#sirone

James Blood Ulmer - Guitar

George Adams - Sax

Sirone - Bass

Official drop: Februrary 15, 2022

Read the liner notes here, or download them from from Scribd.

Cecil Taylor Unit > The Complete, Legendary, Live Return Concert at The Town Hall NYC, November 3, 1973

Oblivion Records OD-8

Read the stories about the album here.

Available on all streaming platforms and Bandcamp

Cecil Taylor: composer, piano Jimmy Lyons: alto saxophone Andrew Cyrille: percussion Sirone: bass

1. Autumn/Parade 88:00     (quartet) 2. Spring of Two Blue-J’s 16:15     Part 1 (solo) 3. Spring of Two Blue-J’s 21:58     Part 2 (quartet)

Composed by Cecil Taylor

.....

Produced by Fred Seibert Recorded live in concert and mixed by Fred Seibert Assisted by Nick Moy The Town Hall 123 West 43rd Street New York, New York

Track 1: Mixed, Summer 2021 Tracks 2 & 3: Mixed, Spring 1974, assisted by Jeff Ader, Alan Goodman, David Laura and Tony May, Spring 1974 Digital transfers from the original analog 4-track and stereo recordings by Sonicraft, Red Bank, NJ Promotional CD Mastering: Tom Nunes, Atomic Disc, Salem, OR

Cover photography ©David Spitzer at Columbia University, 1977 Graphics by The Oblivionettes Publicity: Lydia Liebman Promotions

Essay by Alan Goodman

Special Thanks to Mark Seiden

Producer’s note: This streaming release is the world premiere of “Autumn/Parade,” mixed in July 2021 for the first time since its recording.  This drop is the first release of the complete concert from November 4, 1973. 

The original LP of “Spring of Two Blue-J’s” was limited to 2000 vinyl pressings in 1974 for Unit Core Records, owned by Cecil Taylor. The only other legitimate release is by Oblivion Records in 2021. All others on vinyl, CD, or any other format are unauthorized bootlegs.

The two part "Spring of Two Blue J's" (Oblivion Records OD-7) is exclusively on all digital streaming platforms.

.....

We knew then it was going to be an event.

By Alan Goodman

We knew then it was going to be an event. That’s my first memory, nearly 50 years later, of Cecil Taylor’s “return” concert at The Town Hall in New York on November 4, 1973.

Cecil had as much claim as anyone to be a star in that era, in that city, but instead had split to spend the early part of the 1970s teaching composition at the University of Wisconsin and Antioch College, where he also devoted time each day to his own composing. A couple of years had passed since his last public solo performance in New York –the epicenter of new music, avant-garde, free jazz, whatever you want to call it if you need to call it anything– and listeners were eager to hear what he was going to reveal, especially with a quartet.

As for LP evidence of his music’s evolution, the most recent touchstone was “Indent,” a solo piano performance at Antioch released just six months before the concert at The Town Hall on Cecil’s label Unit Core, but it was not widely heard until it was released years later by Arista Freedom. In fact, since his groundbreaking LPs on Blue Note in the mid 1960s, Cecil’s recorded output was relegated to mostly small, obscure European labels. The result of all that largely private exploration and discovery would at last be on display by Cecil and his longtime collaborators, alto saxophonist Jimmy Lyons, percussionist Andrew Cyrille, and newcomer Sirone on bass. 

The album that documented part of the concert, “Spring Of Two Blue J’s,” was produced and mixed by my friends and me. It received high praise. In his book about the New York music scene in the 1970s, “Love Goes to Buildings On Fire,” Critic Will Hermes called it one of music’s two epiphanies that year (the other being the Dave Holland release, “Conference of the Birds.”)

