Jalopy game out of bounds6/16/2023 Hi- Great choice for yet another window into CT’s solo piano conception from this period. So these tracks offer a snapshot of our man in jazz on the far edges of the commercial scene, recorded on May 29, 1973, in the nether-hours of a Tokyo morning, alone with a music whose imaginative possibilities reverberate so many years on. To my mind, this is what black avant garde music is all about - and in this league Cecil Taylor’s got my vote for MVP in any season. And then even learn the handy trick of going out of bounds to bring the ball back into homecourt. Because for any black person to get over in this country the way Mahalia Jackson sang about getting over, they have to learn to play the game without fouling out. Only here is where the responsibility of black artists to tradition becomes trickiest. This game playing nourishes both the poet’s iconoclasm and his faith in holy tradition - two character traits essential to any people whose artists must invoke release, revolt, and remembrance to survive a culture dedicated to the disposable. In Cecil’s music as in poetry, the game of allusion is played to give spiritual and historical resonance to a language of self-invention.
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