Rivets and Rivulets
Cecil Taylor + Tony Oxley, in and beyond 'Flashing Spirits'
The most breathtaking moment on Flashing Spirits, an album that scatters its gifts with a profligate hand, arrives about 30 minutes in.
As always, context is key. At this point in the recording — I clock it at 30:05 — we have spent half an hour with Cecil Taylor and Tony Oxley in a wild, open-spigot flow. In fact, the watery word that comes to mind is oceanic: I think of Hart Crane, in his 1926 poem Voyages, marveling at “this great wink of eternity, / Of rimless floods, unfettered leewardings.”1
Extend the metaphor, and it’s possible to understand the moment I’m indicating in terms of a storm-battered mariner washing ashore. Taylor, who up to this point has been scrabbling and thundering across the piano, abruptly finds a point of rest; I picture his hands leaving the keys. Dark overtones hover from his soundboard and start to decay, as Oxley decorates the air with a light, arrhythmic row of flams, combining the toylike ping of cymbal bells and the terse, dull thwack of Chinese toms. Each musician has been furiously attentive to the other’s moves, as they continue to be — but with the sort of pause that could only have come out of exhausting so many options, and considering what others remain. I hear thrilling possibility in that brief suspension of onrushing sound. Crucially, I also hear two equals, listening.
Flashing Spirits was recorded at the Outside In Festival, some 40 miles south of London, on Sept. 3, 1988. Taylor and Oxley had performed together for the first time just seven weeks prior, on July 17, during Taylor’s epic residency at the Kongresshalle in Berlin. That inaugural duo performance saw release as the album Leaf Palm Hand, and was later included in the monumental FMP boxed set In Berlin ‘88.
The new album comes to us from the label arm of
, run by the critic Phil Freeman. Freeman, who published a fine biography of Cecil Taylor last year, is obviously just the right person to bring us this previously unreleased work. He does so in collaboration with Leo Feigin, founder of Leo Records. Flashing Spirits is available on Bandcamp, but I bought a copy on CD and can attest that it’s well worth the $15. Its stylish cover art is by Phil’s wife, I.A. Freeman, and the package features a textured card-stock gatefold with an LP-style insert sleeve. (Phil says it’s being released in a limited edition of 500, so act accordingly.)
Listening to Flashing Spirits in full, which I’ve done a few times and counting, will get a person thinking about the unique chemistry between its makers. In the case of Taylor and Oxley, that’s a subject worth unpacking. Freeman does so with care in his book, but I thought I’d take this opportunity to elaborate.
∞ Tuned Drums ∞
The header above is a playful tweak to Val Wilmer’s formulation about Cecil Taylor, from her epochal book As Serious As Your Life. Wilmer actually uses “Eighty-Eight Tuned Drums” as the title of her Cecil Taylor chapter, and I will confess that when I first saw that phrase — at 18 years of age, before I had really warmed to Taylor’s art — I found it seriously off-putting. Why would I want to listen to someone who pounded on the piano as if every key represented a target to strike?
That was youthful ignorance talking; Wilmer is indispensable as a Cecil chronicler, and her metaphor doesn’t delimit his style so much as it offers a key.2 A few pages into that chapter, she notes that “at every stage of his development, Taylor has played with total sureness and the tremendous drive that is his hallmark. Sometimes he will have several melodies going on at once, all of them in different keys, and even the musicians who play with him are only able to keep up with him and complement what he is doing as a result of the hours they have put in working together in private.”
I’ve told this story before, so forgive me if you’ve heard it — but I had the instructive pleasure of seeing Taylor in duologue with three master drummers within the span of six months: first Max Roach (Columbia University, June 4, 2000), then Elvin Jones (Blue Note Jazz Club, June 21, 2000), then Tony Oxley (Tonic, Nov. 4, 2000). Of the three, only Oxley struck me as completely and profoundly in tune with Taylor’s biorhythm: he had put in those hours, in public and presumably in private, and he seemed to meet each unchartable move as if he’d been expecting it.3 This might be a false memory, but I recall walking out of Tonic and saying to a friend: “I feel like I just saw two Cecil Taylors,” which was glib even if it held a spark of truth.