Longtime Village Voice jazz writer Gary Giddins, who at the time had not yet begun his column, recalls today that Cecil’s solo on the first side was his most impressive to date, and that the quartet movement “climaxed his long alliance with Lyons and Cyrille and introduced bassist Sirone.” Of all Cecil’s discoveries in his musical journey leading to “Blue J’s,” that record’s breakthroughs were, Giddins says, the most revelatory and satisfying, and it “announced Cecil Taylor’s permanent reestablishment in the music world, an end to his marginalization, and the evidence of a maturity that allayed any doubts that he or anyone else may have harbored during that self-imposed exile in academia.” In two Voice wrap-ups in 1974, he called it his favorite album of the year.

Given our involvement in the project –college students who had never recorded or mixed an album before, outside of a few, small personal dates– the praise was enormously gratifying.

What almost no one knew was that “Spring of Two Blue J’s” documented just one part of the concert; the shorter, second set. Now, at last, we can present the rest of that night’s story.

“The Complete, Legendary Return Concert” includes the first portion of the concert that has been sitting in a tape box all this time. It includes the compositions “Autumn/Parade,” and it’s a feast. Listening to it for the first time in 50 years alongside “Blue J’s,” it’s clear that this concert was more than a triumphant return. It was also the concert that established how Cecil would be performing for the rest of his life, and how his hunger to explore the limits of human artistry would make each concert as demanding on the listener as on the performers.

Why “Blue-J’s” was released at the time, and not the concert’s first set, was strictly a consequence of recording technology in 1973. “Autumn/Parade” is 88 minutes long, and Cecil is playing almost continuously throughout. On its own, it would have necessitated a double-album set, which was considered to be not commercially viable (The single disk “Blue-J’s” retailed for $6.50). Plus, each side would need to be faded down and faded up on the next side, a solution that is never artistically satisfying, though it was the solution chosen for Arista’s Cecil releases.

“Blue J’s” had a more natural place to break, with Cecil’s piano solo on Side One and the ensemble joining him on Side Two, so that became the record. Thanks to the opportunity today for digital releases, “Autumn/Parade” can be presented as it was heard that night, a marathon of brilliant invention, cascading emotions, and almost unimaginable synchronicity among the musicians pouring everything they had into the performance.

******************

How we became involved in the concert is a story in itself.

Fred Seibert was a senior at Columbia University, I was a year behind him, and the school’s radio station, WKCR, was our second home. Still known for championing primarily jazz and classical music, as a non-profit educational broadcaster we were free from the obligation to be commercially successful. That gave comfort in bending the boundaries (and listeners ears) in both genres to a merry band of counterculture misfits from a spectrum of ethnicities and races. There was another jazz station headquartered just a few blocks up from us on Broadway. They played the hits and the big names. At a time when the downtown loft jazz scene was flourishing and the avant-garde in the U.S. and Europe was attaining new levels of recognition, we liked to play the albums that other station ignored. It was more than a hobby, or an extracurricular activity. We approached exposing new music to listeners like we were on a mission. Being young and in New York, the WKCR playlist (well, in fact, there was no playlist) was our call for representation, inclusion, and acceptance.

If you couldn’t handle everything we played, so be it. At least we gave you a place to sample it, 24 hours a day (not counting news programming and music from other cultures that filled weekend hours). Some of the staff members showed up for their shifts and went home. Others appeared to never leave.

One day, into that environment, walked a fellow named David Laura, who had in tow inventor and jazz guitarist Emmett Chapman. Emmett had come up with an instrument called the Chapman Stick –a 10-stringed fretted board like a wide guitar neck that was tapped two-handed, allowing one performer to play dense polyphonic chords, or lead and bass simultaneously. Emmett’s innovation is a story for another time, but Laura’s visit to the station introduced him to some of the mole-like creatures who would curl up behind the piano for a snooze, or burrow into a news booth with a stack of library books and a pitcher of coffee from the Chock Full ‘O Nuts across the street, desperately trying to finish a term paper in one night.

