Word: pianos
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...earliest recordings that will be broadcast during the orgy, those from the period 1955-1960, Cecil Taylor sounds approximately like a jazz pianist on acid. He performs with the standard format of a jazz combo: piano, bass, drums, and a hornman, in this case, soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy. The group records several versions of tunes from the standard jazz repertoire. Hearing Taylor perform the Duke Ellington-Billy Strayhorn composition "Johnny Come Lately" has almost the shock value that hearing Jimi Hendrix's version of "The Star Spangled Banner" must have had ten years later. The familiar jazzman's repertoire turns...
...namely in 1958, Taylor recorded an album with tenor saxophonist John Coltrane. It is difficult to find a more bizarre record anywhere. With Coltrane struggling mightily to cling to his own advanced harmonic world against Taylor's barrage of atonal clusters, jarring rhythmic patterns, and jackhammer assaults on the piano, a profound tug-of-war between two musical camps ensues. Nobody wins, and the tension produced is exhausting both for the musicians and listeners. Still, this has to be one of the most interesting recordings of American music ever made. It has the curiosity value that one might experience hearing...
Just hearing these early recordings, one takes pleasure from Taylor's sheer audacity. He does what all musicians at some point dream of doing: going on stage and banging on the piano with hands and fists, like a film technician simply searching for the neat sound effect. But as Taylor's recordings from the 1960s show, his music is much more profound than that...
...order to make the opera work, we had to silence the film," says Glass. Indeed, what the composer's creation most resembles is an old-fashioned silent movie shown with live symphonic music. Silent films were never really silent; an organ or piano was always playing along, so the audience experienced an alchemy of music and image. With his new scores for such classics as The Big Parade and The Wind, composer Carl Davis has demonstrated that silents can be operas without words. Glass has simply made the next logical advance...
...time he burst onto the international scene in 1960 with concerts in Finland and America. Like his late Soviet compatriot Emil Gilels, he had been a student of Heinrich Neuhaus' at the Moscow Conservatory, where he met Prokofiev and premiered the composer's Sixth, Seventh and Ninth piano sonatas. Unlike most of the fire- breathing Soviet wunderkinder, though, Richter came to the piano late, originally planning a career as a conductor; until he went to study with Neuhaus at age 21, he was largely self-taught...