'elements geometric and chromatic'

['Chinampas', track 5]

'Unit Structures', from the album of the same name, seem to be Taylor's own term for the musical cells or quanta (take your metaphor from biology or physics as you wish) that form the microstructure of his music. Yet they are not merely little building blocks, they are alchemical formulae that enable him to create his music ('angle of incidence / being matter ignited' - the opening words of 'Chinampas'). They are 'unit', but they are also 'structures', implying the relationship of smaller parts to a larger whole - a hierarchy not predetermined but nonetheless present, just as Taylor usually refers to his bands as the 'Cecil Taylor Unit'. Like the fractal, the unit can contain in embryo, or at least relate metonymically to, all that occurs over the longer scale. ('a substitution of part for the whole' Taylor recites in a fabulously faux-pompous voice on track 7 of 'Chinampas'). Taylor's cells are basically riffs - but sometimes obviously so, such as the thundering Monk/Basie-like bass parts he sometimes tosses in, sometimes less so. They pile on top of one another and after one another, sometimes fulfilling all that the riff is supposed to (rhythmic propulsion, melodic hooks), sometimes being so multiple that they go beyond this into new musical areas, only to be all the more effective when they recur in identifiable form. And they are recognisable, instantly - such as the root - flat five - octave - root - flat five - major seventh figure found in kaleidoscopic but always identifiable form across Taylor's recorded oeuvre. Yet these are much more than merely the licks by which Taylor provides himself with an improvising vocabulary. Rather, they express the dialectic between improvisation and composition in Taylor's work - he is both improviser and composer or perhaps better, not exactly either, when he plays his own music. Brian Morton called him 'an epic singer' in the Wire 242, de-emphasizing 'originality at source while placing a radical new emphasis on the synthesizing skill of the improvisor'. Listen to Taylor's epic encounter with guitarist Derek Bailey from Berlin in 1988, 'Pleistozaen Mit Wasser' (FMP CD 16), and you hear the improviser at work. Taylor plays directly on the piano strings (something very rare now in his own groups), and when he comes to the keyboard uses far fewer of his 'licks' than one might expect, dealing directly with the material musical relationship between himself and Bailey. Then turn to the trio recording 'Celebrated Blazons' (FMP CD 58), also from Berlin and only three years later, and really listen to those 'licks'. Here is the master composer/improviser at work in the medium he himself has built from the ground up. (His bandmembers - bassist William Parker and drummer/percussionist Tony Oxley - inspire, cajole, reinforce and contradict Taylors pianism, but the framework in which they do so is clearly Taylor's alone.) His 'Unit Structures' are much longer than one might imagine - not just a mere couple of notes strung together, but more extended shapes, characterized by pitch, rhythm and texture. Following these shapes, one can begin to predict where Taylor will go next, only to be all the more surprised as he ducks the expected consequent to what we have come to hear as an antecedent. The internal shape of the unit structures, geometric and chromatic, is an integral part of their dialectical character.

The musical whirl continues to fill the Podewil. Time begins to lose meaning. We think we have the measure of the performance - we've reached a climax now, things will wind down (at least temporarily). But they continue climbing. Another peak has become visible as Taylor and Oxley mount what we thought must have been the summit. The audience begins to be exhausted, as well as exhilarated. Then it stops - midnight. Oxley announces that they will return for even more! We wait another half hour in a confusion of moods, and then they do return, for fifteen minutes of exquisite music. The energy and intensity is still there but there are other mountains to climb and the melodic strands now gleam in a way they could not in the midst of the tumultuous whirlpool we heard before.