Cecil Taylor - Conquistador
Released - 1967
Recording and Session Information
Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, October 6, 1966
Bill Dixon, trumpet; Jimmy Lyons, alto sax; Cecil Taylor, piano; Henry Grimes, Alan Silva, bass; Andrew Cyrille, drums.
1781 tk.2 With (Exit)
1782 tk.10 Conquistador
Session Photos
 |
| Andrew Cyrille |
Track Listing
| Side One | ||
| Title | Author | Recording Date |
| Conquistador | Cecil Taylor | October 6 1966 |
| Side Two | ||
| With (Exit) | Cecil Taylor | October 6 1966 |
Liner Notes
CECIL TAYLOR has the kind and quality of temperament which insures the continual growth of his music because the man himself keeps growing. Acutely aware and responsive to a wide range of the textures of this time — in dance, in poetry, in theatre, in politics - Cecil transmutes all his perceptions into music.
A few years ago, I interviewed him for the BBC. He talked about the long stretches during which he seldom performed in public — a result of the obtuseness of club owners and other jazz entrepreneurs. Accordingly. he said, "I had to simulate the working jazzman's progress. I had to create situations — or rather situations were created by the way in which I live — at the piano and away from the piano so that the development of the music continued. If you take the creation of a music and the creation of your own life values as your overall goal, then living becomes a musical process. It becomes a search to absorb everything that happens to you and to incorporate it into music."
The result of this process has been the building by Taylor of one of the most distinctive—and increasingly influential — bodies of work in jazz. As Bill Mathieu wrote in Down Beat about Cecil's previous Blue Note album, Unit Structutes: "This music is advanced from what came before in that it contains a larger vocabulary. The style is more varied, contains a wider range of human response...More kinds of calling, more kinds of answering result in music that leads one deeper and further. In this respect it is in the first rank of all music."
The same is true of Conquistador and With (Exit) in this album. They are two of the most commanding performances in the Taylor discography and they rolled an increasing mastery of extended time in performance. It seems to me that the organic unity of these two achievements will be clear even to a listener not entirely familiar with Taylor's musical language and structures. Also evident here is Cecil's continued exploration of the far-flung possibilities of collective jazz playing. In a Down Boat interview I did with him in February, 1965, Cecil noted: "I'm very interested in problems of sound in the inter-relations between the textures possible on various instruments." Both Unit Structures and this album demonstrate tho extent of this interest and the absorbing resourcefulness with which Cecil s probing the possibilities of intersecting textures.
Listening to Conquistador and With (Exit), I remembered what Cecil had said in the chapter on him in A B Spellman's invaluable book, Four Lives in the Bebop Business (Pantheon). "One thing I learned from Ellington," Cecil emphasized, "is that you can make the group you play with sing if you realize each of the instruments has a distinctive personality, and you can bring out the singing aspect of that personality if you use the right timbre for the instrument." Singing is the word for those performances, and that characteristic is a reminder of the essential lyricism in all of Taylor's work.
There is another strongly identifying characteristic - and that is the enormous energy distilled and released in Taylor's music. At a club after a set the man is totally exhausted because he has literally thrown all of himself into his music. But this is not inchoate energy. Cecil's music, as I noted before has immense, intense organic unity. As he has said, "There is no music without order - if that music comes from a mans innards. But that order is not necessarily related to any single criterion of what order should be as imposed from tho outside. Whether that criterion is the song form or what some critic thinks jazz should be. This is not a question, then, of 'freedom' as opposed to 'nonfreedom,' but rather it is a question of recognizing different ideas and expressions of order."
Or, as Cecil put it in his notes for Unit Structures, "form is possibility." But, some still ask whats the best way to listen to Cecil, to discover his forms? I expect the "best" way is the same as for all music — listen first with your emotions and try to listen to what’s happening as a whole. In Conquistador, for instance. listen to the waves of energy in their different permutations throughout. And listen to the ways in which the percussive textures are integrally imbedded in the stately and lyrical theme at the beginning. Then there is the pyramiding of cries, of conversation, from the contemplative section with Cecil and the two basses through the spiraling constructions of Bill Dixon and the explosive Jimmy Lyons. Toward the end, many listenings will reveal more and more of the stunning architectonics of Cecil’s final solo, which precedes a return to the theme.
Similarly, on With (Exit), listen to the totality of the colors in the opening statement and development. And when you hear Jimmy Lyons’ penetrating solo, hear too what Cecil is saying behind and between his lines. And then during Bill Dixon’s reflective solo, listen again to the corollary commentary by Cecil. Once more, toward the end, there is another disciplined, powerfully releasing piano statement which underlines again the singular nature and depth of Cecil's persistent growth. I would also counsel separate listenings to both sides just for the evocative and provocative bass interplay between Alan Silva and Henry Grimes - and between them and the rest of the ensemble.
