Cecil Taylor 1976 – “Petals” and the Hamburg Onkel Pö concert

Of the tours undertaken by the various Cecil Taylor Units up until the death of Jimmy Lyons in 1986, the one from 1976 is both one of the most fascinating in terms of repertoire and among the most tantalising in terms of documentation, in that the recorded evidence we have of it is of considerable quantity, but also frustratingly fragmentary and muddled. For instance, the circulating 3 hour version of the June 30th Hamburg Onkel Pö concert, on the face of it one of the most comprehensive documents of what might happen in a typical full show by the group, is in fact a complete mess, featuring as it does a questionable track order, unacknowledged mid-track edits, missing material (including one passage which is included on the other shorter circulating version), and one section which is duplicated identically in two different tracks. The order in which this material was actually performed is inevitably a matter of speculation – however, my personal opinion is that it can be broken down into performances of two compositions, probably as separate sets although there is no way of knowing which was first and which was second. One of the compositions is the piece which appears in an earlier version under the name “Petals” on the Ann Arbor Michigan recording from April 15th; the other is (as far as I know) otherwise unrecorded. (Rick Lopez’s assertion in his David S. Ware Sessionography that the Hamburg concert develops material from “Streams and Chorus Of Seed” from DARK TO THEMSELVES is not correct in my opinion). The “Petals” performance from Hamburg is scattered in completely disordered chunks amongst all 3 titles on the circulating “full” recording; but familiarity with what appears to have been Taylor’s standard practice on this tour of having the first ensemble passage within a performance comprise a statement of the full (often quite lengthy) composed “head”, with shorter excerpts later repeated as bridge passages between solos (DARK TO THEMSELVES for instance follows this pattern), allows one to put together a reconstructed version which I feel confident is a lot closer to what actually happened.

Here is my account of what one finds on the circulating 3-hour version of this concert:

1. THE DUMPING PETAL POINT AND SUNFLOWERS (OPENING):

• The first 8:09 of this track belong to the composition which also comprises DON’T SEND ME NO PEBBLES FROM GEORGIA and FIRST WORD – I – II. In my opinion, this passage is the last part of the performance of this composition (or at least the last part of it for which the recording has survived).
• At 8:09 there is an edit (not an obvious one, but close listening makes it evident), and the rest of the track is from a performance of a different composition.

2. THE DUMPING PETAL POINT AND SUNFLOWERS (CONCLUSION):

•  This track continues on from the previous one (editing from 40:08 of “(OPENING)” to 0:00 of “(CONCLUSION)” renders them seamless). It is unclear how much more of this piece was played after the fade of this track, or indeed whether the 8:10 point of “(OPENING)” was the start of the performance – these two lengthy chunks are all we have of the Hamburg performance of this piece.

3. DON’T SEND ME NO PEBBLES FROM GEORGIA:

• The first 19:19 of this track are the opening of the composition which was also performed under the name “Petals” at the Ann Arbor concert. At 19:19 there is an edit to a section which is duplicated in FIRST WORD – I – II, and which does not belong at this point in my opinion.

4. FIRST WORD – I – II:

• The opening 32:23 of this track are a continuation of the same composition, and in my opinion should follow on from the 19:19 point of DON’T SEND ME NO PEBBLES FROM GEORGIA (although I believe there is about 20 seconds of music missing between the two – more on this later). At 32:23, there is an edit to the same passage which occurred at 19:19 on DON’T SEND ME… – in my opinion this is the correct place for this passage, although unfortunately the FIRST WORD has a slightly mangled start and is also about a minute-and-a-half shorter.

As I have said, there is a passage included in the other circulating version of this concert (taken from a radio broadcast) which is not present in the 3-hour version – therefore, to attempt an as-complete-as-possible reconstruction of the concert one needs both versions. However, there is an added complication in that they do not run at the same speed – the broadcast version is just under a semitone higher than the 3-hour version. It is hard to say which is closer to the genuine pitch – if we can assume that the piano was tuned to A440, then neither are quite right. For my personal edit of this concert, I chose to slow down the broadcast version by about 60 cents.

