Celebrated Blazons

Celebrated Blazons is a live album featuring performances by Cecil Taylor with William Parker and Tony Oxley recorded at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin on June 29, 1990, and released on the FMP label.

[3] Reviewer Thom Jurek wrote, "This date was recorded at the 1990 Workshop of Free Music in Berlin, and the ensemble plays one long, 56-minute improvisation... as formidable players challenge and then unite with one another in a frenetic set of modes, tempos, and atmospheres until they reach a horizon, mutually agreed upon as a point of entering silence.

[1] The authors of The Penguin Guide to Jazz wrote: "Oxley's drumming is a more European flavour than anything Taylor's other regular drummers have created, yet it only serves to emphasize the huge rhythmic resources of the leader's playing.

"[6] Brian Morton stated: "Celebrated Blazons is another of the great Taylor records, not least because it finds him working with a group... that unmistakably restores his jazz lineage, but takes it off on a rhythmic and harmonic axis at right angles to the classic Lyons/Cyrille partnership.

Where the older group dispensed with a double bass, William Parker provides a rich accompaniment, the most resonant, symphonic playing since the heyday of Richard Davis, who was Eric Dolphy’s favorite bassist for a time"[7]