Laura took note of Fred, an aspiring record producer at the time and one of the most persuasive individuals you will meet in your life. Fred had launched his own label, Oblivion Records, with an eclectic mix of blues and fusion. Oblivion’s catalog was not going to make anyone wealthy. One of his partners used cartons of records as a coffee table.

Several months later, Laura was back with a proposal. He was going to bring the Cecil Taylor Unit to The Town Hall, and he wanted Fred to record it. Fred had engineered some things at the station –live performances over the

radio– but knew only a little about mic placement and the like, but to hear him with Laura, he was the perfect man for the job.

To prepare for the date, Fred approached a former WKCR colleague who was known to have a four-channel recorder and a collection of studio quality Neumann microphones that he had neither purchased nor rented, and if a crime was committed in obtaining them, the statute of limitations has long run out. So along with Nick Moy, Fred’s roommate and another WKCR stalwart, Fred lugged the

stolen equipment in a cab to West 43rd Street and set up to record one of the most extraordinary music performances we would ever hear.

We couldn’t help reflecting that his previous albums receiving any significant distribution were released when we were high schoolers. The concert at The Town Hall was an opportunity to do more than be spectators and enthusiasts of the history of jazz. This concert gave us a chance to participate in it.

****************

Jazz is, above all, the music of freedom. It makes room for personal expression in

improvisation, a rebellion against formal composition. Jazz champions a soloist’s style, and allows embellishment over another musician’s composition by shaping, caressing, or attacking with sound. It embraces dissonance, reveling in the tension it creates and the satisfaction of its resolution.

And it swings. Swinging is the ultimate revolt as it is the revolt against time. Other factors play into it, such as an emphasis on the “weaker” notes that pushes the performance forward and causes your hips to sway, but it’s that battle between where the beat should be and where the musician puts it that forces your feet to move in a joyous attempt to arbitrate between them, a celebration of an individual’s interpretation of time rather than the way math divides it, that gives jazz its innate jazziness. That small act of freeing eighth notes from their evenness is nothing short of a musical insurrection.

From the start, Cecil Taylor was working to achieve freedom through his music. He found his over a long span.

Most summaries of Cecil’s career do an incomplete job of representing how his music evolved, focusing mostly on his complex and marathon-like performances that required enormous concentration and steered clear of most signifiers that identify jazz. In fact, there was a progression, and the Town Hall concert announced his final phase of development.

As a student at the New England Conservatory in Boston, he studied composition and was influenced by the European art music tradition, but in general his studies left him frustrated by a lack of appreciation for black music and African American cultural treasures. His personal listening brought him to composers and performers in both classical and jazz traditions that were on the “outside” of typical expression – artists who sounded like no one else and were exploring a more personal path.

From his earliest recordings, Cecil declared his independence by reinterpreting composers who were already on the fringes, or playing funhouse mirror reflections of traditional standards. For instance, he was deeply immersed in the off-kilter world of Thelonious Monk’s compositions but also in Monk’s decisive choice to hit the notes that didn’t quite fit. Cecil took it even one step farther. His version of “Bemsha Swing” from the mid 1950s is inside and outside the song. There’s this thing we know that is “Bemsha Swing,” itself a composition that was in no way typical. Cecil is playing it, but he’s also playing with it.

His version of “You’d Be So Nice To Come Home To” seems more a reflection on the title and any emotion that might be triggered by “coming home” than it is a version of the Cole Porter standard. You’d be so nice to come home to, even though that includes feelings of tension, anxiety, fear and defiant joy. Porter had no idea what he had scribbled down until Cecil Taylor got a hold of it.  

From 1956, both those recordings share the album that includes “Rick Kick Shaw,” a tour de force where you can hear some of the influence pianist Lennie Tristano had on Cecil. He uses the tune to work through phrases and themes until he’s worked them out, or worn them out. In both originals and interpretations, Cecil and his band are playing with unmistakable jazz feel.