Here is how to reconstruct the two compositions played in this concert – I’ve put the “Petals” composition first for convenience, though it is impossible to know which way round they were actually performed:

COMPOSITION 1 (“Petals”):
– Segment 1: 0:00-19:19 of DON’T SEND ME NO PEBBLES FROM GEORGIA (from the 3-hour version)
– Segment 2: 0:00-32:23 of FIRST WORD – I – II.
– Segment 3: The entirety of the broadcast version of DON’T SEND ME NO PEBBLES FROM GEORGIA (once the speed discrepancy issue has been dealt with – for me, that took this track from its original length of 29:50 up to about 31 minutes). If you do not have the broadcast version, then the best substitute is 19:19-44:52 of the track DON’T SEND ME… on the 3-hour version. The broadcast version has an extra 5 minutes of material at the end which is not found anywhere on the 3-hour version, but is still seemingly not quite contiguous with what I believe to be the following section.
– Segment 4: 0:00-8:09 of THE DUMPING PETAL POINT AND SUNFLOWERS (OPENING)

COMPOSITION 2 (unknown):
– Segment 1: 8:09-40:08 of THE DUMPING PETAL POINT AND SUNFLOWERS (OPENING)
– Segment 2: 0:00-29:49 of THE DUMPING PETAL POINT AND SUNFLOWERS (CONCLUSION)

This is the simplest way to reconstruct the concert – however, those whose copy of the 3-hour version of this concert is the one recently circulating on Dimeadozen.org will also want to substitute in as much as possible from the rest of the broadcast version, as large stretches of the 3-hour version are disfigured by interference noise (which sounds like the result of a corrupted CD-R – I do not know whether previously circulating versions of the 3-hour version are also afflicted by this problem). For those who want to do this, the track on the broadcast version called “THE DUMPING PETAL POINT AND SUNFLOWERS PART 1” corresponds to 0:00-16:06 of “…(CONCLUSION)” and the track called “THE DUMPING PETAL POINT AND SUNFLOWERS PART 2” corresponds to 16:22-22:08.

In the analysis below, all references to track titles and timings are based on the 3-hour version.

PETALS – The composition.

The composition “PETALS” is built of a series of motifs played by the 3 horns, some played in unison or octaves, some antiphonally, and some in a loose overlapping counterpoint (which might lead to brief semi-improvised developments). Several of these are immediately repeated, and larger phrases can often be broken down into smaller repeated sub-motifs. In a linear statement of the “head” such as occurs at the beginning of both the Ann Arbor and Hamburg performances, none of the phrases are returned to once left, although they will reappear later in the performance, and a lot of the motifs are closely enough related to remind one strongly of each other. Assigning letter names to phrases, the head at the start of the Ann Arbor performance (comprising about the first 5:30) can be broken down as follows:
A A B B C C D D E F G H I J K K L
and comparison with the opening of the Hamburg performance (found at the start of “DON’T SEND ME NO PEBBLES FROM GEORGIA”) shows that this was fixed. The only structural difference up to and including phrase L is that in Hamburg, there is no piano intro and phrase A is only played once – this might indicate that the start of the recording is missing, but possibly not, as I will address later. Here for comparison is a breakdown by time of when the phrases appear in the Ann Arbor and Hamburg performances (note: if one is referring to the YouTube clip above, the performance actually starts at 0:20 following Taylor’s verbal instruction ‘Petals, just once through – Petals‘, so all timings below should be adjusted accordingly):

Phrase               Ann Arbor:      Hamburg:
(Piano intro)     0:00
A                         0:15
A                         0:39                     0:00
B                         1:02                     0:23
B                         1:25                     0:47
C                         1:44                     1:13
C                         2:00                     1:29
D                         2:16                     1:45
D                         2:37                     2:08
E                         3:00                     2:28
F                         3:17                     2:42
G                        3:40                     3:04
H                        3:57                     3:18
I                         4:17                      3:32
J                         4:35                      3:50
K                        4:43                     3:57
K                        4:55                     4:10
L                        5:08                     4:23

Following phrase L, the two performances diverge significantly for the first time, as while the Ann Arbor performance develops into a collective improvisation, the Hamburg version continues with further composed material which does not appear in the Ann Arbor recording (although it is impossible to know whether this material was added to the composition between April and June, or whether it was played later in the Ann Arbor performance at some point after the prematurely faded ending of the surviving recording). This material can be designated as follows:

Phrase            Hamburg:
M                      4:42
N                      5:04

This leads into an extended piano/drums duet – the standard practice in 1976 seems to have been that each composition would feature in some order a piano/drums duet and a feature for each of trumpet, alto sax and tenor sax in turn, all of these sections being a minimum of ten minutes long and often closer to twenty. These features would be separated by ensemble statements of composed material and/or begin with the soloist alluding to one of the composed motifs. In Taylor’s own playing, the relationship between composition and improvisation is much harder to entangle as they are so inextricably linked in his piano language, but at 12:15 in this piece he makes an unusually clear reference to phrase A in the midst of his duet with Edwards.

