Almeda is a live album by Cecil Taylor recorded during the "Total Music Meeting" at the "Podewil", the headquarters of the Kulturprojekte Berlin non-profit organisation, on November 2, 1996, and released in 2004 on the FMP label.

[1][2][3] In the album liner notes, Volker Spicker wrote: "The diversity of musical relationships within the ensemble, the profusion of changes and the form of the entity create a process which is as manifold as life and nature itself.

As in trance, the preconceived patterns of perception which normally put the world in a kind of schema, fade away..."[4] In his AllMusic review, arwulf arwulf wrote: "the nearly 77-minute performance ritual Almeda easily stands among Cecil Taylor's finest large ensemble realizations... Almeda's forces are expansive and colorfully unfurled... Taylor delivers poetry with his voice at the outset, and only participates with the piano during the closing movement, which lasts more than 35 minutes.

It's all very refreshing and intriguing, unlike anything else in both its mechanics and spirituality... At the piano, Taylor remains a force of nature, capable of expressing the full range of emotions from the most delicate to the most intense, with a sense of pathos and humor, and inspiring his followers' incredibly creative improvisations.

"[7] In a review for Dusted Magazine, Marc Medwin remarked: "I have usually preferred Taylor's solo efforts to those of the Unit, but Almeda is an entirely different animal.... this 76-minute piece focuses on timbral exploration, which is apparent from the first hushed moments.

Even compared with Taylor's own high standards, Almeda is a striking piece for large group improvisation, a composition of continual reinvention, constant revolution, where the whole is vastly superior to the sum of its parts...