taylor! braxton! parker! oxley!

I would have loved to have seen the Cecil Taylor/Anthony Braxton/William Parker/Tony Oxley summit meeting, but no-one deemed it necessary to bring them to Belgium, so a, um, deluge of press and web commentary will have to do:

Alexander Hawkins [via Taylor Ho Bynum, who also gives the long-awaited account of Nicole Mitchell's Vision Festival set]: "the group felt much more than the sum of its parts: fairly remarkable given those constituent parts..."

Words and Music: "Eyes were on Cecil and [Braxton], I suppose, for this unique meeting – yet what combat there was occurred under good-natured rivalry – better to see it as a high-powered collaboration."

John Fordham: "The rest of the evening had Taylor, Parker, Oxley and multi-saxist Anthony Braxton on a single, seamless, mostly improvised jam, full of dynamic contrasts and idiosyncratic, on-the-fly logic."

A dissatisfied Night After Night commenter: "I found the whole thing rater (sic) dull."

[added by The Improvising Guitarist]

Dominic Lash: "the gig was in all ways one of the best concert-going experiences I have ever had."

Starting tomorrow and for a week, listen to it for yourself.