Mike Taylor – Pendulum and Trio

Mike Taylor – Pendulum and Trio

2 super rare LPs reissued on vinyl and digital for the first time

Released on 25 July by Decca for the British Jazz Explosion series

Pre-order link from Everything Jazz: https://ukstore.everythingjazz.com/search?q=mike+taylor

Everything Jazz is an online record store for jazz music and culture

On 20 January 1969, the body of a young man was found washed up in a creek near Leigh-on-Sea, Essex. Distinguished by long hair and unkempt beard, it remained unidentified for over a week before the corpse was finally appointed a name. It was Mike Taylor, a 30-year-old jazz musician and composer who, with every passing year, becomes more of a fascinating character in the development of British jazz and whose story reads like that of a grand opera, embracing exceptional music, high drama, mental illness, drugs and death.

The extraordinary story of Mike Taylor reads like a tragic tale one normally associates with the very worst in rock n roll excess. There are echoes of Fleetwood Mac’s Peter Green, Syd Barrett, Vince Taylor (the inspiration behind Ziggy Stardust) and Nick Drake, plus a support cast which includes Cream’s Ginger Baker and Jack Bruce, Colosseum’s Jon Hiseman, and doomed occultist jazzer Graham Bond. And yet, at the very heart of the tragic tale is an exceptionally talented artist and two of the most prized and valuable British Jazz LPs ever recorded - Pendulum (1966) & Trio (1967). Both of these holy-grail rarities are finally getting a well-deserved vinyl reissue through UMG/Decca as part of the label’s British Jazz Explosion series curated by Tony Higgins.

Taylor’s key span of activity was from 1962-1968, a period that saw him go from being a well-groomed and bespectacled ivy-league figure to a shoeless, bearded and mentally ill vagrant. During that time, it is thought he composed over 200 pieces yet only a handful were ever recorded or performed. So scant are the details of his life that he could be mistaken for a work of fiction. In the space of a few years, Taylor contributed material to the New Jazz Orchestra, Colosseum and Cream, and composed many more pieces that remain unrecorded or lost, with charts and manuscripts destroyed by his own hand as his mental condition rapidly deteriorated.

Taylor’s brief jazz career began in the early 60s when he, like so many other aspirant jazz musicians, played the smoke-filled bars and clubs in and around London. Hailing from a comfortable middle-class home in Ealing, West London, Taylor soon emerged as a singular talent on the piano, his abstract and modernist sound fusing the styles of Horace Silver, Bill Evans, Thelonius Monk and Lennie Tristano with European impressionist and epigrammatic composers such as Satie and Debussy. His unique approach attracted like-minded players keen to expand and experiment with their repertoire. Band members included a young drummer called Peter Baker—better known as Ginger—with whom Taylor would go on to write songs for psychedelic blues rock legends Cream. Baker’s own Cream bandmate Jack Bruce would also play and record with Taylor, appearing on the Trio album.

Bass player Tony Reeves, who appears on Taylor’s debut album Pendulum, said Taylor “occupied a unique musical space. It was avant-garde but not fully, not enough to scare people. He could arrange standards, like ‘A Night in Tunisia’, starting in a completely different way; nobody else did that. That’s why I liked him; it was a band that was doing things that nobody else was. When you’re that young, you’re a sponge, you want to absorb all kinds of music and play it. A bit of danger, take risks. A little bit near the edge of the cliff, and sometimes looking over. Sadly, in Mike’s case, he would eventually go completely over.”

