2002 · Album
....... Being Astral and All Registers – Power of Two......
Recorded May 2002, Ulrichsberg Festival, Ulrichsberg, Austria · Discus Records · Released: 2020
Two Masters in Telepathic Communion
Taylor and Oxley play with uncanny precision, sudden stops yielding to moments of genuine beauty.
This is Cecil Taylor and Tony Oxley at work, and Oxley's presence here is the ballast that makes the session cohere. Taylor's piano language—fractured, torrential, operating in clusters and shards rather than linear melody—demands a drummer who won't impose order but will meet abstraction with abstraction. Oxley does exactly that. He doesn't keep time; he creates texture, responding to Taylor's sudden stops with silence, matching his eruptions with his own polyrhythmic density. The result feels less like accompaniment and more like two separate instruments locked in genuine conversation.
Recorded live at the Ulrichsberg Festival in Austria, these performances capture both musicians in their seventies, yet they attack the material with an intensity that belies their age. There's no nostalgia here, no mellowing. Instead, there's precision and risk—long passages where nothing seems anchored, then moments where the music crystallizes into something almost tonal before dissolving again. Jazzwise reviewer Daniel Spicer nailed it: there's something uncanny about how they move together, how a sudden stop feels almost choreographed despite being completely spontaneous. Avant Music News observed they played with the energy of musicians half their age, and that's not hyperbole; this is exhausting, uncompromising music.
For listeners accustomed to Taylor's solo recordings or his earlier free-jazz collaborations, this late-career encounter with Oxley offers something different—not softer, but more refined in its abstraction. If you've never heard Taylor and percussion in genuine dialogue, start here.
Who's playing
Cecil Taylorpiano
Tony Oxleydrums
Where next?
More by Cecil Taylor
All 77 albums →
The musicians on this record
Their own records, close in time
