1990 · Album
CT: The Dance Project
Recorded July 8, 1990 · FMP · Location: Akademie der Künste, Berlin
Taylor at Seventy: Dance and Restraint in Berlin
A multimedia event where piano, bass, and percussion meet four dancers in studied, angular conversation.
By 1990, Cecil Taylor had spent four decades pushing the piano into territories most musicians wouldn't attempt. CT: The Dance Project (2008) documents a specific moment — a Summer Music concert at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin on July 8, 1990 — where Taylor, now in his sixties, collaborated with William Parker on bass, Masashi Harada on percussion, and a group of four dancers. This was not a return to anything. It was Taylor continuing to ask what music could be alongside other bodies moving through space.
What makes this recording unusual for Taylor is its actual restraint. The piano doesn't dominate or overwhelm; instead, it occupies one voice among several. Parker and Harada create their own sound worlds, and the musicians seem conscious of the spaces between them as much as the sounds they make. The interaction is careful, the mood-setting deliberate. This isn't the frenetic, torrential Taylor some listeners know from his earlier solo work. It's angular, yes, but composed rather than urgent.
Reviewer Henry Smith noted the album is marked by restraint and careful interaction, with flow created as much by silence as by sound. This late-period collaboration shows Taylor still willing to reshape his own language when working within a different context — not softening his practice, but genuinely listening to what dancers and other musicians needed from him in that room.
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