Improvised Music II/88
Kongreßhalle Berlin

Achim Heppelmann (1988)

improvised music II/88

The second part of our series "Improvised Music," co-sponsored by WERKSTATT BERLIN, is quickly assuming monumental proportions: for one month, from June 17th to July 17th, keyboard-titan Cecil Taylor, will be in Berlin, confronting and collaborating with both West- and East-European musicians representing an extremely diverse range of styles and directions.

"When Cecil Taylor's playing became so fast it broke the sound barrier, what resulted was not a sonic boom, but instead, the unsimultaneous cluster," to repeat a quote, still on target, by the Swiss writer Jörg Laederbach.*

Cecil Taylor - eccentric, brilliant, well-trained in many disciplines: probably the most important and influential American musician of the last quarter-century. Two years ago Taylor's participation in the Free Music Workshop '86 met with such great success, we've invited him back this June and July to be the focus of a month long festival at Berlin's Kongresshalle.

Over the course of the festival, Cecil Taylor will play one solo concert and six duo-concerts.

Five of his duo partners are percussionists: Günter "Baby" Sommer, Paul Lovens, Han Bennink, Tony Oxley and Louis Moholo (O.K. we know, in this "European Year E-88", he's not European, but, as an exile South African living in London, we're counting him as one anyway). Completing the sixth duo, at the express wish of Cecil Taylor, will be the English guitarist Derek Bailey.

Besides playing the concerts just mentioned, Cecil Taylor will prepare his seventeen-piece European Big Band for performances on July 1st and 2nd. The band will rehearse for two weeks prior to this, and in the second week, the evening rehearsals will be open to the public, the personnel for these evening sessions being determined on short notice by the musicians themselves. Incidentally: The Cecil Taylor European Big Band features an almost all new line-up of European Free Musicians; the only overlaps with Taylor's 1986 Euro-American Band are Peter Brötzmann, William Parker and Hannes Bauer.

Running parallel to the concerts and rehearsals will be a series of workshops and lectures organized by ten of the participating musicians; Taylor himself will give a Piano Master Class. Enrolment in these activities is limited to a small number of advanced students; these are not open to the general public.

Apart from one-day guest appearances in Italy, Cecil Taylor will stay in Berlin for the entire month-long duration of the project. And contrary to rumours propagated by certain sources who should know better, he's not going to be playing the local club circuit (well, with one exception ...).

*Translator's note: i.e. Taylor sometimes plays so fast that an auditory illusion occurs: single note melodies are perceived as a cluster.

Translation: Daniel Werts

from: Booklet “improvised music” by Free Music Production (FMP), 1988

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