Here’s a one of Lake’s more obscure/overlooked projections. I can’t see why as it’s another scintillating discharge of baroque densely detailed mellifluent odd & erratic Avant-Garde mastery that strolls it’s own disparate track with stark individuality. Core associates Pheeroan akLaff & Michael Gregory Jackson are once again entwined, performing two of the four trax as a trio with Lake on side two, & joined by the rather aberrant compository of three violins, a cello (bowed by the excellent Abdul Wadud) & a piano (Anthony Davis) for the A-side’s two tunes. Lake composes all tracks & they veer & contrast considerably between massively chaotic free-formations, highly melodious & abject atonal, soft & frenzied, coherent & agitated all with Lakes signature of super graceful amazingly controlled sapiential complexity & gigantic virtuosity.
Prolific debauchery & plenty of it! an edgy, intemperate leviathan casting a pall of threat as well as riotous wonder & technical brilliance Cecil Taylor’s splendour trails for fuckin’ decades & frequently clambers to unimaginable alcoves. so’ so much could be drafted, but this review will concentrate on the Nuits De La Fondation Maeght trilogy recordings (captured during live group performances in France in 1969), which for me has so far been his best work from a particularly enigmatic period. Taylor was playing sprawling immeasurably intense reckless refulgence & asymmetrical avant wizardry with the insane Andrew Cyrille, for me indubitably one of the most fantastic & original drummers ever. out of the many things that could be said, I would emphasise that Taylor & his unit redefined the elongated-outburst & prolonged-peaking coming with ceaseless surging’s of unparalleled clamour & volatility. frequently without intervals, extenuation or cessation they would dance an immensely detailed & dynamic squall within the singularity of remorseless & unforgiving outermost, fully-cyclic, hell-for-leather frenzy. a heteronomous hurricane & blitzing blizzard of ebullient fulmination Cyrille was able to maintain physically these momentous requirements but also inflect with a cycle of extensive improvisational embellishment & continually capricious contrasting.
