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Cecil Taylor: Flashing Spirits
by Jack Kenny
Jazz never did know how to deal with Cecil Taylor. Does it now? Here is a session from Burning Ambulance from the Outside In Festival in Crawley Sussex recorded on 3rd September 1988. Cecil Taylor was fresh from his sojourn in Berlin where he created an important series of recordings and started working with Tony Oxley, a relationship that proved to be pivotal for both men. The album is issued in conjunction with Leo Feigin who ...
Continue ReadingCecil Taylor: Flashing Spirits
by James Taylor
There is a gift that keeps on giving nature to jazz music. Whether unearthing previously unknown archival recordings or niche labels getting long overdue vinyl re-pressings, fans of the genre have no shortage of new-to-us releases hitting the market every year. Such is the case with Flashing Spirits, the latest release documenting the prolific partnership of pianist Cecil Taylor and drummer Tony Oxley. Captured live at the 1988 Outside in Festival in Crawley, England, the performance consists of ...
Continue ReadingTony Oxley: Unreleased 1974 - 2016
by Chris May
The British drummer and bandleader Tony Oxley passed in 2023, aged 85, after a career which began in the mid 1960s as the drummer in the house band at Ronnie Scott's club. From this prestigious but relatively codified platform, Oxley soon steered into less travelled waters. In 1969 he was in the quartet which recorded John McLaughlin's debut album, Extrapolation (Polydor). In the early 1970s, he began adding ring modulators, tone generators and other fx tools to his assemblage of ...
Continue ReadingTony Oxley Quintet: Angular Apron
by Chris May
Among the most welcome jazz events of 2024 is the return to active duty of the great British saxophonist Larry Stabbins following an absence of over a decade. Stabbins went into voluntary exile in 2013, after around thirty-five years at the deep end of British jazz. Disenchanted with the culturally regressive direction in which the music and its ecology seemed to be heading, he even went so far as selling his tenor. But things change, and towards the end of ...
Continue ReadingRemembering Tony Oxley: Combination
by Ian Patterson
The sad news of the passing of free-spirited English drummer/percussionist Tony Oxley on December 26, 2023, is tempered by the knowledge that his was a life well lived, and his musical legacy a lasting one. As a member of Ronnie Scott's house band in the latter half of the 1960s, Yorkshireman Oxley played with some of the greats of American jazz, and in later decades he would forge a notable musical partnership with Cecil Taylor that bequeathed a dozen live ...
Continue ReadingA Supreme Love
by Duncan Heining
Alan Skidmore is one of the finest saxophonists to come out of the United Kingdom, Europe or indeed anywhere. In fact, it was hearing Skidmore's tenor solo on “Have You Heard?" from John Mayall's Bluesbreakers with Eric Clapton (Decca, 1966) that encouraged a young Michael Brecker to take up the instrument. Skidmore had also served his apprenticeship with blues singer Alexis Kornerin the sixties and by the end of the decade was equally well-versed in the blues and in the ...
Continue ReadingCecil Taylor & Tony Oxley: ...Being Astral And All Registers - Power Of Two...
by Karl Ackermann
The late free jazz icon Cecil Taylor was thought to have only recorded two duo albums in his career. One was Embraced (Pablo, 1977) with Mary Lou Williams, the other, Historic Concerts (Soul Note, 1984) with Max Roach. Both were underwhelming mismatches, with Taylor overpowering his partners. In 2020, drummer Tony Oxley found two live Taylor-Oxley recordings in his personal archives, housed in a basement in Germany. Birdland, Neuburg (Fundacja Słuchaj!, 2020) was released in the Spring of that year, ...
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