Cecil Taylor and Tony Oxley

Photograph: Vanita & Joe Monk

Village Vanguard; Tue 15–July 20

When Cecil Taylor and Tony Oxley played their initial New York duo dates at Tonic in 2000, the chemistry between the maverick American pianist and the British free-improv percussionist was already firmly established. The pair first linked up during Taylor’s epochal 1988 Berlin residency, in a set released as Leaf Palm Hand (originally on FMP, newly reissued by JazzWerkstatt). During the next two years they worked with bassist William Parker in the Feel Trio, regarded as one of Taylor’s finest groups despite its brief existence.

Divergent backgrounds aside, Taylor and Oxley are clearly kindred spirits. The pianist, perpetually described as treating the piano like 88 tuned drums, compels even the most willful percussionists to break new ground; Oxley, whose style can resemble the contents of a junk shop caught in a whirlpool, meshes with Taylor’s idiom to an extent achieved by few others. Their wiry, kinetic opening bout at Tonic included sly barrelhouse and boogie-woogie licks; somehow you managed to pick your jaw up off the floor long enough to laugh out loud.

Taylor, as anyone who’s heard him recently knows, isn’t quite the same pianist that he was on those crucial late-’80s discs. His playing is broader and less frenetic, as athletic exertion cedes to balletic poise and painterly balance. That approach, no less intense, yields its own unmistakable rewards, and as a wrongly maligned recent trio disc with trumpeter Bill Dixon proved, Oxley’s negotiation of Taylor’s terrain remains beyond reproach.