At 18:33, the horns re-enter and begin another run-through of the “Petals” head. Phrase A is again only played once, and phrase B also occurs just once before the erroneous edit at 19:19. Taking up from there with “FIRST WORD – I – II”, we have phrases C to L played in the same order as before from 0:00-3:20, with C, D and K repeated as expected. I am inclined to suspect that phrase B was also played twice and the first statement of it is missing from the recording, as there seems to be a somewhat abrupt lift in intensity at the start of “FIRST WORD” implying that the two sections of the recording are not quite contiguous. If this is true, and all the phrases are repeated here as in Ann Arbor apart from phrase A, then it could well be the case that the singular phrase A at the start of “DON’T SEND ME…” is not due to the opening of the recording being cut off, but that the composition had been modified since April to omit the phrase A repeat. This can only be speculation, however.

At 3:20, Lyons starts to play phrase M, but Ware moves into improvisation, leading to a brief collective passage which turns into an extended feature for Ware. After nearly twenty minutes of trio improvisation, Ware drops out at 23:18, and then the texture drops further to solo piano at 24:10. This is the precursor to the reentry of the horns at 24:33, where for the first time composed material from a later part of the “Petals” head is played separately from the opening. The passage from 24:33-25:28 consists of phrases J-K-K-L, and then after a brief piano-drums interlude Malik enters for his feature at 25:29.

Malik’s feature contains some oddities, which might be cited as counter-evidence to the separation of the two compositions I argued for earlier on. He begins with a composed phrase, but not one from “Petals” – rather one which first appears played by the ensemble at 12:03 of “THE DUMPING PETAL POINT AND SUNFLOWERS (OPENING)”. Then at 28:52, Taylor clearly refers to the harmonies which underly the phrase that will occur at 12:49 in this piece. Whether this indicates that the two compositions were considered as related by Taylor, and what it implies about the order of the performances (are these allusions to something that will happen later, or that happened earlier? Either way, a gap of at least three-quarters-of-an-hour separated this trio improvised passage from the ensemble composed material it appears to reference…)

Malik’s feature is followed by Jimmy Lyons’s (at 37:12 in “FIRST WORD”, or 24:14 in “DON’T SEND ME NO PEBBLES FROM GEORGIA”, as it falls within the duplicated passage.) Lyons also begins by referring to a composed phrase, but this time it is from the “Petals” head – the first 35 seconds of his feature are a statement and looser paraphrase of phrase F.

While the preceding sections have often been bridged by about 45 seconds of piano and drums, after Lyons’s feature there is a 5 minute section of Taylor and Edwards before the reentry of the horns. When they enter (at 53:19 (“FIRST WORD”) / 40:31 (“DSMNPFG”)) it is with the phrase sequence M-N, which now detaches itself from the rest of the “Petals” head to become the main theme of the rest of the piece. These two phrases are here played twice in a row, which then leads into a full ensemble improvisation.

Moving to “THE DUMPING PETAL POINT AND SUNFLOWERS” there is a reduction in texture, moving through solo piano – tenor/piano duet – tenor/piano/drums trio – tenor/drums duet – piano/drums duet over the course of the first 6 minutes. At 6:07, the horns enter once again with phrase M, followed by N at 6:36, leading to a semi-improvised development which swells and then winds down to the end at 8:09.

The material from the edit at 8:09 onwards, though it starts in a similar harmonic area, is not I think motivically related to the “Petals” head, and as stated earlier my opinion is that it makes most sense to regard the remainder of the recording as a separate composition (while acknowledging the questions raised by the allusions in Malik’s earlier feature). This starts in more balladic territory, coalescing into an ensemble “head” from 12:03-14:02, which then, after features for Malik, Lyons, Ware and Taylor, begins to be repeated at 29:32 of “TDPPAS (CONCLUSION)” just before the fade-out.