Cecil Taylor - Whitney Museum 2016

On 14th April 2016, Cecil Taylor gave two final performances as part of the Whitney Museum’s ‘Open Plan’ exhibition dedicated to his work. In the first set, he performed with Tony Oxley (electronics) and Min Tanaka (butoh dance); in the second, with a larger ensemble, the New Unit, featuring long-term collaborators Bobby Zankel (alto saxophone), Elliott Levin (tenor saxophone, flute, voice), Harri Sjöström (soprano saxophone), Tristan Honsinger (cello), Albey Balgochian (bass), Jackson Krall (drums), Jane Grenier Balgochian (spoken word) and Min Tanaka (dance). This recording is the end of the first set. Unfortunately, Tanaka’s visual contributions cannot be conveyed except in the photographs reproduced here, so what we hear is, to all intents and purposes, Taylor solo: the closing moments of the final solo of his career. Ben Ratliff’s description below sets the scene.
“In the final stretch, after Mr. Oxley had gone mostly silent, Mr. Tanaka moved his right arm up and down, making it undulate to the end of his hand. Then he got behind Mr. Taylor, making similar motions on either side of him, nestling his head intimately near Mr. Taylor’s, ending up in a fetal position behind the piano chair. Mr. Taylor, unbothered, possibly not knowing what was going on behind him, played some of his most quiet and devastating music then.
A crude way to represent what Mr. Taylor and Mr. Tanaka have in common is to say that both are describing motion, one in pitch and rhythm, and one in physical space. And sometimes they go to extremes, as if describing encounters with life’s horrors and beauties in a very interior way. But extremes weren’t necessarily the point; a kind of hyper-attention to elegantly rendered motion was the point.”
(Ben Ratliff, ‘Cecil Taylor’s Mysteries Don’t Resolve at the 88th Key’, New York Times, 2016 -- www.nytimes.co...)
Photographs by Michelle V. Agins.