Respiration by Cecil Taylor

Cecil Taylor Warsaw 1968: Street Maps and Barricades
… a velocity, a complexity and an elegance borne of great pressure, light and focus, early childhood travelling in time to Duke's "Daybreak Express", then the light rapid transit of Teddy Wilson or Tatum, in teens introduced to Charlie Parker and Bartok’s cadenzas, perhaps the flocking notes of Messiaen too …
… the ecstasy of the moment of revolt: however long the deliberations, however difficult the ensuing struggle, the moment of revolt is ecstatic, and in the great revolutionary art, that moment is sustained beyond expectation, beyond all reason, time transformed into bliss; in his solo music, a rite both sacred and anarchic, Cecil Taylor found not just that moment but made it an intervention, an act of complete attention, rhythms massing within time itself (and themselves), yet finding that ground in an ecstatic period of time outside of time--eternity a unit of time bounded by no time...clocks inside time, clocks outside time, and alarm clocks, too…that moment of revolt stretched to time itself…
… evolving in an American insistence on growing freedom … from Detroit 1943 to the white riots of 1954, the burning cities of 1967 … then resonating globally … 1968, Poland, Czechoslovakia, France, America … a calendar of cities, Warsaw March, Prague Spring, Paris May, Chicago August, smoke bombs, napalm, machine gun fire, troops everywhere assaulting ceremonies of freedom ... concentration camps in parks and streets, a global stretch … all making perfect sense of the European solo concerts … no spaces between notes, the former note the articulation of the present note the articulation of the next … a new rate of attentiveness to time and events simultaneous … the pan-cultural protest …
… this strange and revolutionary moment is at once collective and individual, a liberation of collective possibility and individual genius…black and white keys exploding like every black word of newsprint and every white interval between, oceanic wave of messages a particulate ecstasy…
… within just a few months or years the primary mechanics of the great solo discourses of free improvisation would arise … Anthony Braxton, Evan Parker, Derek Bailey … suggesting Taylor’s wizardry of breadth and depth and velocity, first achieved on the traditional solo voice of the western tradition from Bach to “Bud on Bach” (adding the analogous elegance of a compound-complex Coltrane cadenza), requiring a corresponding methodological response and universe from every instrument … as if Taylor in these hours of instants is improvising the world…the authentic individual as collective…
Stuart Broomer, April 2022

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