Enter, Evening

Jimmy Lyons (alto sax), Ken McIntire (alto sax, oboe, bass clarinet), Eddie Gale (trumpet), Cecil Taylor (piano, bells), Henry Grimes and Alan Silva (bass) and Andrew Cyrille (drums). From the album Unit Structures (1966).

In 1960 and 1961 Taylor worked extensively for the Candid label, where he plays less limited by chords and beat changes, loses his connection with bebop, his playing has more intense textures and the separation between chords and melodic lines disappears through the unstoppable flood of his sound. In 1962 he founded his quartet Cecil Taylor Unit, which remained until 1986. He toured Europe for six months and even at the height of free jazz his music was regarded as too advanced.

In 1966 he recorded the emblematic album Unit Structures for Blue Note Records in which the flow of the beat is released from the metric of conventional jazz. From then on he began to play solo concerts, several of which were recorded, most notably the 1974 album Silent Tongues. In 1979 he published Cecil Taylor Unit with his group, which had become a sextet, and was asked to write and perform a piece for the ballet dancers Mikhail Baryshnikov and Heather Watts. In the early 1990s he founded the Feel Trio and in 2006 Chris Felver filmed the documentary All the Notes about him. He died in Brooklyn in 2018 at the age of 89.

This musical piece is a kind of ballad that begins with Lyons, Gale with mute, Taylor and McIntire with the oboe. Some time later Grimes joins in playing with the bow and together create an enigmatic environment that gradually increases in intensity. Suddenly there’s a silence and Gale, Taylor and Grimes come back at a low volume, and after a while Silva also enters playing the double bass with pizzicato. Then Gale and Grimes are left alone delivering very quick phrases that are hardly heard. Next Gale leaves  and Taylor and McIntire come in, creating a trio with Grimes that also plays at a breathtaking pace. After that, a quartet is created with Lyons, Taylor, Silva and Cyrille offering a calmer speech, but then Lyons retires and Taylor takes the reins and gets more percussive. Lastly they all come together in complete disorder until the end.