A fine weekend of tennis and Tour De France –related excitement, most of which I spent in the red polka-dotted jersey, was brought to a close by an unforgettable concert at the Royal Festival Hall.  I had seen Cecil Taylor and Anthony Braxton sharing a bill here not long before the place shut for refurb, but here they were to actually share the same stage contemporaneously, for the first time ever.  A fact I found quite hard to believe given the hulking shadows these two cast across the free jazz field.

Although such a heavyweight line-up barely needed an undercard, surprise special guests  Polar Bear were given the task of warming us up.  Arriving 5 minutes late due to Rafael Nadal taking Roger Federer to that fifth set, I found them pootling away fairly inoffensively.  The longer they went on, the more Leafcutter John got stuck in and got his hands dirty, and it was this wild card element, along with some pretty lithe drumming from the colossus of ‘fros Seb Rochford, which raised them far above the mundane.  “Te” in particular saw Leafcutter John playing a squeaky balloon solo, before working with Rochford on reimagining the track as Can’s “Oh Yeah”.

Cecil Taylor danced on stage to begin an intermeshed piano/drum entrée with Tony Oxley, a man who drums with the casual manner of a geography teacher pointing out areas of deforestation on a map of the world.  The first piece stopped-and started, with Taylor pushing out some neat melodic phrases for Oxley to pat into rhythmic shape, the second piece was longer, flowing, and a bit boisterous.  It was very much like listening in to a conversation between two old men collapsing into bickering over who was first to court the affectations of some girl (called Penny…no, called Dorothy!) in some year (1947!  No, it must have been after we went fishing in the lakes, which was 1948…no, wait a minute…).  But with a bit more purpose.

Following a muscular William Parker bass solo, the group including Braxton were on stage together.  After my previous introduction to live Braxton (classical, mathy, swing-free), he was a revelation to me tonight, tearing up the first half of the concert with lengthy fiery excursions on sopranino, soprano, and tenor saxes, and contrabass clarinet, which had the others scrambling at his heels. I could barely hear Parker, that bear of a bass player, amongst this brutality.  As it went on, Taylor caught him up, playing some battering cross handed runs up the keyboard which probably earned him the maillots a pois rouges to Braxton’s maillot jaune.