Likewise, on “Hard Driving Jazz” (1959), later retitled “Stereo Drive” and “Coltrane Time,” Cecil is providing an unfamiliar bed for the other soloists, but he is nevertheless laying down a surface that references the songs, obeys the conventions of typical comping, and unquestionably swings.

On the recordings he made for Candid in 1960 and 1961, Cecil is still playing jazz even though on many of the compositions you’d be hard pressed to find a chord progression. The music is syncopated, though liberated from harmonic presumptions. By the time we get to the brilliant Blue Note records “Unit Structures” and “Conquistador!” in 1966, Cecil has virtually abandoned rhythmic signposts in his playing, though the songs have heads and the backing musicians adhere to expectations. His fellow musicians match him with their passion, but still provide an access ramp for mainstream jazz listeners. Passages of intense fury give way to softer segments as well as to defined statements composed and performed by his sidemen.

The concert that netted “Spring of Two Blue J’s” and now, “Autumn/Parade,” is where you hear Cecil and his entire band having finally broken through the bonds of time. As freeing as it was to swing, Cecil has abandoned even that boundary. Eliminating swing was the final freedom, along with the idea that a “piano

player” should sit at the piano and not get up and dance for an hour if that was what his performance compelled him to do (there was no dance at The Town Hall, but dance was coming soon to Cecil Taylor’s live performances).

And I would argue time ceases to exist for Cecil, not just in the way a song is metered but also in the arc of a performance. Cracking the shackles of time freed him from that thing Captain Beefheart called “mama heartbeat,” the orderliness of a composition that made it… regular. Typical. Hypnotic. If we are no longer being hypnotized hearing that heartbeat, we can instead experience this music like blood running through the veins, which knows no time and is the essence of life.

Guaranteed – at the end of “Autumn/Parade,” concert-goers that night in 1973 looked at their watches and said, “What? That was 88 minutes??? No way!”

You lose all sense of time caught up in the way these musicians fuel each other, at times give way to one another, build and recede. What happens at about 3:50 when Cecil’s playing is suddenly more brittle and in a flash, Jimmy is matching him? What sets off the flurry of total engagement that begins to build about one minute later and lasts about 15 minutes, until an almost imperceptible shift to a more sparse dialogue between Cecil and Sirone? What signals Jimmy’s reentry at 25:00, or the reduction and rebirth at around 40:00 minutes when it’s just Cecil? What was the impetus for Jimmy Lyons’ restatement of his opening phrase at 49 minutes, resetting the stage for the next crescendo? How had they prepared, or in what manner did he point to transitions? We can’t know how this was composed, rehearsed, molded and revised. We can only experience it as participants in the concert experience.

****************

Hours of searching have produced no evidence the concert was anticipated, covered in the press, or reviewed. That weekend in the New York Times, it made the “Jazz/Rock/Folk/Pop/” listings and in Sunday’s Arts section, a one-column inch ad appeared at the very bottom of the page with the word “TONIGHT” plastered diagonally across it in letters so large they obscured the name of the artist appearing.  No reviews have turned up. But after “Blue J’s” appeared, sentiment began to build that Cecil had broken through something significant and lasting, setting him apart from any faction, category, or record bin into which he had been filed.

Critic Giddins says that what Cecil accomplished was “something heroic, a new language largely bounded by the tempered scale that evaded its clichés and formulae.” In his view, “Cecil had developed his own patterns of sound, melody, and rhythm, as well as a distinct touch involving extreme dynamics and extraordinary digital precision.”

Recently, given an early listen to“Autumn/Parade,” Giddins described it as an “extraordinary gift,” likely to be among the most significant discoveries that will fill out Cecil’s discography as more tapes of unreleased concerts and sessions come to light. He singled out “the disarming beginning” and  “the lovely moment as Jimmy’s saxophone makes its first appearance and Cecil’s piano cradles it in a perfectly complementary chord,” as well as Cecil’s “virtuosic solos no one else could conceive.” He praised as well Cecil’s “epic thunderstorm, which dominated the final half hour of the piece, finishing on a peak of delighted triumph.”

