Nature neither ages nor stays the same, it recycles and thus re-identifies itself perpetually,and we continually experience it from a new perspective. Likewise with Art; therefore it’simpossible not to hear the music of Cecil Taylor – akin to a force of Nature – with different ears 34 years on. Similarities may be recognized, a few details confirmed, but the response must embrace meaningful change, or the music, and the recipient, are not alive, cavorting in the same time/ space sensibility. The garden that is re-invigorated and re-defined does not die. Taylor’s choice of the garden to represent this 1981 performance has its roots in his longstanding belief that creativity is the ever-present condition of Nature (in our case, Life), and that his music in particular grew (and continues to grow) out of a personal engagement with the blues – a music, metaphorically, of the soil, grounded in the legacy of African Americans – and specifically an awareness of the innovative transformational powers of Duke Ellington. As he explained in the 1960s to A.B. Spellman (Black Music: Four Lives, Schocken Books), “He could play a blues, but man, the way the thing was laid out it transcended the single idea of the blues. I’m still trying to come to grips with that, you know.” – Art Lange
