1999 · Album
Poschiavo
Recorded May 1999, Uncool Festival, Poschiavo, Switzerland · Black Sun · Produced by Not specified
Nearly An Hour at Sixty-Nine
Taylor's discourse subtly balances apparent opposites: formal versus flexible, spontaneous yet stylized.
Poschiavo arrived quietly in 2018, nearly two decades after the performance itself, but serious listeners heard it immediately. The Free Jazz Collective's Colin Green gave it 4½ stars and framed the recording as a masterclass in controlled spontaneity — Taylor somehow holding opposing forces in tension across a single fifty-eight minute piece. Derek Taylor at Dusted Magazine made room for it in his year-end picks. It found its audience fast among people who follow Taylor's work closely, though it never became a mainstream discovery.
What made critics listen so closely was the sheer scope of it: one continuous unbroken performance on a Bösendorfer grand piano, recorded live at the Uncool Festival in Poschiavo. Taylor was sixty-nine, still fully in command, and the recording catches him thinking through problems at the keyboard in real time — shifting between pulsating textures and hard-edged contours, finding elegant shading in the middle distances, never settling. There's no edit, no pause to reset. Just a musician working through an idea for an hour straight.
For longtime Taylor listeners, this sits alongside his other late solo work, but it's worth seeking out whether you know his catalog or not. It requires attention — there's no rhythm section, no melody line to grab, just the sound of a mind in motion. If you've heard Taylor's group records, you know he thinks horizontally, stacking ideas rather than stacking chords. Solo, without anyone else to push against, he's both more concentrated and more wandering. That's the real thing here.
Who's playing
Cecil Taylorpiano
