SPRING OF TWO BLUE-J’S
Cecil Taylor
Spring of Two Blue-J’s
Unit Core : 1974

CT, piano.

I.
A hand and a piano
Are one
A hand and a piano and a Blue-J
Are one.

II.
Recorded at a Town Hall concert, this album features Cecil Taylor solo on side one and with Jimmy Lyons, Sirone, and Andrew Cyrille on the second side. Both tracks share the same title. We’re highlighting the entire 16-minute solo performance for its sustained mesh of aching beauty and joyful aggression.

III.
This album is dedicated to Ben Webster. Cue traditionalists furrowing their collective brows, but fans know Cecil was a big fan of Ellington and his band. While you might look for some literalist tribute action in the Jimmy Lyons performance on the flip, listen closely to this solo track and you’ll glean plenty of pungent fragments of Ellingtonia. Cecil by himself is more orchestral than most big bands.

IV.
“I thought about doing an Ellington thing I recently heard on one of those fantastic records. But I’ve learned something about the process of art – and this is why Donald Byrd is so full of shit, and the others who take Stevie Wonder’s songs and readapt them. You know, if you love someone, you learn things about that person, but you don’t become them.”
-Cecil Taylor

V.
“Spring of Two Blue-Js is an epic if largely romantic piano solo, which offers an improvisational coherence his previous work only hinted at.”
–Gary Giddins, Village Voice, choosing the album as a key post-WWII jazz release.

VI.
This performance is sandwiched chronologically between two other solo masterpieces — it was recorded after the early morning Tokyo studio reveries of Solo and before the live abyss-limning gymnastics of Silent Tongues. The timeline is instructive here because this album serves as a bridge between the meditative Ravel-like moments of the former and jagged leap-frogging clusters of the later, synthesizing them into one of Cecil’s most instantly rewarding pieces.

VII.
When the leader of a string quartet congratulated him on a performance mentioning Mozart and Ravel’s ‘Sonatine’ in the course of an effusive compliment, Cecil’s response was: ‘Why don’t you talk about Ellington and Bud Powell?’

VIII.
“Musical categories don’t mean anything unless we talk about the actual specific acts that people go through to make music, how one speaks, dances, dresses, moves, thinks, makes love… all these things. We begin with the sound and then say, what is the function of that sound and what is determining the procedures of that sound. Then we can talk about how it motivates or regenerates itself, and that’s where we have tradition.”
– Cecil Taylor (from Riding on a Blue Note by Gary Giddins)

IX.
“In Cecil Taylor’s music as in poety, the game of allusion is played to give spiritual and historical resonance to a language of self-invention. The game playing nourishes both the poet’s iconoclasm and his faith in holy tradition – two character traits essential to any people whose artists must invoke release, revolt, and remembrance to survive a culture dedicated to the disposable.”
- Greg Tate, Flyboy in the Buttermilk

X.
We bring a friend to check out Cecil in concert and afterwards he says Cecil ”must be one of the angriest motherfuckers on the planet.” We’re mystified. What we mostly witness is unbridled joy and abandon, from the way Cecil’s face lights up when he seems to “discover” his next run of notes to the occasional-but-ecstatic vocal outbursts. You can hear snatches of this vocalizing here and unlike some pianist’s interjections (we’re looking at you, Keith Jarrett), this glossalia actually heightens the moment.

XI.
In the 1990s, Cecil began most of his concerts by slowly approaching the piano, dancing around it, running his fingers along the boards, reciting poetry behind it. He was working up to his music, making a sacrament of the moment, preparing for the immersive plunge. Once he finally hit the keys, his focus was fearsome — something you can hear on this recording as well, as the performance unfolds like one continuous and organically sustained thought.

XII.
Visit this site to learn some wonderfully detailed backstory (and much more) about this recording straight from the person who recorded it live at Town Hall.

XIII.
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too
That the Blue-J is involved
In what I know.

& & & & &

If you can scoop up a copy of last month’s Wire, be sure to read Vijay Iyer’s outstanding and thought-provoking essay about Cecil Taylor in their “Epiphanies” section. It’s an expanded version of a piece that ran here as part of Vijay’s solo piano mixtape. But it’s so good we’d tell you to read it no matter where it first appeared.

If you pick up this month’s issue of the Wire, there’s ”The Destination: OUT OOP 15″ – a list of some favorite out-of-print adventurous jazz masterpieces – in their Playlists section.