LP Reissue Review: Cecil Taylor - Unit Structures

Where are you Bud? ...Lightning...now a lone rain falling thru doors empty of room - Jazz Naked Fire Gesture. Dancing protoplasm. Absorbs.

Cecil Taylor

Unit Structures

(Blue Note) store.bluenote.com/collections/classic-vinyl-series

It can take several deep listens to really grasp a Cecil Taylor album. Gary Giddins once said something to the effect that if you listen to a Cecil performance with half an ear, you'll be lost. You need the whole ear, and the other one as well. 

One year during college, my birthday present from a close friend included a cassette dub with Cecil's other Blue Note album Conquistador on one side and Live at the Cafe Montmartre (half of what would be released as Nefertiti The Beautiful One Has Come) on the other. I immersed myself in the tape, listening repeatedly as I walked to and from campus. Eventually things started to make sense, like the recurring themes in Conquistador's title track, or noticeable the section during the second (!) piano solo in "D Trad That's What" from the other side, when Cecil and drummer Sunny Murray seem to land in 4/4 briefly, and Cecil channels Mal Waldron, if not a bit of Monk. I became a Cecil Taylor convert, not always grasping what he intended, but always eager to dive in and get closer to understanding. 

That homemade tape landed in my hands right as the CD reissue boom was taking off, and a few years later, I finally picked up Unit Structures, the other Cecil album on Blue Note. It actually preceded Conquistador's release by two years, though they were recorded within five months of each other in 1966. Unlike the later album's two sidelong tracks, Unit Structures features four dense tracks. Many Blue Note albums had liner notes by jazz luminaries ranging from Nat Hentoff to A. B. Spellman but Cecil penned "Sound Structure of Subculture Becoming Major Breath/ Naked Fire Gesture," an epic with the density of James Joyce on the back cover. (The italicized lines here are excerpted from that tome, lack of punctuation observed.) As a result, Unit Structures proves to be an even more challenging excursion with little in the way of a roadmap.

Rhythm-sound energy found in the amplitude of each time unit.

The 1987 CD's addition of an alternate take of "Enter Evening" right after the master (the standard spot for alternates on jazz reissues at the time) convoluted the flow of the original album. Even though it came at the end of side one, it was still a bit of a distraction, trying to both figure out the structure and compare the performance to the one that preceded it. 

Blue Note's Classic Vinyl Series has just reissued Unit Structures in its original vinyl form, utilizing the original analog tapes. (The mastering was done by Kevin Gray.) This isn't a Tone Poet Series reissue, so there's no gatefold cover with newly discovered candid shots of Cecil Taylor playing while Rudy Van Gelder and Alfred Lion look puzzled, or shots of Jimmy Lyons and Ken McIntyre studying lead sheets. Things are much as they were in 1966. 

When music people write about Cecil Taylor, they can almost be divided into two categories: the ones who write in very general terms or ones who go for a more metaphorical, abstract direction, talking about the music in non-musical terms, borrowing more from science than theory books. The exception might have come in a pull-out from a 1990 Village Voice piece that I held onto for years, in which several writers (beginning with Giddins) tried to explore the Taylor approach from different angles. I would re-read the thing every year, occasionally understanding more but usually wishing that I could get my hands on the albums to which they all referred. (Upon writing this thing, I need to see if I still have that crop of articles.) 

Alto saxophonist Jimmy Lyons has become a devoted bandmate of Taylor by the time of Unit Structures, having played with him since 1961. Andrew Cyrille (drums) was also on his way to becoming one of the longstanding members of the Unit, playing with him from 1964 through 1975. Eddie Gale Stevens, Jr. plays trumpet on a few songs and Ken McIntyre completes the front line playing alto saxophone, oboe and bass clarinet. Holding up the rear are two bassists, Henry Grimes and Alan Silva. 

Time seen not as beats to be measured after academy's podium angle. The classic order, stone churches with pillars poised, dagger ripping skies, castratti robed in fever pitch, stuff the stale sacrament, bloodless meat, for the fastidious eye...

When playing this current reissue the first time, I tried reading the liner notes in hopes that it might reveal some insight into the music between its almost beat-like execution. Alas, it did not. Cecil seemed to really love the word "anacrusis," referring to it several times in the text. (When he recorded an album of spoken word pieces in the 1987 [Chinampas], the word that Webster defines as "a note or sequence of notes which precedes the first downbeat in a bar, " or a pick-up, factors into the first track on the album.) 

Unlike Conquistador, which seemed to have some more clearly define compositional lines, or at least passages where everyone lines up together, Unit Structures flows more freely. Everyone leaps into "Steps" at their own pace, Cyrille offering a rather thunderous bang (which seems to get some more weight, thanks to the new mastering) while everyone does calisthenics around the maestro's piano. Gale doesn't appear on this track and McIntyre plays alto, delivering a more frantic solo than the more measured though equally detailed Lyons, who takes the second solo. The piece might feel loose, but when Taylor joins Cyrille at the end of a press roll in the middle of the piece, coming down right on the pulse with him, it's obvious that the group is following a structure.

"Enter Evening (Soft Line Structures)" brings Gale into the picture, with a mute, that blends with McIntyre's oboe for a thin, reedy but intriguing sound. The two basses contribute have more presence, Silva manically bowing while Grimes plucks away. The entire performance feels unprecedented and new - more new classical than jazz of any sort - but if you zero in on Cecil's playing, his execution has moments that resemble lines of Art Tatum with random accelerations adding a twist to them.

The nearly 18-minute side two opener "Unit Structure/As Of A Now/Section" is where energy and forward motion really coalesce. Ironically, the horns (McIntyre now on bass clarinet) and drums begin the piece in a sinister mood, dark chords and rolls, only to have the mood broken by a flighty arpeggio from the piano. 

The horns sit out on "Tales (8 Wisps)." Most of the time, the basses seem to step back as well, though Silva's bow appears early in the relatively short piece. It's largely a conversation between Cecil and Cyrille. Some of the pianist's lines sound familiar; stuttered ideas that would also feed into solo performances on albums like Silent Tongues. 

In more recent interviews with Cyrille, he has shed some light on what he was playing with the Unit, incorporating more straightforward drumming techniques into the music. Without digging up the exact quote, suffice to say it shed light on the idea that Taylor's work didn't simply come out of nowhere. There were elements that preceded it. Lyons did play with a tone that was a direct lineage from Charlie Parker. If Bird had lived another 15 years, who knows - he might have sounded like Lyons.

Years after hearing this and Conquistador, I wrote a review of Intents and Purposes, a reissue of Bill Dixon's 1967 album on RCA. Dixon had played on Conquistador and hearing his album suddenly made me realize that Cecil's work at the time might not have existed in a vacuum. There were other "free jazz" players besides him who were pushing towards something that could not be summed up easily with words like that.  

Nearly 60 years later, it still sounds fresh and open to deep, repeated listens. And it's still hard to describe this music. This new remastered edition is the perfect opportunity to either reexamine this monolithic session or investigate it for the first time. 

As gesture Jazz became: Billie's right art bent at breast moving as light touch. Last moments, late father no use to sit and sigh the pastors have left us gone home to die.