Oxley himself locates the untruth in my quip: “When you’re playing with Cecil Taylor, there is only one Cecil Taylor,” he told Ted Panken in 2001. “And when you become involved in the music, things happen that have nothing to do with strategy or even preparation. The best preparation I’d say is be fit and open your ears!”4
What’s fascinating to consider is the way in which Oxley’s background actually did prepare him to plunge into the deep end with Taylor’s music. His well-reported 2023 obituary in The Guardian includes this paragraph:
Born into a working-class Sheffield family, Oxley played the piano for a while during childhood but took up the drums as a teenager. While playing in dance bands at night, he was sacked from his regular work in a cutlery-making firm for sleeping on the job.
A cutlery-making firm. What influence might that have had on a person so acutely sensitive to sound?5 Oxley answers that question in the Panken interview. “When I was growing up, leaving school, I was a steelworker in Sheffield,” he said. “The sounds and the rhythms of that kind of environment, I’m pretty sure, had more influence on me than I have ever appreciated, and I am starting to think now that maybe that has quite a significant role to play in the way I work with percussion.”
But it’s not as if Oxley was shaped only by clangor. For a few years in the early ‘60s, he played society music on the Queen Mary, taking three trips a year. “Of course, on those trips, with the 36-hour turnaround in New York, that 36 hours was consumed entirely by chasing around, looking for the best music we could find,” he told Panken.
So as a kind of pattern of activity, I would say to you that it would start in the late afternoon at the Metropole, listening to the Woody Herman Big Band. The Metropole was just one long bar; the band was all strung out along one line, like washing. There were mirrors on the opposite wall so they could see each other through the mirrors. And people stood at the bar, so that meant you’d [be] two yards away from the trumpet section. That was unbelievable! Lift you off your feet. Then we’d move on to Birdland to hear Blakey. Then we’d move on to the Vanguard and hear Bill Evans or Miles Davis. Then we’d move to The Five Spot to hear the legendary quartet with Thelonious Monk.
It would be difficult to describe a better education in modern jazz, given the compressed timeframe.6 Concurrently, Oxley was starting to collaborate in an avant-garde context, with guitarist Derek Bailey and bassist Gavin Bryars. He was developing a fascination with classical mavericks like Webern, Schoenberg and Cage. “So this was happening at the same time as hearing the developments in improvised music, i.e., Cecil Taylor-Bill Dixon,” he said, “and my interest was continuing to develop in what’s called Classical music, only the second Viennese School. So there were a lot of influences going on with me at that time.”
Oxley applied these influences to a career that centered, for a time, in swinging. He was the house drummer at Ronnie Scott’s, a gig that put him in contact with all manner of English and American jazz musicians. He toured with Bill Evans, and logged meaningful time with Sonny Rollins. Yet there was obviously something in him that called from outside any idiomatic expression.
The Scottish journalist David Peacock profiled Oxley for the July 1978 issue of Sound International — so, precisely a decade before the drummer first encountered Taylor. “To some people Tony Oxley is probably a weirdo, who incorporates kitchen utensils into his music,” Peacock wrote. Then he quoted the artist:
I use a variety of percussion, some homemade, which sits on a frame. I also use a homebuilt electronics system, built for me by a friend in Liverpool. The things on the frame are amplified and fed through electronic devices capable of many different sounds, but usually I get sounds by manipulating the existing equipment.
I think it’s no surprise that Oxley was predisposed to click with Taylor.
Space in Every Direction
Whenever Oxley was asked to describe the experience of performing with Taylor, he tended to speak in terms of spatial dimensions. His first exposure to Cecil Taylor’s music had involved two Blue Note releases, Conquistador and Unit Structures. Later he had the chance to see Cecil in action at Ronnie Scott’s, playing in a group with saxophonists Sam Rivers and Jimmy Lyons and drummer Andrew Cyrille.
In the Panken interview, he’s asked to recall the feeling he had when he first performed with Taylor in ‘88. “Cecil seemed to give the space in every direction for what seemed to be the right thing to do at the time, and the right way to go, and how to respond to the way he was working,” Oxley says. “So I think there was a lot more openness in the rhythmic side of the music to match the harmonic side.”
