Search - Cecil Taylor :: Looking

Total Taylor

Joe Pierre | Los Angeles, CA United States | 01/29/2006

(4 out of 5 stars)

""Looking" is an excellent solo concert recorded during CT's return to Berlin for the Total Music Meeting in 1989, a year after his heavily documented and celebrated residence there for the Improvised Music festival in 1988. On this return trip, three separate concerts were captured, each with the title "Looking (Berlin Version)." This solo date was the first, followed by takes by the "Feel Trio" (CT, William Parker, Tony Oxley) and then "Corona" (Feel Trio + Harald Kimmig and Muneer Abdul Fataah on violin and cello).



The solo concert here is an absolutely typical CT effort, meaning that it's an amazing, sustained effort of nearly 70 minutes of punctuated attacks and musical decontructions following what is now an established motif. First, a lengthy main piece that spans tracks 1-2, but is really a continuous work. In it, CT's building up musical themes, then tearing them down, with a mostly continuous medium tempo, occasional extended forays into rapid-fire excursion, sections where he's pounding the poor ivories flat, and growling underneath it all (but no chanting or poetry this time around). Five different short encore pieces are then offered, restating the explorations covered earlier, this time in miniature.



A fine recording captured at the peak of CT's powers, and as good a place to start as any, but where to fit it in the rest of the CT discography? Among CT's now more than a dozen recorded solo dates, I'd rank it below Garden, Silent Tongues, Reinforced Concert (on the In East Berlin 2CD set), Erzulie Maketh Scent, or Willisau. Mostly just because those other concerts were either important milestones in CT's developing art, or offered some refreshingly new approach to the now firmly established Taylor formula. So, while "Looking" is awesome relative to the rest of the universe, it is just a bit more typical than other dates by the master."