David Grubbs wrote: "On
Chinampas, the individual pieces move in beautifully modulated long arcs of sometimes frenetic activity not unlike his solo piano concerts and recordings; they travel from the lowest register of speaking voice to the highest range of squeaking voice... the artist... less signaling through the flames than forcing air through an increasingly constricted windpipe, pitch ascending all the while... the voice leaping sufficiently and uncannily high so as to sound at a handful of especially chilling moments like a panicked child... Occasionally a word is hammered into the ground through repetition, an obsessive handling or worrying or hectoring interrogation of a single note on the piano, a tremolo, that mocking tone, that perhaps self-mocking tone that ironizes, defamiliarizes — a technique for a favored subject: transformations that occur through natural physical processes, in one of
Chinampas's resonant phrases, 'one mineral crystallizing into another.'"
AllMusic reviewer Thom Jurek wrote: "To address what these poems are about is a meaningless endeavor. It would be the same as trying to explain what his piano playing is about. It's all language; it's all music. In fact, these poems... tell the story of Taylor's approach to making music, creating solid matter from thin air, and then -- like the true shaman that he is -- transforming it into sand and blowing it away to make room for something else." is named after Taylor's trio with
William Parker and
Tony Oxley, wrote about the first section of
Chinampas in his essay "Sound in Florescence (Cecil Taylor Floating Garden)". He describes the work as "A poetry... that is of the music; a poetry that would articulate the music's construction; a poetry that would mark and question the idiomatic difference that is the space-time of performance, ritual, and event; a poetry, finally, that becomes music in that it iconically presents those organizational principles that are the essence of music." Moten suggests that the listener "Let Taylor’s 'musicked' speech and illegible words resonate and give some attention to their broken grammar, the aural rewriting of grammatical rule that is not simply arbitrary but a function of the elusive content he would convey," Moten asks: "What kind of writing is
Chinampas? Taylor presents no graphic system — if
Chinampas is writing, it is so in the absence of visuality. Under what conditions, then, could
Chinampas be called 'writing'? Perhaps within an understanding of writing more broadly conceived as nonverbal, as well as verbal, systems of graphic communication... It's not that Taylor creates visible speech; rather his is an aural writing given an understanding of writing that includes nonverbal graphic resources." He writes that Taylor "works the anarchic irruption and interruption of grammar, enacting a phrasal improvisation through the distinction between poetry and music in the poetry of music, the programmatic manifesto that accompanies the music, that becomes music and turns music into poetry." == Track listing ==