It’s not often that we select a re-issue as our album of the week. But this holy-grail pair of super-rare UK jazz classics deserves a moment in the spotlight. Pianist Mike Taylor’s jazz career burned bright and short. He was a prodigious talent and prolific composer but suffered severe mental health issues and sadly fell in to drug abuse and was dead at the age of just thirty. He recorded just these two albums, original vinyl copies of which fetch thousands of pounds. Thankfully now courtesy of Everything Jazz, Decca and One Jazz’s very own Tony Higgins these classics are seeing the light of day again both digitally and on vinyl. You can buy copies here
Here’s an extended extract from the excellent press release that accompanies the promotion of the albums :
“Taylor’s key span of activity was from 1962-1968, a period that saw him go from being a well-groomed and bespectacled ivy-league figure to a shoeless, bearded and mentally ill vagrant. During that time, it is thought he composed over 200 pieces yet only a handful were ever recorded or performed. So scant are the details of his life that he could be mistaken for a work of fiction. In the space of a few years, Taylor contributed material to the New Jazz Orchestra, Colosseum and Cream, and composed many more pieces that remain unrecorded or lost, with charts and manuscripts destroyed by his own hand as his mental condition rapidly deteriorated.
Taylor’s brief jazz career began in the early 60s when he, like so many other aspirant jazz musicians, played the smoke-filled bars and clubs in and around London. Hailing from a comfortable middle-class home in Ealing, West London, Taylor soon emerged as a singular talent on the piano, his abstract and modernist sound fusing the styles of Horace Silver, Bill Evans, Thelonious Monk and Lennie Tristano with European impressionist and epigrammatic composers such as Satie and Debussy. His unique approach attracted like-minded players keen to expand and experiment with their repertoire. Band members included a young drummer called Peter Baker—better known as Ginger—with whom Taylor would go on to write songs for psychedelic blues rock legends Cream. Baker’s own Cream bandmate Jack Bruce would also play and record with Taylor, appearing on the Trio album.
Bass player Tony Reeves, who appears on Taylor’s debut album Pendulum, said Taylor “occupied a unique musical space. It was avant-garde but not fully, not enough to scare people. He could arrange standards, like ‘A Night in Tunisia’, starting in a completely different way; nobody else did that. That’s why I liked him; it was a band that was doing things that nobody else was. When you’re that young, you’re a sponge, you want to absorb all kinds of music and play it. A bit of danger, take risks. A little bit near the edge of the cliff, and sometimes looking over. Sadly, in Mike’s case, he would eventually go completely over.”
That precipitous fall was accelerated by Taylor’s prodigious intake of hash and LSD in ever greater amounts from the mid-60s onwards. By 1965, Taylor was still competent enough to record Pendulum, a stunning debut album, for legendary British jazz producer Denis Preston at the famed Lansdowne Studios. The album is split between reworked standards arranged by Taylor on Side A (including a radical rework of Dizzy Gillespie’s A Night in Tunisia) and original compositions from Taylor on Side B. Reviews were positive but sales were low, not helped by Taylor refusing to do any promotion. Despite Pendulum’s lack of commercial success, producer Preston invited Taylor back into Lansdowne studios in July 1966 to record a follow-up, Trio. Featuring Jon Hiseman on drums, and both Ron Rubin and Jack Bruce on bass, Trio builds upon the foundation set by Pendulum and presents Taylor inhabiting a unique musical space that defies the usual categorisation of cool, free jazz, or hard bop or modal; it’s many of these things and more.”
These are our Chosen Ones – our album(s) of the week.
