CECIL TAYLOR “Fragments: The Complete 1969 Salle Pleyel Concerts”

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ARTIST

Cecil Taylor

ALBUM TITLE

“Fragments. The Complete 1969 Salle Pleyel Concerts”

LABEL

Elemental

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Taylor‘s quartet with Rivers, Lyons and Cyrille has been enshrined in jazz history for 56 years now, ever since the recording of the 29 July 1969 concert at the Fondation Maeght was released across three separate LPs in 1971. It was a turbulent, shimmering immersion into a universe that took the sacred creed of free jazz to its ultimate consequences: by no means an isolated episode, of course, but certainly one of the fullest, most emblematic and most radical of its kind. A less-than-impeccable recording inevitably conveyed the experience far more imperfectly than it must have been perceived by those who found themselves engulfed, in sight and sound, by that veritable cascade of incandescent lava.

Today, thanks to the commendable efforts of Elemental and Zev Feldman, that undisputed landmark – quite apart from other recordings that have circulated more or less clandestinely – has found its twin: two hours and twenty minutes of equally turbulent, uninhibited music, spread across just three tracks in the finest Cecil tradition. The music comes from another concert on French soil, given as part of the eighth Paris Jazz Festival just over three months later, and is now available as a double CD or triple LP. Everything has been transferred from the original analogue tapes preserved by INA and mastered by Matthew Lutthans at the Mastering Lab on Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles.

The resulting sound quality is undoubtedly superior to that of the St Paul de Vence concert, although there are still occasional descents into the depths in terms of volume and consequent sonic presence, particularly in some of the numerous extended sections in which Taylor engages in dialogue either with himself or with Cyrille alone. None of this, however, detracts in any way from the significance of this new chapter in the history of a group whose existence was all too brief and sporadic – and we know only too well how dramatically Sam Rivers’ star would rise just a few years later – especially in those passages where the two horn players join the fray, together or separately.

The final result is, after all, easy enough to imagine: a cascade of notes charged with white-hot energy, but not only that – even if Taylor’s occasional retreats into an almost lyrical vein, which would surprise us a few years later, were still to come. Open structures and seething sequences make for a renewed immersion that, today more than ever, will surely be welcomed by those who have found both their musical education and their identity in these hidden recesses of African American sound.

Alberto Bazzurro

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elemental-music.com

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