Cecil Taylor

Featuring: Archie Shepp

condition (record/cover): NM / NM

Insert included. No obi.

1960, the Candid sessions: Cecil Taylor with Archie Shepp - the young tenor's recording arrival, raw and hungry - alongside Buell Neidlinger and Dennis Charles, in music that captures the exact moment Taylor's world stopped negotiating with convention and began legislating its own. "Air" breathes and detonates by turns; the interplay pushes past song form into pure structure-in-motion, composition and improvisation fused past the point of separation. Nat Hentoff's Candid label gave the new music dignity, proper studios and honest documentation when almost nobody else in America would, and the Taylor sessions are the label's crown jewels - the sound of the sixties being drafted a few months early. Shepp completists take note: this is where that enormous story starts, the tone already unmistakable.

Japanese CBS/Sony pressing of the Candid material, clean and powerful, the density fully resolved. Pivotal music, in every sense of the word, and still thrilling.