Cecil Taylor - Respiration: Live in Warsaw '68

Cecil Taylor Warsaw 1968: Street Maps and Barricades… a velocity, a complexity and an elegance borne of great pressure, light and focus, early childhood travelling in time to Duke's "Daybreak Express", then the light rapid transit of Teddy Wilson or Tatum, in teens introduced to Charlie Parker and Bartok’s cadenzas, perhaps the flocking notes of Messiaen too …

… the ecstasy of the moment of revolt: however long the deliberations, however difficult the ensuing struggle, the moment of revolt is ecstatic, and in the great revolutionary art, that moment is sustained beyond expectation, beyond all reason, time transformed into bliss; in his solo music, a rite both sacred and anarchic, Cecil Taylor found not just that moment but made it an intervention, an act of complete attention, rhythms massing within time itself (and themselves), yet finding that ground in an ecstatic period of time outside of time--eternity a unit of time bounded by no time...clocks inside time, clocks outside time, and alarm clocks, too…that moment of revolt stretched to time itself…

… within just a few months or years the primary mechanics of the great solo discourses of free improvisation would arise … Anthony Braxton, Evan Parker, Derek Bailey … suggesting Taylor’s wizardry of breadth and depth and velocity, first achieved on the traditional solo voice of the western tradition from Bach to “Bud on Bach” (adding the analogous elegance of a compound-complex Coltrane cadenza), requiring a corresponding methodological response and universe from every instrument … as if Taylor in these hours of instants is improvising the world…the authentic individual as collective…
Stuart Broomer, April 2022