Mujician I & II: Piano Solo [Import]

1. All Time, All Time

2. I've Got the Map, I'm Coming Home

3. Dan Sing Music/First Part

4. Dan Sing Music/Second Part

5. I Hear Your Voice Again

Editorial Reviews

From Jazziz
The solo-piano performance has obviously come a long, long way since such 19th century burners as Chopin, Liszt, and Gottshalk dazzled royalty and the burgeoning middle classes, since Jelly Roll Morton held forth at fancy houses and mining camps, since Art Tatum raised the standard for virtuosity, and even since Cecil Taylor (never mind Keith Jarrett) abandoned conventional song forms for intensely physical, totally improvised recitals. British-born, internationally renowned pianist Keith Tippett clearly derives from that distinguished and diverse lineage.

Though linked in the late '60s with first-generation Euro-jazz-rock-prog groups like Soft Machine and King Crimson, Tippett really made his mark in the '70s, leading the 50-member Centipede and 22-piece Ark ensembles, as well as collaborating with English free(r)-jazz types, South Africans-in-exile, and his wife Julie Driscoll. His two "Mujician" recordings reissued here by German FMP - five tracks ranging from 10 to 20 minutes in length - date from '81 and '86, and are akin to Tippett's current playing, as witnessed by his long-standing quartet at the Musiqué Actuelle fest in Victoriaville, Quebec last May.

An explorer and master of the keyboard's entire range and the piano's interior, too, Tippett is more interested in textures, densities, dynamics, and articulation than in melody, Western harmony, or jazz-related (i.e., swing-referent) rhythm. He summons vast yet simultaneously delicate sonic fields - rumbling in the bass registers or trilling up high - rather than narrative lines. And he expands his palette by preparing his instrument à la John Cage, exploiting a creaking piano stool, duetting with a music box, rubbing the wires directly, blowing simple flutes, and vocalizing sparely.

Although Tippett doesn't indulge in any overtly linear structures on this CD (unless one counts the vague allusion to a folk song about nine minutes into track five, "...I Hear Your Voice Again..."), his work always has compelling momentum. His contrasting episodes, employing clusters that may well be dissonant but could function as soundtracks for meditation, too, develop and recede over a constant pulse - at the end of a "song" you do get the sense of having arrived.

Mujician I & II: Piano Solo,Keith Tippett,FMP,Canterbury Scene,Jazz,Prog-Rock/Art Rock,Rock/Pop

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