Cecil Taylor: Steps

With the exception of three tracks for Gil Evans Into The Hot album, Taylors 1966 Blue Note sessions were the pianists first studio recordings in over five years. During the interim, he continued to develop his band concept on club dates and in concert. Steps demonstrates the high-energy improvising, intricate written passages, extreme dynamic shifts, and total rhythmic fragmentation that came to define Taylors work. The first few minutes are a formidable thickettangled lines and broken phrasesthat may discourage first-time listeners, but a structure reveals itself, the piece becoming an episodic sequence of recognizable events (saxophone solos, a piano/drums duo). The muddy, inaudible basses are a major drawback, though.