  |
|
|
 |
|
CD |
| 5.169 Ft
|
|
| 1. | Luyah! The Glorious Step
|
| 2. | African Violets
|
| 3. | Of What
|
| 4. | Wallering
|
| 5. | Toll
|
| 6. | Excursion on a Wobbly Rail
|
Jazz
Recorded at Nola's Penthouse Studios, New York, New York on June 9, 1958
Digitally remastered by Phil De Lancie (1990, Fantasy Studios, Berkeley, California)
Cecil Taylor - Piano
Buell Neidlinger - Bass
Denis Charles - Drums
Earl Griffith - Vibraphone
In June of 1958, Cecil Taylor was well into his transition from eccentric square peg in mainstream jazz to visionary of post-bop free music. That was the summer that he was to cause shock, consternation, and intrigued curiosity among various segments of the audience of the Newport Jazz Festival. He was beginning to be acknowledged as a developer of something new in jazz and, like all innovators, was being received enthusiastically by a few, warily by some, and not at all by most musicians, listeners, and critics. These pieces from his late early period are compact, accessible, and rhythmic in the sense of conventional swing. They owe a good deal to Taylor's love of Duke Ellington and Fats Waller. But the guideposts to a freer jazz of the future are clearly heard.
LOOKING AHEAD is pianist Cecil Taylor's second studio album. It was recorded in 1958, when Taylor was already a controversial figure on the jazz scene. His first album, the brilliant JAZZ ADVANCE, was released in 1956 and introduced alto saxophonist Steve Lacy. On this recording, it is Earl Griffith (vibraphone) who makes the fourth member of a quartet that includes Taylor, Dennis Charles (drums) and Buell Neidlinger (bass).
JAZZ ADVANCE had its roots in Monk and Ellington, and Taylor strained against those influences. Here, all the compositions are his own, and his playing is less referential, more aggressive. Charles and Neidlinger are forced to play more on top of the beat. Earl Griffith's clean, clear tone lends the recording an austere quality, but his composition "African Violets" is lush, deeply melancholy. Cecil plays a solo that contains radical holes, creating pure, activated spaces. Dennis Charles uses those spaces to shape his drum solo, and it sounds like he's accompanying the air. "Toll" is in 3 parts, and the two written sections introduce many of the elemental riffs that Taylor would develop over the next 35 years. Although clearly transitional, it is nevertheless an exciting album.
* Lewis Merritt - Engineer
* Nat Hentoff - Liner Notes
* Tommy Nola - Engineer
One of Cecil Taylor's earliest recordings, Looking Ahead! does just that while still keeping several toes in the tradition. It's an amazing document of a talent fairly straining at the reins, a meteor about to burst onto the jazz scene and render it forever changed. With Earl Griffith on vibes, Taylor uses an instrumentation he would return to occasionally much later on, one that lends an extra percussive layer to the session, emphasizing the new rhythmic attacks he was experimenting with. Griffith sounds as though he might have been a conceptual step or two behind the other three but, in the context of the time, this may have served to make the music a shade more palatable to contemporary tastes. But the seeds are clearly planted and one can hear direct hints of Taylor's music to come, all the way to 1962 at least (the Nefertiti trio with Sunny Murray). Pieces like "Luyah! The Glorious Step" and "Of What" are so fragmented (in a traditional sense) and so bristlingly alive that one can understand Whitney Baillett's observation of crowds at a Taylor concert fidgeting "as if the ground beneath had suddenly become unbearably hot." The contributions of bassist Buell Neidlinger and drummer Dennis Charles cannot be understated; they breathe with Taylor as one unit and appear to be utterly in sync with his ideas. When the pianist edges into his solo on "Excursion on a Wobbly Rail," it's as though he's meeting the tradition head on, shaking hands and then rocketing off into the future. Looking Ahead! is a vital recording from the nascence of one of the towering geniuses of modern music and belongs in any jazz fan's collection.
---Brian Olewnick, All Music Guide |
|
CD bolt, zenei DVD, SACD, BLU-RAY lemez vásárlás és rendelés - Klasszikus zenei CD-k és DVD-különlegességek |  | | Webdesign - Forfour Design |
|
|
