condition (record/cover): NM / EX

Newport, July 1957: the festival takes a flyer on the twenty-eight-year-old Cecil Taylor, splitting an LP between his quartet - with Steve Lacy's soprano aboard, two future revolutions in one front line - and the polished hard bop of the Gigi Gryce - Donald Byrd Jazz Laboratory. The result is one of the great documentary split releases in all of jazz: the mainstream present and the radical future sharing one piece of vinyl, 1957 arguing with itself in real time, and both sides making their case with total conviction - Gryce and Byrd's elegant craft is genuinely satisfying, which only sharpens the shock of what Taylor does to "Nona's Blues" on the other side. Taylor's Newport set was among his earliest major public exposures, an establishment stage briefly and bravely lent to the insurgency.

Japanese Verve pressing, clean and balanced. A historical document you can actually play for pleasure, repeatedly - both halves deliver, and the argument between them never gets old.