2011 · Album
Birdland, Neuburg 2011
Recorded November 2011, Birdland Jazz Club, Neuburg an der Donau, Germany · Fundacja Słuchaj! Records · Released: 2020
Two Masters in Late Dialogue
Taylor and Oxley at the top of their game, locked in as active colleagues finding balance through thrust and parry.
When this recording emerged in 2020, nearly a decade after the session itself, it arrived as a gift to anyone tracking Cecil Taylor's later years. Taylor recorded sparingly in his final decades, so this November 2011 encounter with Tony Oxley in Neuburg became documentation of two musicians still operating at full power—a rarity worth paying attention to. Critic Michael Rosenstein, writing for Point of Departure, captured what makes it essential: Taylor working through his unit structures, spontaneously building those malleable clusters and fluid harmonic constructions he'd spent fifty years developing, while Oxley matched him as an active equal rather than a follower. That balance matters. Free jazz duos can dissolve into solo spotlighting or mutual obstruction. Here, the two men find grip—Oxley's crisp cymbal work, his particular gift for definition in open music, locks directly into Taylor's thrusts and parries, and together they move toward resolution without ever abandoning freedom. This is not Taylor in a nostalgia mode or Oxley proving his credentials. It's two masters still discovering what happens when they listen to each other, in real time, with no net. The recording quality is clean enough that you hear the details—the piano's interior resonance, the exact stick strike on cymbal—without the false polish of studio work. For listeners who know Taylor's earlier work, this sits alongside his best recordings. For anyone new to him, start instead with The Cecil Taylor Unit (1978), but come to this once you understand what his language sounds like. This is that language still being spoken fluently, in conversation.
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
