecil. He wasn't trying to push things anywhere Oxley didn't want to go. Not that his was a deferent performance. But it was outstandingly measured. The Cecil hallmarks were there, i.e., a good deal of what I've termed "The Lick" and "The Flurry" (see this earlier post for some--but only some--elucidation), not to mention some nice crab-handed stabs. But what this set was about for me vis a vis the pianism was ATTACK. And not in the offensive sense, but in the sense of coaxing sound from the keys. During the quieter moments in this set--and as I said, it had a fairly regular and rapid ebb-and-flow between frantic and dreamy moments--Cecil demonstrated what was surely the most sumptuous and sophisticated finger attack I've EVER seen/heard. He was summoning the notes, caressing them out, seemingly lifting them from UP out of the keys rather than striking them DOWNward. He sways dancer-like as he plays these balladic passages--it makes me think of a section in Miles Ornette Cecil where Max Roach recalls Cecil saying to him, "No one knows when I'm playing a ballad." Well tonight it was very clear when he was playing a ballad. The set was filled with air-light drifts across the keys; plush, bluesy twinges that you just wanted to bathe in. (Who knows how much of this was preplanned, but there was a lot of scribbled notation on the piano rack in front of him; he cycled through three or four sheets' worth.)

Oxley, inscrutable mostly, shot a few wry smiles Cecil's way during the grittier passages as if to say, "You want to go there? We can visit but we won't stay long." Again, it was anti-momentum, this dialogue. No coasting, no forgetting to listen, just concentration and the purity of the duo. In a historic jazz club, to boot. Oxley finally broke out in full beam when the set was over. It wasn't a sweaty set, a hammer-till-you-drop thing like I've heard Cecil do so often. It was clean, modest, delineated, impossibly eloquent. The conversation could've kept going tonight and will tomorrow, and anyone who descends that Seventh Avenue staircase this week is blessedly lucky to eavesdrop.