18 February 2008

Cecil Taylor - Garden


There was a request for this one a little while ago, so I thought I'd dip into my Cecil Taylor archives to see if I could find it. Sure enough, there it was.

I haven't had a chance to listen through it all carefully, so for an assessment, here is the entry in the All Music guide:

Recorded in 1981, the original double-LP release of Garden provided non-European followers of Cecil Taylor their first glimpse at two very distinct changes. Given that he was using a Bösendorfer grand piano, the sound quality of his recordings improved greatly; it was finally possible to hear the fickle sonances and subtle timbres his lightning clusters produced. Secondly, his deeply percussive style was opening to other influences. The first volume opened — as do all of his solo performances now — with vocal extemporization and poetry, and on into the slowly evolving gradually revealing performance itself. On the second disc there is nothing but meat. Taylor is in full heat, flailing, banging, slashing out chords and high register trills with studied abandon and a careful attention to detail. Here is where Taylor shows his secret persona: the dancer. Rooted in blues and barrelhouse in some spots and in gagaku and kabuki theater in others, while in still others the classical ballet, Taylor's playing style opens itself to embrace all of the above and spit them back out as part of his own musical iconography. Because whether it's the Jelly Roll Morton blues stomp in the secret heart of "Stepping on Stars," traversed by Merce Cunningham's defiance of gravity or Min Tanaka's influenced movement of rearranging space and time, or in the Ellingtonin transmuted swing of "Driver Says," where Baryshnikov's movements through Balanchine (literally) informs the stride work along the middle register, it's all clearly part of Taylor's idiomatic manner of creating language from the air. And that language — if you've ever seen him play — includes physical movement. That he can translate it so effortlessly here — as its freshness and newness envelope him — is a profound change, if not in direction (since his restlessness is legendary), then in approach. This is a new music by Cecil Taylor, one that invites listeners in and gives them room to move around. This mature phase of Taylor's music is still blooming almost 20 years later, and continues to influence, inspire, and provoke. Garden Pt. 1 and Pt. 2 is the post-'70s Cecil solo date to have.

Both the album and cd appear to be out of print as far as I can see.

15 comments:

kinabalu said...

Cecil Taylor - Garden - as a VBR mp3 download.

Available from here:

http://www.divshare.com/download/
3801614-378

Unknown said...

I came upon this list in Divshare not long ago these are great posts took a couple of days but a good bunch of stuff I will try in the next week or so to try this uploading again ,I have some Derek Bailey and Brotzmann not to mention a few others you guys might get a little excited about ,I will leave a the url in a comment ,I don't know how to make rapid share work so I will try it this way please do give me a credit for it Steve

1009 said...

thanks! i heard some of this on d:o (i think?) & i'm excited to hear the whole thing.

Anonymous said...

WOW, i never thought i'd find you church#9 folks again! i lost internet access over the summer, and once i got back everything was over. i was the homie who seshed the cooper-moore and brotzmann trio stuff oh so long ago. i am very excited to see the beauty continuing to unfold, and much thanks for this hard to find cecil.

Tantris said...

This is sublime - I can't believe that it is out of print.

John V said...

kinabalu-thanks so much for this.just staggering....

John V.

Anonymous said...

As a big Cecil nut and long-time owner of this album, let me say that you're doing a very, very nice thing here.

All that said -- contra the review, I think For Olim is the album for the 1980s. For anyone who likes this, it would be a nice pick-up. It's terrific in part because the ideas are self-contained, short, and exploded to the maximum.

david_grundy said...

excellent. solo cecil. or should that be, excellent solo cecil? Either way, thanks for posting. Weird cover art, however.

Anonymous said...

Thanks very much. I've been looking for this for ages.

Anonymous said...

Thank you very much for this, it's a pretty rare find in my neck of the woods!

Jazz-Nekko said...

i do not know 'a neck of the woods' from a 'down the block' but this is readily available in my area.

in fact, i just picked up a sealed version for aprox. 70 cents! this will save my vinyl for the future,

jn

Anonymous said...

any chance of this being re-upped to a different host? divshare says the uploader's limit has been reached. in return, i'd be happy to share "indent", a 1973 solo recording.

Jazzrealities said...

I still remember this cold night in Basel. We all met there - coming from the Black Forest - to see and hear him and to witness the first digital live recording of Werner Uehlinger's Hat Hat label. Only few people filled the first two rows of a big hall. Cecil played with fire and heated us up down to our toes.
jazzrealities

Anonymous said...

here is a mirror for when the divshare is inaccessible
http://rapidshare.com/files/395631978/ctgard.rar.html

bongomccongo said...

thanks, i finally am getting into cecil