Welcome reissue of a legendary performance that marked after a lengthy hiatus the return to the stage of the 1960s iconoclast who pushed back the boundaries of the piano in terms of both improvisation and composition, or rather the continuum in which the two sit.

Cecil Taylor’s music is exhilarating precisely for the questions it poses on such relationships, and the very notion of conceptual ‘norms’, namely the quantity of information a player can produce and a listener process, and the speed at which the direction of a musical narrative can change.

In the company of the members of his renowned Unit – saxophonist Jimmy Lyons, bassist Sirone and drummer Andrew Cyrille – Taylor is on stellar form, and while his hyper rapid attack, a kind of stride vocabulary that sounds magically speeded up on a tape machine put into warp drive, is distinctive, it is the variety of ‘weights’ he produces that beguiles.

Some phrases fly through the air like slingshots while others hammer into the ground like boulders, making the keyboard not just a device for harmony and rhythm but a live mixing desk for the greatest imaginable extremes of bass and treble.

It is indeed the sense of Taylor pushing to the limits of what we think are high and low tones, while making us feel how physically engaged he is in the process, that makes this work truly timeless.