1996 · Album
Corona
Recorded November 1, 1996, Total Music Meeting, Berlin · FMP (digital 2018, CD 2021) · Format: Live
Two Towering Artists in Conversation
The concert was among the last times the pair played together, another link in a long and solid chain.
By 1996, Cecil Taylor and David S. Murray had been playing together for decades, and Corona captures them near the end of that relationship. Recorded live at the Total Music Meeting in Berlin on November 1, 1996, this is a late-career document—not a summation exactly, but a moment where two radically uncompromising musicians could still find common ground in real time. Taylor was in his late sixties; Murray had long since moved beyond any orthodoxy. What you hear is not the sound of artists conserving energy or repeating themselves. The music is restless, precise, built from fragments and timbral collisions rather than traditional time-keeping.
The duo section especially reveals what made their partnership durable. Rather than swing or accompany in conventional ways, they construct intersections of sound—hard drum-top rattles, rumbles, triangle hits, cymbals—meeting Taylor's piano not as support but as equal pressure. There is no comfortable groove here, no settling in. Both men seem acutely aware of each other's next move without needing to telegraph it. This is what mature collaboration sounds like when both players refuse to simplify.
Corona sat unreleased for over two decades before FMP issued it digitally in 2018, then on CD in 2021. For committed listeners of either artist, it matters precisely because it does not try to be final or definitive. Critic Pierre Crépon noted in The New York City Jazz Record that the music resists easy assessment, and that resistance is its value—another occasion to examine what these two had to offer, uncluttered and direct.
Who's playing
Cecil Taylorpiano
Sunny Murraydrums
Where next?
More by Cecil Taylor
All 77 albums →
The musicians on this record
Their own records, close in time
