Michelle Mercer

You go hear pianist Cecil Taylor to suspend your disbelief. Not exactly like you do at the cinema, where the lights go down and you temporarily relinquish skepticism for the transport of fantasy. At a Taylor performance you become a believer when you succeed in holding off stupefaction over his real-time inventions for the whole weird trip. Say it's Thursday, at Tonic, the first evening in his three-night run in duet with British drummer Tony Oxley. In typical Taylor fashion, there's a wait so long you begin to doubt he'll ever appear. Finally Taylor glides up to the stage, an hour or so overdue. He's not dancing or chanting, as he often will, but this isn't just a perfunctory approach, either: He's Pound's Tame Cat, subdued but purring his command with invisible antennae. Meanwhile Oxley, of less magisterial bearing, seems to have stolen onstage.

After your adjustment to Taylor's presence, there's your surrender to his fabulistic pianism. Tonight he's especially keyed up on Ellington, with polyrhythms and prickly blue notes, with alternations of single treble-note calls to his own bass-chord responses. For his part, Oxley's more a percussionist than a drummer, with equal or greater interest in exploring textures and tones than in keeping time. You begin to see what the club's murmuring cognoscenti mean when they call Oxley a "colorist," as he considerately daubs and strokes his way around Taylor's sonic splashes. Unlike Taylor's more combative meetings this year with Elvin Jones or Max Roach, his rapport with Oxley suggests the two had called a truce going in. Tonight's battle is the one being waged against your attention span. After 70 minutes, they're still playing, and you're still listening, although concentration's easy rewards have long passed. Is it over? you wonder, when Taylor settles onto a descending line with a graceful simplicity worthy of Satie. It's not over: He's animating the line with fresh motives, 15 minutes worth of them. Is it over, already? Oxley asks by clocking his big cowbell, his accent on the phrase's final beat. It is. You think of turning to someone in the audience to describe what you've heard, but why break the spell and give rise to disbelief?