Cecil Taylor Unit: Live At Fat Tuesday's February 9,1980 First Visit

More faux-intellectual codswallop has been written about Cecil Taylor than about any other jazz musician, dead or alive. He has been, and continues to be, misrepresented as an arcane Einsteinian theorist by a cult whose members are afraid of visceral reactions to his art (or to anyone else's). But Taylor's work demands a visceral response. It has nothing to do with rational thought and everything to do with emotion and physicality. Sadly, the nonsense that has been written about his music will have driven unknown numbers of potential listeners away from it.

Anyone unfamiliar with Taylor's work is advised to forget everything they have read about it before listening to Live At Fat Tuesday's February 9, 1980 First Visit. Everything except Taylor's own famous description of the piano as "eighty-eight tuned drums." This is the key to appreciating his music. Taylor played those drums with the energy, muscularity and stamina of an Olympic athlete, and on occasion of Zeus himself. Japan's kodo drummers are minnows by comparison. If James Brown was the hardest-working man in showbusiness, Taylor was the hardest-working man in jazz. Indeed, James Brown is Taylor's closest musical comparator. Brown's performances may have been choreographed and through composed to a molecular degree, while Taylor's were as in-the-moment and impulsive as could be, but the end result for the listener is identical: a combination of trance, catharsis and ecstasy. Providing, that is, that one lets go and surrenders to the music.

That is the way to listen to Live At Fat Tuesday's February 9, 1980 First Visit, an unbroken (the division into three tracks is notional) 66:08 chromatic tidal wave that sweeps all before it. The disc is the first release in the Ezz-thetics' label's First Visit series of previously unreleased recordings of historic and musical importance. An earlier set from the same engagement, the 2xLP It Is In The Brewing Luminous (Hat Hut, 1981), part of it heard on the YouTube below, has long been a collector's item. Another two sets were recorded at Fat Tuesday's and hopefully they will see the light of day in due course.

Meanwhile, fasten your seat belt, open your ears and your heart, and feel the force.