Spend Black Friday With Cecil Taylor!
Live In Bologna & Live In Vienna available digitally at full length for the first time
As longtime readers of this newsletter know, Burning Ambulance is also a record label, Burning Ambulance Music. And one of Burning Ambulance Music’s ongoing projects is the reissuing of the Leo Records catalog on Bandcamp. We’ve been putting out 20 titles per month since the middle of the year, with the next batch due out Friday, December 6. But I want to tell you about two of those titles in particular, so you can pre-order them now. I will do so with an excerpt from my book In the Brewing Luminous: The Life & Music of Cecil Taylor, which is available now from Amazon, directly from the publisher, and many other places.
[Alto saxophonist] Jimmy Lyons died on May 19, 1986. On May 28, a memorial service was held at Saint Peter’s Church on 54th Street and Lexington Avenue. A variety of former bandmates and friends performed, including Taylor, Andrew Cyrille, Sunny Murray, Jemeel Moondoc, Denis Charles, Raphé Malik, Joseph Jarman, William Parker (with his wife Patricia Parker dancing), Rashid and Brenda Bakr, saxophonist Marco Eneidi, pianist Michelle Rosewoman, and singer Ellen Christi. Taylor’s longtime friend Jeanne Phillips, journalist and sociologist Joan Thornell, and poet Thulani Davis (then married to Jarman) all offered tributes.
Taylor attempted to keep moving forward without his longtime partner. In June 1986, he brought a new alto saxophonist, Carlos Ward, into the band. Born in Panama, Ward moved to Seattle as a teenager. He joined the military and was stationed in Germany, where he played with trombonist Albert Mangelsdorff and vibraphonist Karl Berger, and met Eric Dolphy and Don Cherry. Upon returning to Seattle in 1965, he got the opportunity to sit in with John Coltrane’s band at the club the Penthouse; on the 2021 recording A Love Supreme: Live In Seattle, he can be heard soloing. He moved to New York, where he played with Coltrane again and became a member of the Jazz Composers Orchestra, appearing on several of their albums.
The incarnation of the Cecil Taylor Unit with Ward, Frank Wright, Ken McIntyre, Parker and Steve McCall played for a week in mid-June at Carlos I, a restaurant and cabaret located on Sixth Avenue and Ninth Street. At the end of the year, Taylor would return to Carlos I for another week-long engagement, this time with Ward, Karen Borca, Parker, Thurman Barker, and drummer Freddie Waits; that same Unit would play there for a third and final time in March 1987.
In October 1987, Taylor put together a group featuring violinist Leroy Jenkins, Parker on bass, and Barker switching between drums and marimba. For the group’s first few concerts on the West Coast, Ward was listed as a member but was not present. But when the group traveled to Europe in late October, he was back in the band. They played at least eight shows in Germany, France, Italy (twice), Austria (twice), the Netherlands, and Belgium. The performances in Bologna, Vienna, and Paris were recorded for the albums Live In Bologna, Live In Vienna, and Tzotzil Mummers Tzotzil, all released on the Leo label.
The Bologna and Vienna performances ran to approximately 90 minutes each in their original double LP incarnations, but were shaved down to 70 minutes when reissued on CD. Live In Bologna starts as though someone’s fired a pistol, and barrels along at full strength for a half hour, Taylor and Jenkins and Ward all battling for the spotlight. But then the music breaks down midway through Side Two of the LP version. Taylor begins playing inside the piano and striking clanging, atonal chords; Barker takes up the marimba, and other members of the group are pounding on various objects and either singing or chanting.
When the music shifts into its next mode, it’s a mournful sort of chamber ballad, with Jenkins’ violin taking the lead and Taylor and Barker filling in the landscape behind him. Parker’s prominent in the mix but is never the most interesting aspect of the music, and Ward — who switches between alto sax and flute — is maybe the most R&B-oriented player in any Taylor ensemble. His broad honks and speedy flourishes are exciting, but out of place. One is reminded of a possibly apocryphal story of Dave Liebman, saxophonist in Miles Davis’s early ’70s septet, asking the boss why he was there and being told that audiences liked to see saxophonists’ fingers move. The group is at its best when playing as a chamber ensemble: Taylor, Jenkins, Parker, and Barker on marimba. Live In Bologna was released in 1988; it topped year-end polls in The Wire and the Guardian and placed fifth on the DownBeat critics’ list.
Live In Vienna was recorded four days later, on November 7, but wasn’t issued until 1991. It’s a more dreamlike and abstract album, beginning with several minutes of poetry that could have been overdubbed; some voices are extremely close to the microphone, but Taylor is far away, growling and purring. When the music gets rolling, Barker and Jenkins dominate once again, with the percussionist adding church bells to his arsenal to punctuate the music in dramatic fashion. Ward attempts the occasional interjection, but seems to recognize his own superfluity.
So as you might have inferred, I have arranged for the complete Live In Bologna and Live In Vienna to be part of the Leo Records digital reissue program. We used the best available copies of the original double LPs as source material, and had help from Jonathan Horwich of International Phonograph and Ken Christianson at Pro Musica Audio in Chicago, who digitized the tracks. And we have added the edited CD versions of each to the packages as a bonus.
Here are sample tracks from each release:
Live In Bologna, Part A:
Live In Vienna, Part A:
This was a really fascinating band — Taylor’s final attempt to recapture, or at least honor, what he’d had with Jimmy Lyons for more than 20 years. After this, he would never again lead a band with a full-time saxophonist; it would be solo performance, duos (with guitarists, violinists, drummers), trios, the occasional one-off quartet, and when there was money, a large ensemble. But in many ways the Cecil Taylor Unit of 1987 represented the end of a particular line. More of their work can be heard on Tzotzil Mummers Tzotzil, which is also available on Bandcamp now.
That’s it for now. See you next week, when I will share a list of 50 great jazz albums that turned 50 this year.