| Air Above Mountains | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|
 | ||||
| Live album by | ||||
| Released | 1978 | |||
| Recorded | August 20, 1976 | |||
| Genre | Free jazz | |||
| Length | 76:15 | |||
| Label | Inner City/Enja | |||
| Cecil Taylor chronology | ||||
| ||||
| Review scores | |
|---|---|
| Source | Rating |
| Allmusic |   [1] |
| The Rolling Stone Jazz Record Guide | [2] |
| The Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings |  [3] |
Air Above Mountains (Buildings Within) is a live album by Cecil Taylor performing a solo piano concert recorded at the Moosham Castle in Langau, Austria on August 20, 1976.
The Allmusic review by Scott Yanow states "Except for some brief moments, his music is quite intense, percussive, crowded and overflowing with passion. Taylor's longtime fans will find much to marvel at while newcomers to his music are advised instead to check out his earlier (and less dissonant) sessions from the 1950s first". [4]
In a brief tribute to Air Above Mountains in the Chicago Tribune, journalist Jack Fuller wrote: "To breathe Cecil Taylor's rarified piano atmosphere, you have to have been acclimated. Straight jazz won't do it. Contemporary European art music is closer, thin on conventional harmonic structure and without recognizable melodic line. When you have learned to live in this thin but bracing abstract atmosphere, Taylor's improvisations are as magnificent as a mountaintop: hard, inaccesible and grand." [5]
Nat Hentoff described Air Above Mountains as "unyieldingly absorbing – in terms of inexorable logic of its structures, the kaleidoscopic swiftness of his melodic inventions, leaps through pulsing time, and the oversize feeling with which all these elements are fused." [6]
Greg Tate referred to Air Above Mountains as "a marathon... architectonic solo where Cecil designs a cathedral with one hand and hammers that sucker together with the other." [7]
In an interview, pianist Craig Taborn stated that he borrowed Air Above Mountains from a library when he was 13 years old. He recalled: "It really had an impact on me... I don't think I understood it when I first heard it. But it really intrigued me because I could hear something going on in that long-form solo piano concert idea." [8]
In an homage to Taylor, pianist / composer Myra Melford said that, while in college, "I lived in this little cottage on a bay in Puget Sound, outside of Olympia, Washington. And I remember lying on the bed and listening to... Air Above Mountains over and over again. That was when I fell in love with Cecil. The way he moved between the high-energy, clustery textures and his sublimely harmonic lyricism felt so intuitive and natural to me." She recalled: "I had a very visceral, physical, kinetic response to his music; it was unfamiliar, on the one hand, but it also felt very familiar, as if my body would like to do that too... I felt such a kinship with him. It was as if he was saying, 'You can play the piano the way I do and make it your own'... I associate the first time I heard Air Above Mountains as a kind of initiation—that somehow Cecil was opening this doorway to another world for me... He lit a fire in me to aspire to make music that could do the same thing for others." [9]
Pianist Matthew Shipp stated: "The major models for solo pianists of my generation would be solo concerts — Keith Jarrett's Koln Concerts and Cecil Taylor's Air Above Mountains... Those albums provided a model for a new realm of improvisation, intellectual structure and emotion to explore with solo piano using a vocabulary that was very idiosyncratic to a particular composer. I consider myself as continuing the evolution of that idea, but in my own distinct way." [10]
Guitarist Ernesto Diaz-Infante stated that his 2017 album Manitas [11] was "inspired by listening to Cecil Taylor's Air Above Mountains. It's a spectral way of playing I have been developing, of avoiding melodies or harmonies, and using extended techniques, strumming, free-form fingering and picking, that verges on noise. I'm interested in automatism, letting the unconscious mind take control." [12]
In a 2018 interview, Drummer Jason Levis said that his project "No Ins & Outs", a duo with bassist Lisa Mezzacappa, was an "examination" of Air Above Mountains. He stated: "I had done a bunch of research on Air Above Mountains (Buildings Within) for my qualifying exams at UC Berkeley, and one of the main things I did was map out the limited number of musical materials he's using in those 45 minutes and how they relate to each other. He's juggling that handful of materials throughout the piece in this wonderfully masterful way. It is fast, clear, relentless. So that was our jumping off point; she and I did a lot of listening, talking, transcribing, and rehearsing... We wanted to uncover the way he works with his materials. How does he do that for 45 minutes with such clarity and density?" [13]
Steven Block's 1990 article "Pitch-Class Transformation in Free Jazz" [14] contains a gestural analysis of an excerpt from Air Above Mountains. Regarding Taylor's "constructionistic" approach to music, Block notes: "The working-out of material is an additive or subtractive process in which motives or pitch material are not only reinterpreted and reworked but also altered slightly from phrase to phrase in a chain of progression that may span a long period of time. The final material may not, therefore, necessarily be understood as related to the original except in the sense that it lies at the opposite end of a musical process." [15]
On October 26, 2019, as part of a lecture / concert series called "Unit Structures: The Art of Cecil Taylor" at Brooklyn College's Buchwald Theater, Professor Nahum Dimitri Chandler of University of California Irvine presented a paper titled "Air Above Mountains (Buildings Within): A Meditation". The abstract of the paper reads: "This discussion will propose the value of the pursuit of an understanding of the itinerary of Cecil Taylor's musical and general artistic cultivation from the eruptive articulation of his work Indent in early 1973 through his transformative realization in the work recorded as Air Above Mountains (Buildings Within), just past mid-year, summer, 1976). While several conjunctures of Taylor's work may be understood as pathbreaking, it may be proposed that the art announced by him across that temporal-space emerged as radical and remained decisive in a singular manner throughout his itinerary of practice." [16]
Cecil Percival Taylor was an American pianist and poet.
