Cecil Taylor & Italian Instabile Orchestra: The Owner Of The River Bank

The Italian Instabile Orchestra played two concerts at the Talos Festival in Ruva di Puglia in 2000, celebrating its tenth anniversary. Cecil Taylor wrote the music, if it can be called writing, for he brought in paper with symbols, words and shapes to the rehearsals. This work in progress began to ferment over the next three days. Ideas came from Taylor, who encouraged the other musicians to ignite their own. Impulse interacted with heart and soul and mind, and from that febrile melting pot came a suite filled with passion and drama.

The work is in seven movements and goes just past an hour. Both Taylor and the Orchestra are not votaries of conventional harmony. Taylor sets up the soundscape with the strings in oleaginous flow, the horns coming in to twitter, the rhythm scattershot. The eddying eye of the timbre whirls giddily as the horns rip in with caterwaul and coil the driving forces. The diminuendo comes in, drums, a skeetering horn, the soft notes of the piano filtering in and through. The Orchestra has a penchant for using voices in full throated animation. These players' trait does not escape them, and in giving vent to it they wrap themselves around the trajectory of the instruments. Taylor splashes colour across a divergent canvas in the fourth movement, on which he gives himself plenty of room. He is poetry in motion, in free verse. Some of this can be seen on the video track.

Creativity is the force, the musicians its diviners.

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