2003 · Album
The Owner of the River Bank
Recorded September 2000, Talos Festival, Ruvo di Puglia, Italy · Enja Records · Personnel: Cecil Taylor (piano), members of the Italian Instabile Orchestra
Collision and Brilliance at the River Bank
Taylor's explosive piano meets the Instabile's soft voices in textured, vivacious free jazz.
The Owner of the River Bank puts you in a room where Cecil Taylor's hands are moving faster than your ear can follow, hammering out jagged clusters and low-register chords while around him the Italian Instabile Orchestra swells and retracts like a breathing organism. It's not bleak or austere—the music is restless, almost gregarious, with brightness from the trumpet section and Gianluigi Trovesi's alto sax cutting through trombone smears and the leader's nervous, mercurial runs. Taylor has always loved pairing his explosive piano with intense percussion, and here that dialogue gives the whole ensemble permission to be vivacious and varied rather than hermetic.
This was a live concert recorded at the Talos Festival in Ruvo di Puglia in September 2000, presented to mark the Instabile's tenth anniversary. By this point in his career, Taylor was in his seventies, and what's striking is not restraint or reflection but an undiminished appetite for collision—for seeing what happens when a visionary soloist meets a genuinely adventurous ensemble that listens back.
John Fordham's review in The Guardian noted echoes of Taylor's late-1960s concerto work, but called this performance less bleak and more sculptural, with the ensemble's collective confidence building textures that reward close listening. If you know Taylor's solo piano work or his earlier orchestral experiments, this belongs alongside them—proof that at any age, he could still find something new in free jazz's fundamental question: what can happen when musicians stop following a preset map.
Who's playing
Carlo Actis Datobass clarinet
Giovanni Maierdouble bass
Umberto Petrinpiano
Cecil Taylorpiano
Daniele Cavallantitenor saxophone
Mario Schianosaxophone
Gianluigi Trovesialto saxophone
Luca Calabresetrumpet
Alberto Mandarinitrumpet
Guido Mazzontrumpet
Lauro Rossitrombone
Giancarlo Schiaffinitrombone
Sebi Tramontanatrombone
Tiziano Tononidrums
Vincenzo Mazzonepercussion
Eugenio Colombowind instruments
Paolo Damianicello
Renato Geremiainstrument
Martin Mayeshorn
Where next?
More by Cecil Taylor
All 77 albums →
