John Taylor
In Two Minds
CamJazz ****
This exquisite solo piano album features the distinguished Manchester-born jazz pianist’s three-part ‘Ambleside Suite’ and six other compositions: two by Kenny Wheeler (‘Phrase The Second’; and ‘3/4 pm’, the latter of which appeared on Wheeler and Taylor’s 2001 studio album, Moon); ‘Reflections in D’ by Duke Ellington (heard on Duke’s 1953 Capitol album The Duke Plays Ellington); and the remaining three Taylor’s own ‘Episode 3’, ‘Middle Age Music’, and ‘Calmo’.
In October last year the BBC organised a London concert that Radio 3 programme Jazz Line-Up later broadcast celebrating Taylor’s 70th birthday. Taylor played both ‘Coniston’ and ‘Ambleside’ solo, their deftly probing improvising lines that memorable evening drawn from the pools of the pianist’s huge experience captured just as evocatively on In Two Minds, an album that had by then already been recorded and mixed the November before in the famed Bauer Studios in Ludwigsburg, north of Stuttgart in Germany, some six years after Songs and Variations, an album that Taylor had largely recorded there. Airy, passionate in Taylor’s clearly defined impressionistic style that has proved so influential on a new generation of leading players as different as Richard Fairhurst and John Turville, In Two Minds is a significant achievement, full of sublime rhapsodic moments and intimate asides that draw you in and never let you go.
Released on 13 January