Chad Taylor

For whom you play, for yourselves, for the departed who live within you, for all the dilettantes who listen to you, for the young and the old, for the joyful and the sad, the melancholic of all stripes, for the innumerable, unnamed crowd that flits about on the earthly ball, these are the words of Baudelaire before he evoked the itinerant musicians, “one of the two played one of his compositions, and the other improvised beside him a variation, an accompaniment, an underscore”. I really like thi…

"The band showed up, four folks from three different spots on the globe -- Chicago (Vandermark, Reid); Nickelsdorf, Austria (Gustafsson); Philadelphia (Taylor). They assembled their gear and sound-checked at the studio. There was a four-way freedom at play, structures but liberties and no need for elaborate explanation. Everyone spoke the same shorthand. Cues were understood; timings were implicit and considered; space was made for chances to be taken. In creative music, you sometimes need to re…

Rob Mazurek’s creations, dedicated to these six artists offered to Tomeka Reid, Angelica Sanchez, and Chad Taylor, to interpret freely. A foundation laid for these improvisations in the foursome’s forays into Mazurek’s music with the larger ensemble. Here something becomes distilled. Interaction is direct. The unit is unitary, the dynamics are gently modulated, the sounds are tendered with deliberation love and inter-ensemble generosity.

"The Recursive Tree features a rather remarkable trio consisting of John Blum on piano, tenor-saxophonist David Murray, and Chad Taylor on drums. Although the three musicians had never before recorded together, they sound very much like a working trio. The title is inspired by a concept in mathematics that explains the architecture in nature arising from systematic growth over time. This algorithmic expression also illustrates the growth of Jazz through the art form’s incremental expansion of id…

Meditative moods from the Chicago duo of bassist Josh Abrams and percussionist Chad Taylor. With Taylor on mbira and Abrams on guimbri, instruments from diverse African states, finding a new pairing that moves past world music and jazz into something new, to do with dance, meditation, listening and convergence. Natural Information Society's Abrams has been using the guimbri, a lute-style bass, for years, but it's rarely sounded better than it does here, alongside Taylor's resonant mbira. Taylor …

Artist and musician Rosa Barba paired up with drummer Chad Taylor for their first duo record, In a Perpetual Now of Instantaneous Visibility. Documenting a September 2019 performance and installation at New York's Park Avenue Armory, part of an invitation by pianist Jason Moran, the CD's two mesmerizing tracks clock in at over 30-minutes each. Patiently built as collaborative soundscapes, they feature Barba's unorthodox conjoining of cello and film projector in which she uses the celluloid as an…