2008 · Album
Conversations With Tony Oxley
Recorded February 2008, Chamber Music Hall of the Berliner Philharmonie, Berlin · Jazzwerkstatt (2018 release) · Musicians: Cecil Taylor (piano), Tony Oxley (drums)
Two Voices in Perfect Disagreement
The improvisation on this album is total from both players—listening music that demands complete attention.
By 2008, Cecil Taylor had spent fifty years redefining what the piano could do in jazz and beyond. Conversations with Tony Oxley (2018) captures him at eighty-two, still uncompromising, recorded live in Berlin with Tony Oxley, a drummer equally committed to free improvisation without safety nets. This is not a retrospective or a victory lap. It is two musicians at the absolute height of their powers, testing each other in real time.
What makes this duo work is asymmetry. Taylor dominates the surface—his fingers moving across the keyboard in cascades, angular phrases that refuse resolution—but Oxley is never submissive. His cymbal work splashes and settles, sometimes pulling back into near-silence, sometimes answering Taylor's aggression with space instead of noise. The music stops. You hear nothing. Then it starts again, heavier. Jack Kenny, reviewing for Jazz Views, caught the essential tension: the intensity varies, stretching both men, silence becoming as important as sound. When they lock in, as Duck Baker noted in The New York City Jazz Record, it feels like the music flows through them from somewhere outside themselves.
This is not background music or a document of decline. Taylor remained searching, restless, and Conversations with Tony Oxley proves he had no interest in comfort at any age. The album sat unreleased for a decade before appearing on Jazzwerkstatt in 2018—not because it needed refinement, but because the right moment hadn't arrived.
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
