Cecil Taylor: The Complete Cecil Taylor in Berlin '88 Album Review | Pitchfork
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The Complete Cecil Taylor in Berlin '88

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8.4

Best New Reissue

  • Genre:

    Jazz

  • Label:

    Destination: OUT

  • Reviewed:

    May 19, 2015

This landmark set consists of 13 discs and 14 hours of music recorded by avant-garde jazz pianist Cecil Taylor in 1988. Every aspect of his life's work, from solo piano to small combos to large bands, is represented here.

One of the more famous descriptions of Cecil Taylor’s piano playing compares his sound to someone playing "88 tuned drums," and it’s true—his all-over-the-instrument dexterity is a physical marvel. You have to recalibrate your imagination when listening to Taylor performing at top speed, the better to make sense of how much music can be made by one person in a single moment. That those note-rich passages routinely add up to unbroken hour-long performances is what makes Taylor seem like the Everest of American music.

Precisely because his technique is so potent, critical reaction to Taylor's music usually breaks down into two camps: those who feel the big climb is worth it, and those who don’t. Miles Davis famously walked out of an early Taylor gig in New York. When asked by a 1990s PBS documentary crew about Taylor’s suggestion that audiences should "prepare" for his concerts, saxophonist Branford Marsalis dismissed the concept out of hand. But elite opinion has shifted in recent years. A rising vanguard of pianists, led by the likes of Vijay Iyer and Craig Taborn, is not shy about praising Taylor’s extreme, often atonal style as a crucial part of the jazz tradition. This advocacy harkens back to the '60s work of African-American poet-critics like Amiri Baraka and A. B. Spellman, both of whom wrote about Taylor’s abstracted connection to the blues as much as they emphasized the pianist’s classical, conservatory training.

This recent shift in perception of Taylor's work has been helped along by two significant reissue projects. The first is a fresh and deeply clarifying remaster of Taylor’s seminal 1966 group album Unit Structures (reissued on vinyl and in a "mastered for iTunes" edition as part of the Blue Note label’s ongoing 75th anniversary celebration). With this title, Taylor made explicit his idiosyncratic break with previous jazz practices. Instead of charts written out in standard notation, the structure of these compositions was based on sequences of themes, many of which were communicated and rehearsed orally. (Other bits of Taylor’s music might be notated in small snatches, or else delivered to the band live, during Taylor’s feverish piano improvisations.) That Taylor was working with an exploded conception of "ensemble togetherness" was indicated by one excerpt from a lengthy bit of free-verse poetry that served as the original LP’s liner notes: "Time seen not as beats to be measured after academy’s podium angle." In other words: buckle up.

After Unit Structures, Taylor cut one more LP for Blue Note, Conquistador! (also reissued by Blue Note this year). Then the pianist fell into a seven-year recording hiatus. During this period, it was possible for fans to look back at the "we’re concerned for Cecil’s future" tone of those '60s music-journalism pieces by Baraka and Spellman and concede that these writers had correctly foreseen a challenging period ahead. When Taylor popped back up, in the '70s, it was often as a solo artist touring in Europe. And, over the ensuing decades, it has been the interest (and respect) that Taylor has received from foreign promoters, crowds, and artists which has contributed mightily to the cause of keeping him afloat, and at work on his art.

The most lavish European tribute Taylor has ever received came in the form of a month-long residency in West Berlin, in 1988, which afforded him time to perform in all of his guises—as a solo visionary, as a telepathic improviser playing next to a wide variety of top-shelf duo partners, and also as a big-band and orchestra leader. The results were recorded, and released as In Berlin '88, an 11-CD box set from the Free Music Production label. Longtime Village Voice critic Gary Giddins wrote that "Cecil Taylor’s Berlin adventure represents his finest achievement." Then the set promptly went out of print.

Thanks to Destination: OUT, the mp3 blog turned Bandcamp reissue-label, the whole set is now available as a high-quality, authorized download, complete with two additional discs of solo works Taylor recorded on the other side of the Iron Curtain in '88. The whole package is now titled The Complete Cecil Taylor in Berlin ’88, and while it’s an investment ($125 for over 14 hours of music), it’s the other iconic reissue event that makes 2015 a prime year for approaching Taylor.

The first disc in this set, Legba Crossing, presents the Cecil Taylor Workshop Ensemble, which the bandleader had time to instruct in his idiosyncratic compositional/rehearsal system. There are passages of collective squall here, but in its best moments, you can hear a sense of dawning discovery, as subsections of the group try out Taylor’s serpentine motifs and steadily gain control over them before individual players dare to contribute fluttering improvisations. The takeaway here is that, in contrast with his often lighting-fast pianist playing, Taylor the chamber-music composer has a taste for long, sustained tones, which might entice fans of drone artists like David First (who actually spent some time playing in one of Taylor’s early '70s groups).

The next five discs in the Berlin box are all piano-and-percussion duets (each with a different drummer). Here’s where you get several metric tons of Taylor at the piano. On these sets, Taylor is by turns raging and lyrical, though always confident. And the drummers bring out different aspects of his playing. He meets the shrapnel-distributing heaviness of Günter Sommer with similar intensity, on the box’s second disc (Riobec). On Regalia, the occasionally Latin-tinged work of Paul Lovens brings out an interesting restraint.

Another attraction of the Berlin box is the double-album Alms / Tiergarten (Spree), recorded by the Cecil Taylor European Orchestra. It’s a major addition to Taylor’s in-print catalog. Behaving less like an orchestra and more like a big band outfitted with famous names from Europe’s avant-garde improv scene (such as Peter Brötzmann and Evan Parker), the group is capable of high-energy blowouts. But like Taylor’s Workshop Ensemble, they play his quieter music with authority, too. Album number nine in this set, The Hearth, takes the cellist Tristan Honsinger and saxophonist Parker, both members of the European Orchestra, and places them in an instrumental trio setting that I don’t believe is duplicated anywhere else in Taylor’s discography.

The most divisive album from the original box set follows: Pleistozaen Mit Wasser, which pairs Taylor up with the late British scrape-guitar pioneer Derek Bailey. The first half-hour track features very little piano playing from Taylor: He starts out by accompanying Bailey’s free-improv plucks with poetry (and then various inside-the-piano rubbings). It’s not a disaster, but given the historic meeting between iconic experimenters, it feels underwhelming. Things improve on the second half-hour cut: a stretch of quietly metallic avant-garde music that avoids sounding like well-behaved children sorting the recycling. The richness of the piano (even with Taylor pedaling the mute) contrasts winningly with the dry sound that Bailey coaxes from his electric guitar.

The finale from the original box set, Erzulie Maketh Scent, is a solo marathon, broadly similar to other such Taylor records from the '70s onward. And the double-album bonus release, In East Berlin, is split between piano solos and another Taylor hookup with drummer Günter Sommer (who seems less intent on out-walloping Taylor, this time around). Neither East Berlin set trumps the highlights from the original West Berlin box, but hey—as long as you’re paying real money, they’re nice to have.

Speaking of consumer considerations, there is the inevitable question as to whether this box set, important as it is, makes for a "good place to start with Cecil." The answer is no. You should start with some early Taylor albums first, if only to get a clearer look at his connection to jazz’s past. (And if you elect to pick up Blue Note's new vinyl pressing of Unit Structures, you’ll find a compelling value-add, too, as Taylor’s original poetry has been reproduced on the back jacket.) Though once you've got some grounding in Taylor's core approach, be advised that there's still a full lifetime of music waiting to be discovered.