Cecil Taylor Unit - Live At Fat Tuesdays, February 9, 1980

The Free Jazz Collective 100

By Don Phipps

There was nothing like a Cecil Taylor concert. As someone who saw him play in multiple contexts at multiple stages of his life in multiple venues, I always left the concert feeling I had heard something special, something extra, something beyond. To say that this album deserves five stars is underrating the album – if it made any sense, I would give it ten stars and call it a day. That said, Cecil Taylor Unit - Live At Fat Tuesdays, stands with his best recorded ensemble work – right up there with Dark to Themselves (1976), Nefertiti, the Beautiful One Has Come – Live at the Café Montmartre (1975), and One Too Salty Swift and Not Goodbye (recorded in 1978 and released in 1980). And one would be remiss not to mention the incredible work he did with his Feel Trio at Ronny Scott’s in London in 1990, captured beautifully on the 10-disc 2 Ts for a lovely T box set.

There is a reason I am choosing to write this review in the first person. Why? I saw him and the Unit play live at the Modern Theater in Boston on April 7, 1979. In this concert, the Unit was comprised of, Cecil, Jimmy Lyons (alto sax), Ramsey Ameen (violin), and Ken Tyler (drums). On “Salty Swift,” recorded in Stuttgart in June of 1978, the unit was comprised of Cecil, Lyons, Ameen, plus Raphe Malik (trumpet), Sirone (bass) and Ronald Shannon Jackson (drums). On this album, Live At Fat Tuesday’s, the concert took place on February 9, 1980, and the unit was comprised of Cecil, Lyons, Ameen, Alan Silva (bass and cello), Jerome Cooper (drums and balaphone), and Sonny Murray (drums). One may wonder why the revolving chairs in the rhythm section beneath a consistent nucleus of Cecily, Lyons, and Ameen? [And as a side note, during this period, Cecil played the White House in 1978, with President Jimmy Carter in attendance].

As an artist, Cecil never coddled his audience. One wonders what he was like as a student at the New England Conservatory of Music, where he attended from 1947-51. Some suggest the influence of Olivier Messiaen, as it is known that Messiaen visited the conservatory while Cecil was a student there. Cecil himself admitted that he sought to blend mid-20th-century classical music - “the energies of the European composers, their technique” as Cecil put it in Joe Goldberg’s Jazz Masters of the Fifties - with the “traditional music of the American Negro….” The goal for Cecil was to create a “new energy.” And one wonders how, in the sixties, when he was relegated to washing dishes to earn his keep rather than compromise his musical vision, the shape of his music changed – the eternal restlessness that comes with rebellion against orthodoxy?

All of this is manifest of course in the period of this recording. Visually, Cecil was always a work of art in progress. Cecil was not a large man and yet he covered the piano from stem to stern. In my review of his Modern Theater performance, published in the Boston University Daily Free Press in 1979 back in my student days, I wrote the following:

“The legendary jazz pianist explored the universe of the Steinway Model B, all 88 keys, with a vengeance. His hands moved like lightning across the board, up and down, splash, down and up. If his hands were stationary, the fingers continued to bounce. Cecil’s second and third fingers, extremely powerful, plied the inner voicings with authority…. Taylor felt little need to restrict his technique along classical boundaries. His elbows, wrists, palms all found use. At times, Cecil would growl all over the bottom of the keys; at other times, he would prattle incessantly atop the higher registers, providing sharp contrast.”

When thinking of great descriptions of Cecil’s playing, one need only look at Nat Hentoff’s liner notes on “Nefertiti.” In the liner, he discusses The New Yorker jazz critic Whitney Balliett’s review of Cecil’s performance at the Great South Bay Jazz Festival in 1958. Hentoff paraphrases Balliett – “Always there was a nucleus of listeners who were utterly absorbed – almost mesmerized – by Cecil’s music. As for the rest, to quote Balliet, they ‘fidgeted, whispered, and wandered nervously in and out of the tent, as if the ground beneath had suddenly become unbearably hot.’” Hentoff concludes – “So fiercely – and sometimes tenderly – alive is Cecil’s music that even bland people cannot react to it blandly.”

Exactly. And those who choose to engage with this album will find it “utterly absorbing.” Cecil is a force here – prime time, locked and loaded, ground control to Major Tom. From lightning runs to syncopated pauses, from bluesy abstractions to high powered keyboard racing, Cecil’s left-hand pounds the piano’s lower registers as his right-hand whistles along like a speeding bullet. There is a grand rotation to his improvisations, as the spontaneous compositions roll like a giant Ferris wheel off its moorings. When combined with Jimmy Lyon’s hot alto exhortations, one feels like a passenger in a Lamborghini speeding along the winding curves of the Amalfi Coast.

Nothing is simple or easy about Cecil’s playing. Down low to up high – and then back again - each finger lands precisely on the keyboard – a technique that is as complex as it is delicate. When Cecil goes solo on Set 2, one can feel aggression and rambunctious intensity – and then suddenly an interlude with elements of Bach and blues. No matter where his fingers land - the resulting notes and use of the pedal resolve in an overarching theme. As vigorous as Cecil’s playing is, a careful listen will detect an architecture to his method – not formalism per se – but a grand conception, nevertheless.

The rest of the Unit enters and exits the music at various times. Lyons on alto leaps in early (my apologies to Lester Young). Lyon’s relationship with Cecil began in 1961 and at the time of this recording, it was already 19 years in the making. In a Unit concert, Lyon’s blurts and wails are always a welcome development. There is a sting to his phrases –like a hot fire that sizzles and pops, except this fire is made up of blazing notes and forceful blowing. Ameen and Silva are also present – though Silva’s contributions are muddy (live recordings of bass playing were still a work in progress at this time). Still one can hear him bowing the bass in long single note arcs on Set 2 – a perfect response to the busy fingerings of Taylor’s keyboard. Ameen adds to the mix, keeping things lively with an almost electric violin sound, and playing abstract double, triple, and quadruple stops atop the musical mayhem. Cooper (left channel?) uses the cymbals to significant effect while Murray (right channel?) bounces his sticks on the tom-toms. The two drummers never walk on each other and at times they combine to create effervescent sheets of sound.

If popcorn popping, ballet dancer leaping, jet streaking, wave breaking music is your thing, Cecil Taylor Unit – Live At Fat Tuesdays is a must. More than just a historical artifact, the music presented herein is a living organism – a here and now – and raw evidence of a wonderfully dynamic soul who once walked the earth. I miss him.