Cecil Taylor Unit- Live at the Kimo Theater Albuquerque 1979 (Black Editions Archive, 2026) *****

By Stuart Broomer

There’s nothing so startling as the appearance of a vintage concert tape, in this case some 47 years old, that might illumine your view of a musician’s oeuvre, even a slight shift in focus counting for much. Such is the case with the release of Cecil Taylor’s performance from a New Mexico concert in 1979. Part of the concert was lost, but on the evidence heard here, Taylor was at the helm of one of the finest groups he would ever lead, a relatively unusual quintet that consisted of alto saxophonist Jimmy Lyons (with Andrew Cyrille, one of Taylor’s greatest collaborators), drummer Jerome Cooper and two string players, the violinist Ramsay Ameen and Alan Silva, here playing cello as well as his usual bass.

Among extant releases, the two-LP set bears some resemblance, at least in personnel, to It Is in the Brewing Luminous, recorded in 1980 at New York’s Fat Tuesday’s, which had the additional inclusion of drummer Sunny Murray in the band and Alan Silva playing bass, exclusively. His cello playing here is an essential element, especially for the way in which it combines with Ameen’s violin. In a sense, the Albuquerque quintet is a larger band than the New York sextet, in terms of what the opening up of the soundscape makes possible.

Perhaps the most notable thing about the Albuquerque recording is the level of subtle and evolving detail achieved by the quintet and its capture in the extraordinary recording job done by Mike Wolff, who was regularly responsible for recording the New Mexico Symphony Orchestra. The University of New Mexico’s Steinway was also borrowed for the performance, giving Taylor a piano appropriate to his special energies. The unusual clarity with which Ameen is heard here gives the performance some of its special significance, particularly in the way that his contribution combines with Silva’s cello in a virtual string section. Jerome Cooper, too, is less polyrhythmic, less aggressive than his predecessor, Andrew Cyrille, who had been the perfect complement in the trio with Taylor and Lyons.

What is highlighted here is the omni-directionality of Taylor’s music, from his thorough absorption of Western “classical” music as well as the jazz tradition and the general legacy of African music in America. Here those elements are present both individually and in Taylor’s special syntheses, those combined and foregrounded strings every bit as African as they are European.

Side C is given over to one of Taylor’s trance rituals, a summoning of spirits -- equivalent perhaps to speaking in tongues -- inspired and unknowable language accompanied by incidental phrases from the instruments, random sounds and Taylor’s piano musings, now enacted directly on the instrument’s strings, all an essential component of the complexity and mystery of Taylor’s far-reaching art.

The music that continues on side D is particularly spacious, opening up with Cooper’s spare percussion and the lyrical motifs of Ameen, Lyons and Taylor, evolving and flowering, still spacious yet dense with high speed content – some of Taylor’s most brilliant moments on record, the other instruments lifted skyward, until it concludes with Taylor’s gravelly equivalent of speaking in tongues, the very practice akin to the untranslatability of Taylor’s complex, contrapuntal, poly-vocal band music and the extrapolating lines and abstract organizing figures with which he guides the music from his piano keyboard.

Live at the KiMo Theater is a special event, reasserting an especially creative and relatively neglected period in Taylor’s career. 

Live at the KiMo Theater will be released on October 16th, but you can listen and pre-order now.