1989 TMM / "Quartier Latin"

Bert Noglik (1989)

This year's Total Music Meeting follows a theme started by Free Music Production in 1986 and continued by them in a large-scale project in 1988: The presentation of Cecil Taylor in a series of working stages. The fact that Cecil Taylor - an outstanding pianist in the tradition of Afro-American Music and Free Jazz of the sixties - will be playing with European Musicians, is one of the results of these efforts.

Cecil Taylor's biography has already made the encyclopaedia. What began in the mid-fifties in a group featuring Steve Lacy, Buell Neidlinger and Dennis Charles has been courageously propelled along by Cecil Taylor, Both as a soloist and with the help of various line-ups, and has become his life's work. Cecil Taylor: "The thirty years passed very quickly. At the same time I feel I have been very lucky to be myself". He says nothing of the long, hard, difficult years, only adds, as an afterthought, that he sometimes wonders how he managed to survive. As opposed to the avant-garde, by definition a concept, Cecil Taylor's message is to be found among other things in the consistency of his playing. Not a sign of playfulness. Playing as an expression of vital energy and as a means of survival. Not a severing of the psychological, but a consolidation. Movement towards the essential.

Over the years Cecil Taylor has extended the cultural radius, assimilating elements of modern European music, but in doing so has never questioned the essential bond with Afro-American and Indian tradition. He has re-interpreted the piano as a percussion instrument, has sublimated the psycho-physical dynamics of his work, and again and again emphasised the spiritual dimension of his music. He sees the creation of musical movement as comparable to the motion of a ballet dancer. Poetic expression is for him the supreme form of artistic and even of musical communication. Above all he always wanted to be a poet. Playing is for him an ascent to the realms of trance. Ballet and Blues, Mikhail Baryshnikov and Billy Holiday, even the bridges of New York, all these describe far-reaching arcs of inspiration. The tradition of Jazz as a heritage and commitment to renewal of ideas. Cecil Taylor's creation of a synthesis includes musical material in its widest sense, as well as the image of individual expression and a form of playing heightened to the point where it becomes akin to magic.

The first evening of the Total Music Meeting presents Cecil Taylor, soloist. On the second evening a trio which has been in existence for some time appears on the stage of the "Quartier Latin" - "The Feel Trio" with Cecil Taylor, William Parker and Tony Oxley. The following two evenings see the formation of a completely new line-up of the "Corona" quintet.

William Parker, who was born in New York and studied under Richard Davies and Jimmy Garrison, has for several years now been playing the bass in Cecil Taylor's groups. He has performed with Peter Kuhn, Jemeel Moondoc, Frank Lowe, Wayne Horwitz, Butch Morris, Billy Bang and Peter Brötzmann, to name but a few, and has appeared in groups centred around Jimmy Lyons and also in line-ups with Cecil Taylor and Jimmy Lyons.

Probably no other percussionist since the sixties has pushed the idea of liberating music from beat dogma with such logical consistency as Tony Oxley. In a trio with Gavin Bryars and Derek Bailey, Tony Oxley advanced into the field of free improvisation as far back as the first half of the sixties. Since then he has continuously worked on expanding his musical vocabulary. In the sixties, apart from occasional performances with musicians like Bill Evans and Sonny Rollins, he increasingly devoted himself to activities in the sphere of Free Improvised Music. He worked for many years with such musicians as Evan Parker, Paul Rutherford, Howard Riley and Phil Wachsmann. At the Berlin JazzFest in 1985 he presented his Celebration Orchestra, the members of which have since then come together for several performances. Recent years have seen the formation of "The Feel Trio" with Cecil Taylor and William Parker, a trio with Anthony Braxton and Adelhard Roidinger and a duo with John Surman.

"Corona" is the name of the quintet with Taylor, Parker, Oxley, Muneer Abdul Fataah and Harald Kimmig. The cellist Muneer Abdul Fataah comes from New York and has now been living in Freiburg for some time. He has played with Jimmy Lyons, Charlie Rouse, Billy Higgins, Henry Threadgill, James Newton and Steve Coleman to name but a few. Muneer Abdul Fataah has written numerous compositions and leads a quintet called "The Rhythm String Band Vol.III" comprising a cello, two guitars, double-bass and percussion. Muneer Abdul Fataah has already taken part in a big line-up with Cecil Taylor. - The violinist Harald Kimmig comes from southern Germany and plays in a trio with H. Lukas Lindenmaier - percussion and Uwe Martin - double-bass. Harald Kimmig met up with Cecil Taylor last year for the first time. He was participating in the Ensemble-Workshops, organized by FMP and run by Cecil Taylor. When asked about his work with musical ensembles, Cecil Taylor once said: "One thing I have learned from Ellington is that by realizing that each instrument has its own personality to put across, I can make the group I'm playing with literally sing". Listening to Buell Neidlinger, Cecil Taylor felt him to be at an early stage of this development: "You can almost hear the piano screaming and crying". "Corona´s" voices can be heard on two separate evenings in Berlin.

Translation: Margaret Neuendorf

from: TMM Program Folder 1989

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