That precipitous fall was accelerated by Taylor’s prodigious intake of hash and LSD in ever greater amounts from the mid-60s onwards. By 1965, Taylor was still competent enough to record Pendulum, a stunning debut album, for legendary British jazz producer Denis Preston at the famed Lansdowne Studios. The album is split between reworked standards arranged by Taylor on Side A (including a radical rework of Dizzy Gillespie’s A Night in Tunisia) and original compositions from Taylor on Side B. Reviews were positive but sales were low, not helped by Taylor refusing to do any promotion. Despite Pendulum’s lack of commercial success, producer Preston invited Taylor back into Lansdowne studios in July 1966 to record a follow-up, Trio. Featuring Jon Hiseman on drums, and both Ron Rubin and Jack Bruce on bass, Trio builds upon the foundation set by Pendulum and presents Taylor inhabiting a unique musical space that defies the usual categorisation of cool, free jazz, or hard bop or modal; it’s many of these things and more.

As his mental state deteriorated and his LSD use increased, Taylor’s marriage collapsed and his appearance became ever more dishevelled. He sported a large unkempt beard with his hair growing down way past his shoulders and he walked around in bare feet; a sort of proto-hippy. Things were not helped when saxophonist and organist Graham Bond, a heavy drug user and occultist, moved in with Taylor. Bond’s own erratic behaviour, failed marriage and dire financial straits mirrored that of Taylor. Bond would eventually die in May 1974 under a tube train at Finsbury Park station aged just 36. Taylor ended up homeless, living as a mute vagrant, only communing with the deer in Richmond Park.

“By the time Trio was recorded, Mike’s madness had become so extreme that he and I had fallen out with each other and working together had become impossible,” says Dave Tomlin, who played sax on Pendulum. “The last time I saw him was when he arrived about a year later at the door of the London Free School where I was a resident music teacher. Not recognising him, I invited him in and offered a cup of tea. Then, taking a closer look, I saw through the bare feet and shaggy beard my old musical friend Mike Taylor. He would not speak but stayed a few days mostly walking round the streets banging a small drum.”

As Taylor’s mental decline accelerated, it coincided with the release in August 1968 of Cream’s hit album Wheels of Fire. Taylor had three co-writes on it with Ginger Baker but even the hint of financial reward and some commercial success did not arrest Taylor’s further descent into madness and eventual death in the icy waters of the Thames. Much like that of Nick Drake, Taylor’s demise went largely unremarked in the music press at the time.

In the years following his death, Taylor’s name slipped from memory of all but his closest friends. His two Lansdowne albums languished in obscurity, out of print for decades, slowly rising in staggering value on the collectors’ market. The importance of these two LPs cannot be overstated. They are a source of inspiration for the new British Jazz Explosion spearheaded by the likes of Ezra Collective, Shabaka, Nubya Garcia and Sons of Kemet. Quite what Taylor would have made of his two albums becoming £1,000-plus trophy pieces is anyone’s guess. With these long-awaited reissues, his music can be heard and appreciated by many more people than it ever was in his own tragic lifetime. Perhaps something of a bittersweet vindication for the best jazz pianist you’ve never heard of.

Pendulum:

Remastered at Gearbox Records' Studios, London. High resolution digital source files, taken from the original master tapes, were transferred to a Studer C37 reel-to-reel tape machine and mastered using an all-valve analogue mastering chain, including an ex-Decca Studio 3-band EQ and Telefunken U73b compressors. Lacquers were cut using a Scully disc mastering lathe with Westrex cutter head and cutting amps.  

Trio

Remastered at Gearbox Records’ Studios, London, directly from the original tapes, using a Studer C37 ¼-inch stereo tape machine. They were then equalised through an all-valve mastering desk built bespoke for Decca studios in the late 1950s, Vintage Lang Pultec EQ, Prism Maselec EQ and Telefunken U73b valve limiters from 1959. The LP lacquers were cut on a beautifully restored Haeco Scully Lathe from 1967 with Westrex (Western Electric) head and cutting amps; the same lathe that Rudy Van Gelder used.  

British Jazz Explosion Series

The British Jazz Explosion series is dedicated to the fantastic sounds and recordings created by some of the most pioneering musicians from the past 60 years. Focusing on rare and hard to find jazz, from the vaults of Decca, Deram, Argo, Lansdowne, Fontana and other historic labels, with thoughtful attention to the remastering and packaging.

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