On November 4, 1973, pianist Cecil Taylor was booked to perform at New York's Town Hall. He planned to perform three free-jazz works accompanied by Jimmy Lyons (as) Sirone (b) and Andrew Cyrille (d). Sensing that Taylor's concert would be significant both as a work of music and because Taylor hadn't played in the city since the Newport Jazz Festival a year earlier, David Laura, Taylor's then manager, reached out to Fred Seibert, a Columbia University student. Back then, Fred had experience recording concerts for WKCR-FM, Columbia's radio station, and had produced blues albums on his Oblivion label. [Photo above of Cecil Taylor]
That afternoon, Fred set up borrowed recording gear, cables and microphones. Then the Cecil Taylor Unit arrived and proceeded to play Autumn/Parade, Spring of Two Blue J's (Part 1), a solo piano work, and Spring of Two Blue J's (Part 2). Part 1 ran just over 16 minutes while Part 2 lasted 22 minutes. As for Autumn/Parade, it ran 1 hour and 28 minutes, which may be among the single longest recorded works in jazz concert history. [Photo above of Fred Seibert]
Now, 49 years later, Fred has just released Cecil Taylor: The Complete, Legendary Live Return Concert (Oblivion). The full three-song set documents a hail storm of open-ended improvisation and a marathon of wailing and percussive piano playing. When the concert ended, the resulting tapes ran too long to release affordably on vinyl. Instead, a shorter offering was released that fit on a single 1974 LP called Spring of Two Blue J’s. Only 2,000 copies were printed. The full tracks waited patiently on the shelf for the digital age, when length was no longer a hurdle.
The quality of the music will depend on your patience and tolerance for abstraction. For those uninitiated to Taylor and free jazz, the new album will likely produce a splitting headache. As for the seasoned avant-garde listener, you will be treated to a thunderous tour inside the vibrating minds of artists turned loose to play whatever they felt at that moment in time. Taylor's music lacked a traditional beat, melody or harmony, but it still had energy and charm and reflected Black culture's turmoil in the early 1970s and drive to create its own language and form.
By 1973, free jazz was running short of an audience. The helter-skelter expression was a hard sell and had been eclipsed by the segmenting of pop music. FM radio was on the ascent in all communities and with it album rock of many stripes, soul, funk, electronic jazz fusion and adult contemporary jazz. Many jazz musicians had either joined the fusion movement, gone off to Europe and Asia to tour, taken teaching jobs in academia or a combination of the three. Taylor toured his music and taught at Antioch College, from 1969 to 1973.
In this regard, the music on this new set is a stark snapshot in time when free jazz was played by a small, tightly knit community suspended in limbo as other forms advanced around it. In Taylor's lashing performance, one hears artistic frustration, anger over social issues, and bitterness over America's narrowing and increasingly commercial culture that no longer had the patience for experimental music. In this regard, the music on this album is important as a historical document and an artistic expression. My only advice is to keep the volume low. I'm a seasoned listener and found the album most rewarding when my ear had to reach for the art rather than be overwhelmed by it.
Cecil Taylor died in 2018.
JazzWax tracks: You'll find Cecil Taylor: The Complete, Legendary Live Return Concert (Oblivion) here.
Because there are just three tracks, Amazon reads each as a 99-cent purchase. So for two hours of exciting, experimental music, the cost is $2.97.
You'll also find the album at Spotify.
JazzWax clips: Here's Taylor's solo piano on Spring of Two Blue-J's, Pt. 1...
Here's the Cecil Taylor Unit at the Châteauvallon Jazz Festival in August 1973, several months before the Town Hall concert...