Part of the essence of a Cecil Taylor ensemble has been described by Jimmy Lyons, as quoted by A B Spellman. "It has to do with the way Cecil accompanies. He has scales. patterns, and tunes that he uses and the soloist is supposed to use these things. But you can take it out. If you go into your own thing, Cecil will follow you there. But you have to know where the tune is supposed to go, and if you take it there another way than the way Cecil outlined it, then that is cool with Cecil. That's the main thing I've learned with Cecil, the music has to come from within and not from any charts."
To which, as a listener, I would add what I wrote in a review of Unit Structures for Hifi/Stereo Review: "Those who do not want music to shake them and to open new ways of feeling...will avoid Mr Taylor, but the adventurous have startling surprises ahead." Two of those surprises are here. And I have no hesitation in predicting that they will last and continue to surprise, in this generation and beyond. Because Cecil Taylor is unquestionably one of the jazz masters.
"When you play with authority," he has said, "then that's what the music is about like ooooooh baby, and sing it." No one plays with more authority and few have so much to say and sing at each moment.
-NAT HENTOFF
RVG CD Reissue Liner Notes
A NEW LOOK AT CONQUISTADOR!
Our sense of both the general direction and specific nuances of jazz evolution has frequently been enriched by the appearance of newly discovered and alternate takes, airchecks, concert transcriptions and various other authorized and unauthorized recordings. The record has been expanded on Cecil Taylor's groundbreaking 1960s music as well, with the surfacing of a few European and Stateside performances; but the fact remains that Taylor's live opportunities exceeded only his meager number of visits to the studios during this most critical period of the pianist's development. So much has been lost (like the few Taylor/Albert Ayler encounters that continue to tantalize the imagination) that even without its bonus track Conquistador! would remain a rare sign of this most important chapter in the development of what came to be called free jazz.
Taylor's slim discography reveals a musician who worked within the conventions of 4/4 rhythm and at least the shadow of song form through early 1961. By the end of that year, in the three performances included on the Impulse! album released under Gil Evans' name as Into the Hot, both the shape and the metabolism of Taylor's music had grown more irregular and kinetic, thanks in part to the deeper understanding of the pianist's ideas displayed by such new sidemen as alto saxophonist Jimmy Lyons and drummer Sunny Murray. A more expansive example of how these ideas worked in live performance was captured when Taylor, Lyons and Murray recorded at Copenhagen's Café Montmartre a year later; then nearly four years passed before the fleeting Taylor/Blue Note affiliation that led to the classic 1966 studio albums Unit Structures and the present collection. Even with debate on the avant-garde at the time making later controversies over smooth jazz, Ken Burns or you-name-it pale in comparison, and as other experimenters spread the message with albums on independent and even a few of the established labels, the combative Taylor found and/or accepted few opportunities to document his own music through the end of the decade. The present album and its predecessor suggest how much we have missed.
By 1966, Taylor not only had established a basis for improvised performances that attained a momentum and dynamic to replace the vestigial shadows of swing and structure his earlier worked had carried; he had also worked similar changes within the various instrumentations that he led and dubbed the Cecil Taylor Unit. Horn soloists no longer played over a secondary "rhythm section" stratum, but spoke in conversation alongside piano and percussion parts that expanded and contracted with startling equivalence. With no further need to state a metronomic pulse, a bassist might be eliminated altogether, as on the Montmartre tapes, or two basses might generate contrasting parts, as is the case here (Silva does the upper-register and bowed work, and Grimes occupies the lower registers). In this context, the notion of a beat was replaced with that of pulse, and thematic development became an art of shape-shifting.
The Conquistador! band understood what Taylor wanted as well as any of his documented groups. Lyons and drummer Andrew Cyrille would continue to perform with the pianist for several years, most frequently in the trio that Taylor once identified as one of his very best groups, and both are exceptional here. They reveal both a fluency in Taylor's language and the echoes of more familiar masters in their own conceptions. Bill Dixon, who began recording his own studio masterpiece, Intents and Purposes, four days later, doesn't move within the music as briskly as Lyons, but he hangs on, and his lyrical shards generate an effective contrasting tension. Silva and Grimes establish distinct and sympathetic angles on the music far more effectively than the other, often muddy two-bass efforts of the era. With Grimes' reappearance in 2003, we can now report that all save the late Lyons remain musically active. It would be fascinating to hear them reunite.
We might also hope for a Taylor ensemble to return to this performance length. Recording technology of the period limited the often-prolix pianist to more modest statements on the rare instances when he entered a studio, an inhibition that worked to the music's advantage for at least this listener. The twenty-minute boundary that a side of vinyl threw in Taylor's way provoked statements with a winning concentration of fury and rapture, while the greater length of the compact disc and the fortuity of an alternate "With (Exit)" allow a better understanding of how this still challenging, still magical music took shape.
— Bob Blumenthal, 2003
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