Customer Reviews

Nefertiti Beautiful One Has Come

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4 star:		(1)
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Cecil Taylor is one of the great jazz pianists, and all creative improvisors need to deal with his music. This session from 1963 features some great music (the out-of-tune piano and the recording quality don't detract much from my enjoyment of it). Cecil's compositions and the group's playing are great.

This is actually a fairly conservative record, and it puzzles me why other people find this music so difficult. The group's rendition of "What's New" follows the standard form and chord changes. I can tap my foot to almost all of the record, and some of it swings quite outright. Most of Cecil's chord voicings are standard, and he also plays quite a few roots on the head and in Jimmy Lyons' first chorus. I'll never understand why people think this stuff is strange.

This reissue admirably fills a gap in Taylor's work, showing how he got from the brilliant early recordings for Candid, Contemporary, &c--where Taylor pushes the music of Ellington and Monk several steps further--to the newly-minted free-jazz of his later albums (beginning with the pair for Blue Note). A warning for listeners: this is not a high-fidelity recording, though the sound-quality is passable; like all recordings from the Cafe Montmartre it features a clapped-out upright piano that's not especially in tune (you can hear Tete Montoliu struggle with it on a classic Roland Kirk date from this period, too). But: so what? the music is some of the most important jazz ever recorded. The bassless group--with Sonny Murray on drums, Jimmy Lyons on alto--is constantly pushing outwards, trying to discover a new music: their demolition of the standard "What's New" is an encapsulation of the process. Lyons plays brilliant bebop lines that (like Lee Konitz from the same time) show how in the hands of an inventive musician a style that seemed to be coalescing into hard bop could instead provide a springboard for the most radical of explorations. Taylor & Murray seem to finally be within grasp of a reorientation of the rhythmic basis of jazz--discovering how it may be "free" & yet full of rhythm & swing.

This is an important disc, & also a pleasure to listen to. The dodgy piano & live recording aren't any more distracting than on some of the classic live Parker dates, so shouldn't put people off. Everyone knows that jazz's history is more than just the recorded legacy: that many of its crucial moments must have disappeared into the ether unrecorded. Listening to these tapes, one almost feels as if one of these moments has been magically recaptured: this is a truly pivotal recording.

This astonishing album marked another great leap forward by Cecil Taylor in his musical evolution. This live date was recorded by Taylor with an eary trio consisting of Jimmy Lyons on alto and Sunny Murray on Drums. All three players were reaching forward. Lyons alto lines are steeped in the bebop tradition, influenced by the cerebral approach of some of the cool school players, and yet they wander free of their bop boundaries...more and more as the session goes on. Murray is in the midst of discovering his signature drum style...fast but without traditional time keeping feature. And Taylor is a marvel, even with the out of tune piano. His works is steadily outgrowing it's roots in Monk and Ellington. Even in his approach to the standard What's New, the work approaches the more frenetic phrasing of his mature work.

This is a fascinating album to fill in the pieces of Taylor's career, but it is a revelation in it's own right. There are paths in this music that Taylor never followed, but that could be worked by other musicians. Any great innovator leaves side braches in development that spark music from those who follow. Taylor's early career is full of this sort of thing. Perhaps some enterprising musicians will travel through Taylor's unexplored territory.

Man, hard to believe when this album was recorded. True, compared to Taylor's own work earlier releases foreshadowed this and the definitive classic _Unit Structures_ was only four years away. But no contemporary was anywhere close to what Cecil Taylor was doing at this time. Taylor is as much an extension of the modernist composers like Bartok, Stravinsky, Cowell, and the Viennese School, as he was of Ellington and Monk, and he has been a leader of avant-jazz virtually since day one. Even when people were first getting into free-jazz, picking up momentum in the musical culture, Taylor's music was still considered way out there. Anyway. _Nefertiti, the Beautiful One Has Come_ is incredible, as breathtaking in twenty-first century context as it must have been fifty years ago. Recorded in Copenhagen, Taylor appears in trio format with Sunny Murray (drums) and Jimmy Lyons (alto saxophone). They play Taylor's original compositions except for a fiery version of Haggart and Burke's "What's New" as a launch pad for improvisation. The combination of psychic interplay, dazzling composition, ultra-jazziness, and perfect dissonances was perfect for these men on this day. The huge "D Trad That's What" proves you can have the sickest jazziness in music that is atonal as hell. The first two pieces "Trance" and "Call" make for one of the most intense first 20 minutes of jazz ever. Lyons uses the sax quite idiomatically but with chromatic contours and Murray understands the heavily _percussive_ nature of Taylor's music, and his clearly minded towards interplay vis-à-vis another percussion instrument. The inimitable Taylor is jaw-dropping as always. As a reissue, the package is nice but more liner notes would have been appreciated. It seems there are hidden bonus tracks on each disc as well, featuring fairly poor recordings of high free-jazz. There is input from Lyons and Murray but mostly they are Taylor going crazy. Pretty awesome!

As the other reviews state, this is some brilliant music. However, the premium price for these discs does not reflect what the packaging offers. As the AMG would say, somewhat disdainfully, this is a "straight re-issue" of the two-LP set on Freedom available in the 70s. While that edition added to the 1964 single Fantasy "Montmarte" LP, Revenant's minimalist package has no notes beyond the wrap-around J-card on the outside of the case. The Fantasy LP had a striking color photo of CT; the Freedom had some nice artwork. For $32, I would like an essay or at least a couple of photos of the players.

Cecil Taylor has been one of the single most iconoclastic instrumentalists of out time and remains to be a VERY controversial figure in music after forty years of performing. His percussive approach to his instrument (Piano) coupled with his digital prowess, dauntless physical stamina (He's over 60 years of age), his irreverance for metric or pulsitive time and the complete abscence of OBVIOUS chord sequence and/or structure makes Cecil Taylor, for all intents and purposes, "dangerous." One of the founding father's of the Avant Garde movement in Jazz (along with Sun Ra, Albert Ayler, John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman) Cecil has managed to stay ahead of the game. In this trio recording with long-time collaborator, Jimmy Lyons (alto) Cecil envokes some of the most violently tender and moving music comitted to disc. The uninitiated should make no mistake, Taylor is not one to put on a suit and run through renditions of "Hello, Dolly" for you to tap your foot lightly to during dinner. This is music... not for the light hearted.

...you MUST own these two discs. I really enjoy all of his other recordings, but this one is perfect. I've listened to this maybe 500 times; each time it's fresh and interesting. Lyons and Murray, who play brilliantly here, are all Cecil needs; any other players would have gotten in the way. This recording and Charles Gayle's "Touchin' on Train" are the only music I listen to regularly. Those are my picks if I was stranded on a desert island.