Olu Iwa
By Cecil Taylor
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Track listing
Show track credits
- 1 Cecil Taylor Unit - B Ee Ba Nganga Ban'a Eee! 48:21
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trombone
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tenor saxophone, tarogato
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tenor saxophone
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- 2 Cecil Taylor Quartet - Olu Iwa (Lord of Character) 27:09
- Total length: 75:30
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Review
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2 Reviews
Punishing Concert Bears Many Surprises
Berlin, April 12, 1986
Cecil Taylor: piano; Thurman Barker: marimba, percussion; William Parker: bass; Steve McCall: drums; Earl McIntyre: trombone (1); Peter Brotzmann: tenor sax, tarogato (1); Frank Wright: tenor sax (1)
For the second show taken from a Berlin festival in April of 1986, Taylor brings the noise. The "noise" is the furious playing of Peter Brotzmann, whose searing sax threatens to wipe all life from the earth in the first of two tracks. Thankfully, that track is many things and on either side of the furious, twenty some odd minute thrashing, there are moments where contemplation and variance thrive. For one, these truly boost Thurman Barker's marimba, an instrument that always sounds right next to Taylor, yet was rarely used. Beyond that, William Parker is ever the perfect, most elastic bassist for Taylor, and Steve McCall manages to keep the pace going while moving, circling, and at times storming his set, never once keeping a "normal" style. Frank Wright is the other tenor sax here, and he gets a few fiery moments as well, but also contributes to the harmony (as, to be fair, does Brotzmann) in the final minutes.
The surprise, then, comes with the second track, where Brotzmann and Wright drop out, allowing a focus on all of the rhythm, supplemented by the string bending bass of Parker. Taylor keeps things slower for some time here, only truly taking off in the last ten minutes or so of the shorter track. It's so great, again, to hear McCall, Barker, and Taylor winding around each other, a set with a lot of sound and fury, signifying something.
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Two sessions from the Berlin Workshop Freie Musik festival in 1986. The shorter one, at only 27 minutes, is by the Cecil Taylor Quartet; the longer - 48 minutes - is by the Cecil Taylor Unit, i.e., the Quartet plus three horn players. If you know Taylor's music then this will be much as you might expect: rigorous, powerful, unrelenting, serious. It’s music you have to listen to, concentrate on, otherwise it will pass you by. It is like an Ingmar Bergman movie or a Samuel Beckett play: it is Serious, it demands your full attention, no slacking. As with Bergman and Beckett it takes risks: perhaps the greatest being that it is always on the verge of the ridiculous, it lays itself open to ridicule, it is easy to parody. And where there is nothing so dreadful as this sort of Seriousness when it doesn’t work, when it is left seeming earnestly vacuous, Taylor’s music does work. At the heart of the music is the relationship between the four musicians in the Quartet: each is superb – as well as Taylor there is William parker on bass, Steve McCall on drums and Thurman Barker playing the marimba and other percussion (although I am not a marimba connoisseur and cannot judge in terms of technique how good Barker is as a marimba player, the sound of the instrument is superbly effective, especially in its relationship to the piano, giving the overall sound a softer dimension that complements the aggression of Taylor’s playing). When the horns come in they do not dominate but remain part of the ensemble: and they don’t enter the music until half way through the long piece, except for a brief how-do-you-do at about 10 minutes just to show us they are there. Earl McIntyre’s trombone is wonderful, but Frank Wright and Peter Brotzmann’s tenors are just more examples of aggressive, avant-garde horn blowing, noisy but one dimensional: but they do work well enough here, as part of the music’s texture. My only problem with the music, the one I have with much of Taylor’s work through the 1970s and beyond, is that it is difficult to know where the music is going: it’s a voyage where we just don’t know where we are going to end up, and once we’ve reached our destination we still don’t know where we are or how we got there – this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it is part of the difficulty of the music, it takes no hostages.
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Catalog
29 Feb 2024
11 Jan 2024
4 Jan 2024
11 Sep 2023
9 Sep 2023
17 Jun 2023
16 Jun 2023
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1
Cecil Taylor Unit - B Ee Ba Nganga Ban'a Eee!
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2
Cecil Taylor Quartet - Olu Iwa (Lord of Character)
29 Apr 2023
20 Apr 2023
21 Feb 2023
27 Jan 2023
13 Jan 2023
26 Nov 2022
26 Jul 2022
13 May 2022