Cecil Taylor, Mary Lou Williams

condition (record/cover): NM / EX

Gatefold sleeve. Insert included. No obi.

Carnegie Hall, April 1977: Mary Lou Williams - pianist to the entire history of jazz, from Kansas City swing through the bebop midwifery of her Harlem apartment salons - meets Cecil Taylor in a two-piano summit that became one of the most argued-about concerts of the decade, and remains so. She came with a program tracing the music's whole lineage, spirituals to modernism, intending a dialogue; he came as weather, intending Taylor. The collision is real, audible and riveting: two titanic conceptions of the same instrument and the same tradition, refusing to blend, colliding in real time before a Carnegie audience unsure whether to witness or referee - and producing something stranger and more honest than agreement ever could have. Decades on, the concert reads less as failure than as the century's most public demonstration that the tradition contains multitudes that do not reconcile.

Pablo Live documented the whole encounter across two LPs, bless them. Japanese edition. History with friction - the best and rarest kind.