"Taylor's aggressiveness and speed belie the incredible intricacy and precision of his compositions. Indeed, listeners of this performance might find themselves wishing to parse it out into a hundred or more sections (though doing so would be impossible) because the myriad themes throughout the piece explode like bubbles on a pot of boiling water, lingering just long enough for you to know that they were there before disappearing forever into the air." "Cecil's is a voice in the interruption of race and nation, just as it is a voice in the interruption of the sentence and, indeed, in the interruption of the word itself. He works the anarchic irruption and interruption of grammar, enacting a phrasal improvisation through the distinction between poetry and music in the poetry of music, the programmatic manifesto that accompanies the music, that becomes music and turns music into poetry. These things occur "between regions of partial shadow and complete illumination" in the cut." - Fred Moton --- Cecil Taylor / piano, poetry Carlos Ward / reeds William Parker / bass Leroy Jenkins / violin Thurman Barker / marimba, drums, voice --- Recorded live in Vienna on the 7th November 1987. Tapes remastered by Alan Mosley. Design by Michael Bennion. Artwork by Lora Denis.

Taylor reads his poetry on the subject of composition, accompanied by small percussion.  "What kind of writing Is Chinampas? Cecil presents no graphic system - if Chinampas is writing, it is so in the absence of visuality. Under what conditions, then, could Chinampas be called "writing"? Perhaps within an understanding of writing more broadly conceived as nonverbal, as well as verbal, systems of graphic communication. Yet, since what we have there is nongraphic verbalcommunication, the legitimacy of its claim to writing is not self-evident. Nevertheless ideas of and about graphic systems are presented in Chinampas, sound blurrring vision in the improvisation of another writing; and image, position, and direction are so encoded- the visual-spatial so embedded -in the poem that what we have is something more complex even than some newly included Outside of writing. Rather, Chinampas is out from the outside of writing as it is conventionally defined or redefined in what have become conventional redefinitions. Writing is, in Chinampas, a visual-spatial-tactile improvisation of system that activates the aural resources of the language. The poem is an improvisation of writing not to be appropriated by, not proper to, an older and somehow more inclusive graphesis: it is not a valorization but an improvisation of the nonverbal; not an abandonment but a (re)sounding of the visual-spatial." - Fred Moton Great essay by Moten on this piece here. --- Cecil Taylor / poetry, voice, tympany, bells, small percussion --- Recorded at Doodlehums Studio, London 16th & 17th November 1987 by Alan Mosley. Artwork by Lora Denis. Original painting by Malik Cisse.

Cecil Taylor's poetry set to a live recording by Carlos Ward, Leroy Jenkins, William Parker, Thurman Barker and Taylor. "Taylor is leading the charge and all of these players know how to follow him, down an improvisatory highway that leads straight into a darkness beyond language. And perhaps, as he re-enters with his poetry at the very end of the work, that's what it's about anyway, going beyond language, ever beyond the place where it occurs to the place where it is conceived in spoken word and in music, which is but an extension of the human voice"." --- Cecil Taylor / piano Carlos Ward / reeds William Parker / bass Leroy Jenkins / violin Thurman Barker / marimba, drums, voice --- Poetry recorded by Alan Mosley 16-17th November, 1987. Music recorded live in New Morning, Paris, 13th November, 1987.