Since moving from Houston to New York in 1993, I’d gone out to hear Cecil Taylor an even dozen times before tonight. Had I figured that out in advance, I might perhaps have arrived at the Blue Note with superstitiously lowered expectations. Were I ever to claim that I’d seen a dud Taylor performance, tonight’s opening set would be it.

The fault did not reside in Taylor’s own playing, I must stress. At 76, the man remains a preternatural marvel of copious physical strength, abundant wit and mercurial impulse. The first of two pieces in tonight’s early set stretched to a generous 55 minutes, which the pianist opened with rumbling mysterioso at the low end of the keyboard. A decorous barbarism akin to Bartók or Prokofiev mingled with African fanfares, Ellingtonian jungle rhythms, crabbed Monk clusters and the wounded chromatic sobs that are Taylor’s own. To hear him at the keyboard is to witness one of music’s most profound intersections of elemental caprice and human intellect; there is literally nothing in music like it.

In the second piece — a tighter 15 minutes long, or so it felt after I stopped checking the clock — Taylor opened with a stretch of glossolalia poetry, savoring multisyllabic words ("wre-tched-NESSSSSS… ceREEbro-spinal fluid…") less for meaning than for the way they tasted on his tongue. Flickering melodic cells piled into onrushing waves, as if a single man had somehow superheroically managed to wrest control of wind and tide. The handful of notes contained in Taylor’s epigrammatic close seemed to contain all the mysteries of the universe, known and otherwise.

Had tonight been a solo performance, I would doubtless have been enraptured. Instead, I spent much of the evening with a thumb pressed into my right ear, praying for an electrical failure. Drummer Jackson Krall, who’s been playing with Taylor for as long as I’ve been hearing him in a live setting, has most definitely grown into his role. He’s a physically disconcerting performer, playing with a jerkiness that yields uneven results. (Other brilliant modern drummers such as Tom Rainey and Randy Peterson fall into this same caste, although largely to richer ends.) When Krall skittered lightly across snare and cymbals — a la Taylor’s breakthrough drummer Sunny Murray — all was well. But when he bashed with the reckless physicality of a John Bonham, his playing was painful, and obscured the leader in the process. Across the space of the entire set, Krall presented a series of peaks and valleys rather than an organic flow that moved in accord with Taylor’s lead. I’ve heard better from him, so it’s not hard to forgive a less than ideal night.

What’s more, it’s entirely possible that Krall simply couldn’t hear Taylor; most of the time, I couldn’t, either. Bassist Albey Balgochian, who plays a slender plank of wood with a neck at one end and a pin at the other, pretty much killed any chance of subtlety in this set. Grossly overamplified, his harmonically bereft tone and frenetically meandering lines often drowned out a Steinway grand located a foot away from him, and no more than 10 feet from my seat. While it’s true that the role of a Taylor bassist often means simply providing a low-end gravity between the key interplay of piano and drums, Balgochian’s incessant skittering tended to break that critical connection instead of cementing it. I’d be more kindly inclined to dismiss this as a result of inadequate audibilty on the bandstand during the more torrential segments, but Balgochian also punctuated more serene passages with an unfamiliar, water-filled percussion instrument I can only describe as a metal bong with spokes. He bowed and beat the thing during his processional to the stage — and more hurtfully during some of Taylor’s most pensive moments in the second piece, as well. (The extrovert Dominic Duval — Taylor’s last bassist, and the subject of some opprobrium during his tenure — seemed a model of musicianly restraint by comparison.)

More than 15 years have passed since Taylor last fielded a truly balanced, cohesive unit — the magnificent Feel Trio, with elemental bassist William Parker and quixotic percussionist Tony Oxley. I never heard that group live, but its recordings, as well as a brilliant November 2000 performance by Taylor and Oxley sans bass at Tonic, provide proof enough. But like a number of other aging jazz lions — Miles Davis and Sonny Rollins among them, with Abbey Lincoln and Tommy Flanagan decidedly to the contrary — Taylor has for some time demonstrated a tendency to hire sidemen not remotely at his level of accomplishment. To what end is territory for armchair psychologists and perhaps economists. But not for me.

Playlist:

Ben Johnston – String Quartets Nos. 2, 3, 4 & 9 – Kepler Quartet (New World)

Mono – You Are There (Temporary Residence, out April 11)

Cecil Taylor – Looking (Berlin) The Feel Trio (FMP)

Cecil Taylor – Qu’a: Live at the Iridium, Vol. 1 (Cadence Jazz)