When this gig was booked earlier this year, the great British pianist John Taylor was supposed to be promoting his latest album, 2081, in the company of some of his favourite pianists. His shock death on tour in France in July has turned tonight’s show into a wake – one that celebrated both Taylor’s life and work, and also the boundless potential of the piano.
The three pianists initially booked to appear – Gwilym Simcock, Michael Wollny and Richard Fairhurst – were joined by five further pianists, all either students of Taylor’s or musicians with whom he’d duetted in recent years.
All revisited various musical territories that Taylor had explored over the past four decades. John Turville and Tom Hewson played two improvisations, all dissonant vamps, quizzical lead lines and unresolved chord sequences. Playing solo, Liam Noble performed two of Taylor’s favourite standards – How Deep Is the Ocean and I’m Old Fashioned – with endlessly spiralling cycles of sevenths. Kit Downes and Tom Cawley played three lengthy duets, with Downes providing folksy refrains and Cawley impish lead lines. German pianist Michael Wollny duetted with saxophonist Trish Clowes on Enjoy This Day, a spacious modal jazz piece that Taylor wrote for his then wife Norma Winstone’s 1972 debut, Edge of Time.
Like any event with a rolling cast of acts, there was a touch of the Live Aid about proceedings, and you inevitably wonder who the “winner” was. Among a strong cast, the Freddie Mercury and Bono of the show were Wollny and Simcock, both in tandem with Richard Fairhust and, even more impressively, in duet with each other. All of these pairings started with cinematic soundscapes – plucked strings, high-pitched horror-movie sequences and rippling broken chords – and ended with a charged, hard-swinging rhythmic intensity, an often-overlooked component of Taylor’s music. A fitting tribute to a unique voice.
