Cecil Taylor: Garden - 1st Set

opis:
"Nature neither ages nor stays the same, it recycles and thus re-identifies itself perpetually, and we continually experience it from a new perspective. Likewise with Art, therefore it'simpossible not to hear the music of Cecil Taylor - akin to a force of Nature - with different ears 34 years on. Similarities may be recognized, a few details confirmed, but the response must embrace meaningful change, or the music, and the recipient, are not alive, cavorting in the same time/space sensibility.

The garden that is re-invigorated and re-defined does not die. Taylor's choice of the garden to represent this 1981 performance has its roots in his longstanding belief that creativity is the ever-present condition of Nature (in our case, Life), and that his music in particular grew (and continues to grow) out of a personal engagement with the blues - a music, metaphorically, of the soil, grounded in the legacy of African Americans - and specifically an awareness of the innovative transformational powers of Duke Ellington. As he explained in the 1960s to A.B. Spellman (Black Music: Four Lives, Schocken Books),

"He could play a blues, but man, the way the thing was laid out it transcended the single idea of the blues. I'm still trying to come to grips with that, you know."
by Art Lange