Air Above Mountains
Air Above Mountains (Buildings Within) is a live album by Cecil Taylor performing a solo piano concert recorded at the Moosham Castle in Langau, Austria on August 20, 1976. Reception The Allmusic review by Scott Yanow states "Except for some brief moments, his music is quite intense, percussive, crowded and overflowing with passion. Taylor's longtime fans will find much to marvel at while newcomers to his music are advised instead to check out his earlier (and less dissonant) sessions from the 1950s first". In a brief tribute to Air Above Mountains in the Chicago Tribune, journalist Jack Fuller wrote: "To breathe Cecil Taylor's rarified piano atmosphere, you have to have been acclimated. Straight jazz won't do it. Contemporary European art music is closer, thin on conventional harmonic structure and without recognizable melodic line. When you have learned to live in this thin but bracing abstract atmosphere, Taylor's improvisations are as magnificent as a mountaintop: hard, inaccesible and grand." Nat Hentoff described Air Above Mountains as "unyieldingly absorbing – in terms of inexorable logic of its structures, the kaleidoscopic swiftness of his melodic inventions, leaps through pulsing time, and the oversize feeling with which all these elements are fused." Greg Tate