Air Above Mountains (Buildings Within) is a live album by Cecil Taylor performing a solo piano concert recorded at the Moosham Castle in Austria 1976

Air Above Mountains (Buildings Within) is a live album by Cecil Taylor performing a solo piano concert recorded at the Moosham Castle in Langau, Austria on August 20, 1976. The Allmusic review by Scott Yanow states 'Except for some brief moments, his music is quite in-tense, percussive, crowded and overflowing with passion. Taylor's longtime fans will find much to marvel at while newcomers to his music are advised instead to check out his earlier (and less disso-nant) sessions from the 1950s first'. In a brief tribute to Air Above Mountains in the Chicago Tribu-ne, journalist Jack Fuller wrote: 'To breathe Cecil Taylor's rarefied piano atmosphere, you have to have been acclimated. Straight jazz won't do it. Contemporary European art music is closer, thin on conventional harmonic structure and without recognizable melodic line. When you have learned to live in this thin but bracing abstract atmosphere, Taylor's improvisations are as magnificent as a mountaintop: hard, inaccesible and grand Nat Hentoff described Air Above Mountains as 'unyield-ingly absorbing - in terms of inexorable logic of its structures, the kaleidoscopic swiftness of his melodic inventions, leaps through pulsing time, and the oversize feeling with which all these elements are fused.

Additional Details

Label: Enja Records

Genre: Jazz

Run Time: 50 mins

Region: 0

Release Date: 06/07/02

UPC: 063757300526