Forty-Four Thoughts for Cecil Taylor
Writing about a newly released 1973 Cecil Taylor concert in The Baffler:
It is stunning how fresh the music sounds, fifty years later. Technical innovations have been standardized, instrumental virtuosity institutionalized, but spontaneous musical communication on this level remains tantalizingly rare. It demands a superhuman intensity of focus, a clarity amid the chaos. While listening to the recording, ideas for this essay kept drifting through my head, but just as I made to write them down, the music would shake all of that away and pull me back into its shifting web.
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