| Excerpt from the booklet:
(...) CECIL TAYLOR spoke of the ´vocal sound´ of the piano. "Letting the group sing" when playing together was something he once learned from Duke Ellington. For TAYLOR, the soloist, music always means complete involvement, an involvement which demands both physical energy and the use of the voice. The recording of this concert presents the instrumental and the vocal in a condensed form and thus intensifies their effect.
A new dimension is created by the introduction of pre-recordings of TAYLOR´s voice and the sparing use of percussion. CECIL TAYLOR once said that above all he had always endeavoured to be a poet - a poet on the piano, and a poet in thought, feeling and expression. Although recordings of TAYLOR´s poetry - which he calls ´music in print´ - do exist, his real medium seems to be situative or oral communication. In this he follows the Afro-Indian-American tradition. Even if his music seems to be refined to the extreme, and is heard in the context of the contemporary avant-garde, one cannot deny that something in it echoes the heritage of oral cultures, something which seems to be related to the African griots or Indian story-tellers. (...)
After the concert in the Bechstein House in Berlin I wrote: He runs out, almost cowering, whilst the applause still thunders. He played much longer than was intended. (...) He has given himself body and soul. (…) Everything has been said. (...) |
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