Classic Recordings, The World of Cecil Taylor

The World of Cecil Taylor captures the pianist in 1960, at the point where he stood on the precipice, well into the process of shedding his mainstream jazz skin and metamorphosing into the forbidding avant-garde behemoth we know and love today. What makes this particular album so fascinating is that we can actually hear the sound of bebop being stretched and ripped apart from inside, as if it’s the one of the Incredible Hulk’s unfortunate t-shirts. Opening cut Air immediately announces this will be even more advanced than the previous year’s Love for Sale, as drummer Denis Charles beats out a war dance for a few bars, then stops abruptly for Taylor to hammer out some dissonant chords. Archie Shepp then takes the first solo, making a decent fist of appearing to look like he fully knows what’s going on, propelled along by Charles’s relatively orthodox rhythms (especially if compared to Sunny Murray’s resolutely un-swinging contributions to Taylor’s music just a couple of years later). Once Taylor jumps into the fray Shepp’s relative inexperience becomes apparent (he was only 23): starting off with some trills, Taylor’s solo gathers momentum – first building up kinetic energy from the interplay between what his left and right hand are doing separately, then peeling of unison runs with both at ridiculous speed. All is not chaos however, with a bedrock of identifiable melodic units and harmonic shifts - just don’t ask me to elucidate further as to what’s going on. But neither is the end result difficult to listen to – at its best Taylor’s music is an exhilarating experience, and The World of… still makes sense as a satisfying jazz album, aided in no small part by Buell Neidlinger’s bass which keeps things tethered to a familiar harmonic framework. And lest you should think it all sounds too manic, try the following track, the standard This Nearly Was Mine, on which Taylor’s more romantic side is the focus.

Taylor famously once said that his approach to the piano was to view it as ‘eighty-eight tuned drums’, which is exactly what we get here, especially as we progress further into the record on E.B., a lightning-paced taste of the Taylor to come, all clangorous cluster chords and hyperactive runs where he treats the keyboard like the abstract Expressionists were treating paint and canvas at exactly the same time in New York. It’s terrific fun, honest!

Here are some other Cecil Taylor records I can recommend...