condition (records/cover): EX / EX (cut-out drill hole)

Gatefold sleeve.

The beginning, gathered up twenty years later. In Transition collects Cecil Taylor's earliest recordings, from the 1956 Jazz Advance session for the Transition label onward, and hearing them now is genuinely disorienting: the vocabulary is already entirely his, the clusters and the percussive attack are in place, and yet the material is standards and the format is a jazz quartet. Steve Lacy is on soprano for part of it, playing Monk tunes with a man who was about to make the entire framework unnecessary. Everything Taylor did over the following fifty years is audible in embryo here.

Blue Note double LP, gatefold. Where the most uncompromising career in American music begins.