Another jazz fan who delighted in Cecil’s work 50 years ago was also given early access to “Autumn/Parade.” She wasn’t a survivor. “I can’t anymore,” she told me. A reaction I’d like to think Cecil would respect, as this is supposed to be a dialogue, a pact, between performer and listener.

Or maybe she needs to try again. After seven listenings, it is still providing me surprises and encouraging the next listen. There is nothing about it that says its vintage was half a century ago. It is about now because it touches your life, in a vibrant, visceral, life-affirming sound experience.  

Enjoy the “extraordinary gift” of “Autumn/Parade.” And rest in peace, Cecil Taylor.

Alan Goodman is a writer. He was a DJ and engineer at WKCR, where he also produced news and cultural programming. He is a former journalist and producer who wrote for newspapers, magazines, radio and television. He wrote two books for Simon & Schuster and a comic book for Virgin Comics, and has written for Mosaic Records since 1984.

(This entire essay, plus assorted visual emphemera of The Return Concert, is included and downloadable in the PDF booklet at the top of this post. Enjoy.)

Read the liner notes here, or download them from from Scribd.

Producer’s note: This digital-only drop of "Spring of Two Blue-Js" is available of all streaming services. It is the first authorized release of the album, mastered from the original master tapes, since 1974. The vinyl LP was originally issued in early 1974 on Unit Core Records*, the personal label of Cecil Taylor. There were only 2000 records pressed. Every other release has been a bootlegged transcription from that pressing.

For more on the entire story behind the recording, you can read this essay written by Alan Goodman for the release of the complete, legendary, live recording.

* The only other LP on Unit Core was a 1973 solo performance named Indent recorded at Antioch College, Yellow Springs, Ohio, USA.

Cecil Taylor Unit Spring of two Blue-Js Oblivion Records Digital OD-7 2022 Original vinyl release Unit Core Records 1974 Read the stories about the album here.

Credits from original vinyl release:

Cecil Taylor: composer, piano Jimmy Lyons: alto saxophone Andrew Cyrille: drums Sirone: bass  

For Ben Webster, died 10/73

Second set of a concert recorded live November 3, 1973 at The Town Hall 123 West 43rd Street New York, New York

Produced by Bonitza Melodies (Fred Seibert) and A.D.Icklas aka David Laura Recording engineered by Fred Seibert with Nick Moy Remix by Fred Seibert, Jeff Ader, Alan Goodman, David Laura and Tony May Cover photo by K. Abe Art by Don Mathe and Li Baily

.....

Here are some of the emphemera from the original concert and vinyl LP release:

Cecil Taylor Unit: Return C... by Fred Seibert

Click here to download or read the digital booklet of Cecil Taylor: The Complete, Legendary, Live Return at The Town Hall NYC November 4, 1973

The Cecil Taylor Unit, Five Spot Cafe, NYC, April 18, 1975, photograph by Fred W. McDarrah/MUUS Collection Getty Images

Cecil Taylor’s The Complete, Legendary, Live Return Concert at The Town Hall  NYC  November 4, 1973 is capturing the imaginations of the critics...

“The first set of this digital release provide the core of this digital release, and is a major revelation, best heard without the fade-outs of vinyl...” –DownBeat, by Martin Longley

10 Albums You Need to Know: February 2022 –Jazziz by Matt Micucci

“[T]his was a band that could breathe like one, even when they were soloing quite independently.” –SoundStageExperience, by James Hale

By Mike Jurkovic: All About Jazz, January 20, 2022

"If the title alone The Complete, Legendary, Live Return Concert doesn't blow out those flu-like post-holiday cobwebs in a big hurry, the full, near ninety minute assault on all that was and is holy damn well will.

"[The unreleased performance contained here] 'Autumn/Parade' is impenetrable, hypnotic, impossible to hold, but never look away."

More here...