In many ways the Candid period was the warm up for Cecil Taylor to become Cecil Taylor on Blue Note. Here he is doing the odd standard, stating a theme no less. And swinging. Given the mesmerisingly personal language he went on to create, whereby the piano acted as orchestra and drum corps at the same time in order to smash through harmonic-melodic orthodoxy, the very notion of Taylor doing ‘tunes’ may be disconcerting to those who are enamoured of masterful albums such as Conquistador and Unit Structures. Yet there is still much to enjoy here, above all because of the first stirrings of Taylor’s subversion within a head-solo-head model. He is already pummeling away at chords so as to blast them into showers and streams of notes, often with the starkest jolts of tempo, that would become the eye of the storm model for his later work. There is also the blues. Taylor bangs it out potently, smacking down the left hand with real relish while the right gets busy like a stride maestro taking giant steps into the unknown. Bolstered by Dennis Charles and Buell Neidlinger’s hard-wrought drums and bass and Archie Shepp’s occasional forays on tenor sax, Taylor dominates proceedings here, showing that he was as much a part of the Tatum-Ellington-Monk lineage as a departure from it. From the old came the new.