Cecil Taylor Unit - Live at the KiMo Theater Albuquerque 1979 Cecil Taylor Unit

Black Editions Archives presents Live at the KiMo Theater Albuquerque 1979, a major new archival work by the late Cecil Taylor (1929-2018).

Pianist, composer & bandleader Cecil Taylor's capacious & audacious originality reshaped twentieth-century music. In an astounding act of artistic forbearance spanning sixty years of performing & recording, Taylor didn't win over so much as wear down the jazz establishment through the force & brilliant execution of his ideas. His methodologies & language, if studied at all, remain unassimilated by the twenty-first century jazz mainstream & its institutions. Lincoln Center turned the house lights on during Taylor's performance there (2007), a stark reminder that in spite of Guggenheim & MacArthur Fellowships & increased respect among some of his tradition-minded peers, the shock of his music had not diminished & he was still an outlier, if not an outlaw, presence.

Live at the KiMo Theater Albuquerque 1979 captures Taylor on November 20, 1979, during a rare tour of the American West with a then newly reconstituted quintet formation of his Unit. An ensemble in regular flux from the mid-1970s onward, only two members of Taylor's 1978 Unit, violinist Ramsey Ameen (1945-2019) & alto saxophonist Jimmy Lyons (1931-1986)-the bel canto voice of every Cecil Taylor band since 1961- made the trip with Taylor to Albuquerque. Re-entering the fold on bass & cello after a decade-long absence was prime mover extraordinaire Alan Silva (1939-), with drummer Jerome Cooper (1946-2015) making his Cecil Taylor Unit performance debut.

Each historical incarnation of the Cecil Taylor Unit emphasized the musicians' freedom to infuse the architectures of Taylor's music with their own personalities. Together with the Maestro in Albuquerque, this novel formation played a concert as unique & fascinating as its line-up & instrumentation suggests, with dynamics, textures & interactions that are quite different from the often in-the-red, sometimes gladiatorial 1978 Taylor bands. The addition of Sunny Murray to this ensemble in February 1980 for the recording of It Is In The Brewing Luminous (HatHut) would transform the music yet again.