That ideal of openness — not a musical descriptor so much as an imaginative one — defined my experience of seeing Oxley with Taylor. Eight years after hearing them at Tonic, I attended the first set of a weeklong engagement at The Village Vanguard, reviewing it for the New York Times.7 This was Taylor’s first proper booking at the Vanguard in nearly a decade, and I’m pretty sure it was Oxley’s first set in the room. Lorraine Gordon, who ran the club, had enormous admiration for Cecil Taylor; she’d rave about him, as a pianist and a person, at every opportunity. So despite what might have looked like an avant-garde incursion, the Taylor-Oxley duet was hospitably met.
I won’t parrot my review here, save for one paragraph:
Mr. Oxley is an obsessively texture-minded drummer, and he operates in this setting as a shadow rather than a foil. For much of the set he kept up a stir of cymbals and bells — his rig includes an orderly row of them — along with the occasional tap or trill on a tom-tom or bongo drum. Often he seized on a rhythmic idea of Mr. Taylor’s, before dissolving it into static. He was serenely undaunted by fluctuations in energy or pulse.
Open Plan(e)
The last time I saw either Cecil Taylor or Tony Oxley, they were performing with the dancer Min Tanaka, another abiding C.T. collaborator and confidante, at The Whitney Museum of American Art. This was part of the monumental exhibition Open Plan, which was duly recognized as a major cultural event.
In my review for JazzTimes, I noted that “Oxley, seated not at a drum kit but rather a tabletop electronics console, played a series of metallic-sounding chimes and other clanky industrial sounds, which ultimately felt like a distraction. After a while he seemed to realize this, falling silent for most of the hour, resting his hands in his lap.” In his book, Freeman quotes Jay Sanders, a curator at The Whitney, who describes Oxley’s setup as “two CD players with volume pedals, and he was just sort of fading himself in and out, playing pre-recorded tracks, which was so beautiful and strange.”
Freeman also provides a firsthand account of a small-ensemble concert later in the run, on April 23. “Around the half-hour mark,” he writes, “everyone fell silent but Taylor, who spun out beautiful weblike lines for a few moments, suspended in air. Then they roared again, with Oxley sampling bits of Taylor’s earlier playing and throwing it back into the mix, distorted and industrial.”
I savor that last detail, because it feels so true to form, and to the relationship that these two artists forged over almost 30 years of musical co-conspiracy. To the end, Oxley was receiving, transmuting and returning Taylor’s signals. As Freeman notes, this turned out to be Cecil Taylor’s last public performance. He passed in 2018.
Tony Oxley died the day after Christmas in 2023 — seven weeks after the release of his final album: The New World, an set of electroacoustic percussion duos with Stefan Holker, recorded the previous year. I daresay a part of Cecil resides there too.
Poetry buffs will recognize “Voyages” as a florid manifestation of Hart Crane’s unrequitable homosexual desire. I’m not trying to be cute, drawing a line between this literary ardor and the sexual identity of Cecil Taylor. I do feel, however, that something about the grand clash of Romantic and Modernist style in Crane’s poetry can also be located in Taylor’s music.
Not that kind of key.
Please don’t construe this as a value judgment, because I found immense delight in the duos with Max and Elvin. If a genie presented me with the option to experience any one of those performances again, it would be the Cecil-and-Elvin summit, because I remember it as such beautiful sorcery from start to finish, on an intimate rather than grandiose scale.
I’m quoting, here and elsewhere, from an interview that Ted Panken reposted in 2023, on the occasion of Oxley’s death. It’s an illuminating read, if you’d like to delve further. Oh, and the emphasis is mine.
I’m reminded of an indelible line from “Hyperballad,” one of my favorite songs by Björk. In it she sings of standing on a cliffside and tossing over whatever she can find — “like car parts, bottles, and cutlery” — every morning, out of some enlightened form of boredom.
For more on this side of Oxley’s career, I’ll recommend you to a thoughtful obit by Vinnie Sperrazza at Chronicles.
Gift link! Please enjoy.
Love it when you take up “out” improvising!
Great essay. The Hart Crane reference is spot on. Well done in every respect!