** Heavy tip-on 2LP gatefold jacket with ink pigment and metallic foil stamping on uncoated paper, metallic spot color gatefold. Detailed, color printed 12-page listening guide. ** Live at the KiMo Theater Albuquerque 1979 is a major newly recovered document from Cecil Taylor, recorded on November 20, 1979, during an unusually rare American West tour by his ever-changing Unit. Presented by Black Editions Archive, the release captures Taylor at a point of extraordinary openness: still operating with the full ferocity, density and architectural command that made him one of twentieth-century music’s decisive forces, but working with a new quintet whose unusual instrumentation creates a distinct atmosphere of space, colour and shifting perspective. Taylor’s originality was never a matter of simply extending jazz piano. Across more than six decades, he developed a language of rhythm, touch, poetic structure and collective improvisation that remained stubbornly unassimilated by the jazz mainstream. He did not so much win over the institutions as wear them down through the sheer force and brilliant execution of his ideas. Even after Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellowships, the shock of his music remained potent: when Taylor first performed at Lincoln Center in 2007, the house lights were turned on during the concert, an absurd but revealing reminder that his work was still heard as an outlier presence - if not an outlaw one.

The Albuquerque recording presents a Unit in transition. Of the 1978 group, only violinist Ramsey Ameen and alto saxophonist Jimmy Lyons made the trip west with Taylor. Lyons, the bel canto voice at the center of every Cecil Taylor band since 1961, brings a lyrical acuity and spring-loaded rhythmic intelligence that remains essential to the music’s identity. Ameen’s violin adds another high-register line, sometimes cutting through the ensemble with wiry intensity, sometimes blending into Taylor’s dense harmonic fields. Re-entering the fold after a decade-long absence is Alan Silva, whose bass and cello contributions give the group an unusually broad low- and middle-register presence. Jerome Cooper, making his Cecil Taylor Unit debut, brings drum kit, balafon, shehnai and whistle into the ensemble, expanding the rhythmic language beyond conventional percussion. This combination produces a sound world quite unlike Taylor’s frequently in-the-red, sometimes gladiatorial 1978 units. The music remains charged, relentlessly alert and physically demanding, but it has a different kind of luminosity. The strings create long arcs of resonance; Lyons’s alto moves through Taylor’s piano architecture with piercing clarity; Cooper’s diverse instrumentation introduces sudden shifts in grain, color and ceremonial pulse; Silva alternates between the grounding gravity of bass and the more mobile, exposed voice of cello. Together, the musicians inhabit Taylor’s structures without simply submitting to them. Every incarnation of the Unit gave its members freedom to infuse the music’s architecture with their own personalities, and this particular formation makes that principle unusually audible.

The recording itself has an exceptional history. KUNM and New Mexico Symphony engineer Mike Wolff built a custom bandshell on the stage of Albuquerque’s historic KiMo Theater, using direct and indirect symphonic microphone placement to capture the ensemble for NPR’s Jazz Alive. The program never broadcast the concert. The tapes then remained dormant for more than forty years, until Tom Guralnick - producer of the original event and director of Albuquerque’s Outpost Performance Space - brought them to the attention of Black Editions Archive. The result is not merely a recovered tape but an unusually natural and dynamic live recording, capable of conveying both the ensemble’s force and the fine internal detail of its interactions.

The performance also provides a crucial point of comparison with the later It Is in the Brewing Luminous, recorded in February 1980 with the addition of Sunny Murray. There, Taylor’s ensemble would transform again, adding a second drummer and pushing the rhythmic architecture into another state of turbulent expansion. In Albuquerque, the music is less overdetermined by percussion and more spaciously distributed across five voices. The result is a concert that allows individual textures to surface, recede and re-enter in unpredictable ways, making its roughly contemporary relation to the 1980 recording all the more illuminating. Black Editions Archive presents the release as a deluxe 2LP set in a heavy tip-on gatefold jacket, with ink-pigment and metallic-foil stamping, an extensive 12-page listening guide by Taylor scholar Ben Young, lacquers cut by Kevin Gray at Cohearent Audio and audiophile-quality pressings from Fidelity Record Pressing. The production honors the quality of Wolff’s original work while making available a performance that has waited far too long to be heard.