Fly! Fly! Fly! Fly! Fly!

Avant garde jazz nirvana. I wrote a review on this forum a while ago saying "Silent Tongues" was the first CD one should check out if you were curious about the forbidding oeuvre of Cecil Taylor, but this is another great place to start if you are a Cecil novice, and it's essential if you love Cecil solo. (Cecil Taylor, for those who do not know, is the founding father of Free Jazz, pianist, born c. 1930, who threw out the window song forms, countable time, traditional swing, the pentatonic scale, the 12 bar blues and all the other hallmarks of jazz observed even by revolutionary contemporaries like Trane and Ornette, in favor of founding his own boundless, noisy, but ecstatic idiom). Recorded in fall, 1980, at the MPS/Pausa studio in Germany for the small Polygram-distributed GDR label of that name, Fly!...etc. is noteworthy for a few reasons. First, by my reckoning, it's the last officially released Cecil album hitherto only available in its original vinyl incarnation to be released on CD. (Not counting the recent limited edition vinyl-only Oxley duet lp). Second, it is one of the very few instances of Cecil solo recordings made in the studio, and both the original LP and this tremendous remaster captures every nuance of the sounds CT draws from the 97-key Boesendorfer piano with extraordinary clarity and presence. Third, it is a very accessible program, without sacrificing any of the thunder and lightning fans expect from Cecil; throughout the album's 45 minute or so unbroken length, Cecil takes a single motif, blue yet declamatory, and transforms it into a fantasia of seismic bass rumbles (where the extra octave in the Boesendorfer comes in handy) and waterfall treble flurries, with every color in the spectrum appearing in between, but never losing sight of the original "tune," to which he inevitably returns, albeit in myriad disguises. Critics have been fairly unanimous that this album ushered in the more lyrical and relaxed Cecil we've all enjoyed for the last thirty plus years. "Lyrical" and "relaxed" are relative terms in Cecil-land; he still wields his piano like Thor's hammer, and as the excellent liner notes state, this comes as close as I think we'll ever hear to what Beethoven must have sounded like when he improvised, in feel if not in content. I now own 15 or 16 Cecil Taylor solo albums on CD, that is all of the official releases, and they are among the crown jewels of my collection. This one is an essential addition.

Fly! Fly! Fly! Fly! Fly! is a masterwork from a true original. I have owned the LP version of Fly! since the mid-80's. Fly! is a mature work of art from a true master of the art. Unlike many, perhaps most, of Taylor's 1990's solo concert recordings, which move moutains, Fly! is more like the contemplative reflections of a master upon questions of life and death, cycles and changes, and ancient spiritualities. Large swaths of the music are highly lyrical in their reflectiveness, and this aura of reflection makes Fly! (almost) downright accessible in its lyrical sense of space, ruminative exploration, and transparency. You can practically hum along with the first track, entitled "T(Beautiful Young'n." Of course, in a Cecil Taylor recording, the sense of lyrical reflection can only last so long. No different here. The last track "Rocks Sub Amba" gets back into the essential Taylor approach of moving mountains, of thunderous and extremely powerful key-busting, and just generally raising hell. You really have to love it.

Also: the recording quality is superb - warm, yet totally clear. And Taylor's recordings that are well-recorded do a much better job of revealing his musical intentions.

I've waited for a long, long time for this to get onto cd. And now it's here. Make sure you don't miss it.