Cecil Taylor

Cecil Taylor Unit

at Power Center, Ann Arbor, April 15

Eclipse Jazz closed out its first season on the UM campus in high style April 15th with a spectacular concert performance by the Cecil Taylor Unit, marking the brilliant pianist's first appearance in the area since the 1974 Blues & Jazz Festival (in Windsor) and his 1970 visit to the Ibo Cultural Center in Detroit. Outside of these two historic occasions local lovers of Cecil's all-out approach to the art of improvisational music have had to suffer unremitting silence, with only their old C.T. albums Unit Structures and Conquistador (Blue Note), Into the Hot (Impulse), Hard Driving Jazz and Love for Sale (United Artists), Spring of Two Blue-J's (Unit Core). Live at the Cafe Montmartre (Fantasy), Looking Ahead (Contemporary), The World of (Candid), the Jazz Composers Orchestra, and a few to offer relief from the less than thrilling work of most of his contemporaries.

To add to the excitement, Cecil brought a three-horn unit with him this time out, giving us the chance to hear his compositions ("unit structures") scored for alto and tenor saxophones, trumpet, piano and drums. Cecil's approach to the piano is so complete that a bassist is a luxury in his music.) Taylor's former students, David S. Ware on tenor (sounding very beautifully like a young Archie Shepp, with a fat. juicy tone and a penetrating thrust in solo), and Raphe Hakim on trumpet, added their hot attack to Jimmy Lyons' alto, a mainstay of Taylor's groups since 1961. Drummer Mark Edwards. another of ' Cecil's students, laid down a thrilling mosaic of rhythm and percussive melody throughout the two long, difficult sets, filling the huge musical space created by Sunny Murray and (for many years) Andrew Cyrille around the drum chair in Cecil's Units.

The music was taken from Cecil's score for Adrienne Kennedy's Rat's Mass, staged in Manhattan recently in an adaptation by Taylor himself. The first set offered a series of incredibly intense solos by Lyons, Malik, and Ware over Taylor's churning, whipping, dazzlingly brilliant piano attack, testing each player's intelligence and stamina to the limit and taking the breathless audience through what was probably the most grueling musical experience any of them had ever enjoyed.

Taylor's aesthetic is centered on total expression, the fullest possible articulation of human information which is both physical and spiritual in origin. The shape of the music is a direct extension of its emotional and intellectual content; it is always determined by the heat or calm of the moment of (group) creation, by the course or rush of feeling and thought which rises in the players while they are immersed in the energy of the time and place of the music. In other words, this is jazz of the highest possible order, a group improvisation which extends into as many directions as the musicians themselves are pointing that night- and when the players are as strong as Cecil's (the strongest!), they can take you to a lot of places you've never been, or even thought existed, Taylor himself is a creative artist of the highest order, an uncompromising vanguard musician who has been refining and extending; his incredible conception since it emerged in its mature form fifteen years ago ("Bulbs," "Mixed," "Pots"-all on Into the Hot, Impulse AS-10). His determination to perform and record under his own stringent terms has kept him from enjoying a rewarding public career, or even a stable recording situation. He releases a new record every few years now, content to practice his art to perfection rather than accommodate the commercial exigencies of the music industry. Arista Records has recently reissued two classic Taylor albums, recorded live at the Cafe Montmartre in Copenhagen in 1962, and a solo piano album from 1974, but at this writing, the master has no plans to release his current music on record at all.

After a very necessary intermission, the Cecil Taylor Unit returned to the Power Center stage for the second half of the concert, which led off with a reflective piece developed through a series of piano/ horn/drums duets and trios, to exceptional effect. They took it out with a long. relentlessly intense ensemble improvisation, driven mercilessly by Taylor's piano, and finally left the audience to pick itself up " off the floor and stagger home. More power to Eclipse Jazz for this inspirational event, and let's not wait too long to bring Cecil back to town!