Cecil Taylor Unit – Dark To Themselves / Enja Records Audio CD 1997 / ENJ-2084 2

UPC 063757208426

Dark to Themselves is a live album by Cecil Taylor recorded at the Ljubljana Jazz Festival, Yugoslavia, on June 18, 1976, and released on the Enja label. The album features Taylor on piano with alto saxophonist Jimmy Lyons, tenor saxophonist David S. Ware, trumpeter Raphe Malik, and drummer Marc Edwards. (The album documents the only occasion on which Ware and Edwards recorded with Taylor.) The original LP release presented the music in edited form, while the CD reissue contains the complete performance, restoring sections that were previously excised.

The album liner notes feature Taylor's poem "Da", which was later reprinted in the collection Every Goodbye Ain't Gone. The liner notes also include the following statement by Taylor, taken from an interview with Joseph Chonto: "Music... is the force of nature which is what the sound is – the eternal sound. The beauty of whatever made those trees, those stones, the rivers... that is the living force I'm concerned with. That is the force that leaves me at those highest points of ecstasy... I'm trying to be in touch with and appreciative of... this day - the way the sky looked last night - extraordinary! ... The beautiful forces unleashed were not a manifestation of anger, but manifestations of the beauty of nature. What we try to do now is consciously bring the beauty of living experience and to share that."

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