Myra Melford is an American avant-garde jazz pianist and composer. A 2013 Guggenheim Fellow, Melford was described by the San Francisco Chronicle as an "explosive player, a virtuoso who shocks and soothes, and who can make the piano stand up and do things it doesn't seem to have been designed for."
Joseph Jarman was an American jazz musician, composer, poet, and Shinshu Buddhist priest. He was one of the first members of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians and a member of the Art Ensemble of Chicago.
Don Gabriel Pullen was an American jazz pianist and organist. Pullen developed a strikingly individual style throughout his career. He composed pieces ranging from blues to bebop and modern jazz. The great variety of his body of work makes it difficult to pigeonhole his musical style.
Marty Ehrlich is a multi-instrumentalist and is considered one of the leading figures in avant-garde jazz.
Craig Marvin Taborn is an American pianist, organist, keyboardist and composer. He works solo and in bands, mostly playing various forms of jazz. He started playing piano and Moog synthesizer as an adolescent and was influenced at an early stage by a wide range of music, including by the freedom expressed in recordings of free jazz and contemporary classical music.
Air is an album by Cecil Taylor recorded for the Candid label in October 1960. The album features performances by Taylor with Archie Shepp, Buell Neidlinger, Denis Charles and Sunny Murray on alternate takes of material released on The World of Cecil Taylor (1960).
Live in Bologna is a live album by Cecil Taylor recorded in Bologna on November 3, 1987 and released on the Leo label. The album features a concert performance by Taylor with Thurman Barker, William Parker, Carlos Ward and Leroy Jenkins.
Chinampas is a spoken word album by avant-garde jazz pianist Cecil Taylor on which he reads his poetry accompanied by the sound of bells, tympani, and small percussion. Taylor performed all of the vocal and instrumental parts, which are overdubbed. A note on the album jacket states: "Chinampa – an Aztec word meaning 'floating garden'."
Avenging Angel is a solo piano album by American jazz pianist and composer Craig Taborn recorded in July 2010 and released on the ECM label.
Craig Taborn Trio is the debut album by American jazz pianist Craig Taborn. It was recorded in 1994 and released on the Japanese DIW label.
The Same River, Twice is an album by pianist Myra Melford which was recorded in 1996 and released on the Gramavision label.
Above Blue is an album by pianist Myra Melford's group The Same River, Twice which was recorded in 1999 and released on the Gramavision label.
Octopus is a live album by jazz pianists Kris Davis and Craig Taborn. The album was recorded in 2016 and released on 26 January 2018 by Pyroclastic Records.
The Transitory Poems is a live album by pianists Vijay Iyer and Craig Taborn. The album was recorded in March 2018 and released a year later by ECM Records.
The Willisau Concert is a live solo piano album by American musician Cecil Taylor. It was recorded on September 3, 2000, at the Jazzfestival Willisau, and was released in 2002 by Intakt Records. On the album, Taylor is heard on a 97-key Bösendorfer Imperial piano.
Shadow Plays is a solo piano album by Craig Taborn. It was recorded in concert in March 2020 and was released by ECM Records the following year.
At Angelica 2000 Bologna is a double-CD live album by American musician Cecil Taylor recorded during Angelica, Festival Internazionale Di Musica, Bologna, Italy. Disc 1 was recorded on May 10, 2000 at the Teatro Comunale Di Bologna, and consists of a three-part piece for piano and voice titled "Dance of All Seasons." Disc 2, titled "Rap," was recorded on May 11, 2000 at the Teatro Comunale Di Bologna, and features a long interview with Taylor by musicologist and musician Franco Fabbri, followed by a montage created by producer and festival director Massimo Simonini which blends excerpts from the interview with some of the piano music. The album, which contains a 40-page booklet featuring photographs and transcriptions, was released in 2020 by I Dischi Di Angelica.
Respiration: Live in Warsaw '68 is a live solo piano album by Cecil Taylor. It was recorded on October 18, 1968, at the Jazz Jamboree festival in Warsaw, Poland, and was released in 2022 by the Polish label Fundacja Słuchaj!. The album helps to document a period during which Taylor recorded infrequently, and captures a performance that took place roughly three months after the one heard on Praxis, Taylor's first recorded solo piano concert.
The October Revolution is a live album that documents a concert celebrating the 30th anniversary of the 1964 music festival known as the October Revolution in Jazz. It contains two long tracks, dedicated to composer, trumpeter, and festival organizer Bill Dixon, by a quartet that features drummer Rashied Ali, pianist Borah Bergman, saxophonist Joe McPhee, and bassist Wilber Morris, plus a single short track featuring the Myra Melford Trio, led by pianist Melford, and featuring bassist Lindsey Horner and drummer Tom Rainey. The album was recorded on October 22, 1994, at the Fez Room under the Time Cafe in New York City, and was released in 1996 by Evidence Music.
