A sonic exploration and tonal analysis of contemporary creative music in a myriad of improvisational/composed settings, textures, and expressions.
Welcome to Sound Projections
I'm your host Kofi Natambu. This online magazine features the very best in contemporary creative music in this creative timezone NOW (the one we're living in) as well as that of the historical past. The purpose is to openly explore, examine, investigate, reflect on, studiously critique, and take opulent pleasure in the sonic and aural dimensions of human experience known and identified to us as MUSIC. I'm also interested in critically examining the wide range of ideas and opinions that govern our commodified notions of the production, consumption, marketing, and commercial exchange of organized sound(s) which largely define and thereby (over)determine our present relationships to music in the general political economy and culture.
Thus this magazine will strive to critically question and go beyond the conventional imposed notions
and categories of what constitutes the generic and stylistic definitions of ‘Jazz’, ‘classical music’, ‘Blues.’
'Rhythm and Blues’, ‘Rock and Roll’, ‘Pop’, ‘Funk’, ‘Hip Hop’, etc. in order to search for what individual
artists and ensembles do cretively to challenge and transform our ingrained ideas and attitudes of what
music is and could be.
So please join me in this ongoing visceral, investigative, and cerebral quest to explore, enjoy, and pay
homage to the endlessly creative and uniquely magisterial dimensions of MUSIC in all of its guises and expressive identities.
Saturday, January 20, 2018
Craig Taborn (b. February 20, 1970): Outstanding and innovative musician, composer, arranger, ensemble leader, producer, and teacher
Jazz pianist and keyboard player Craig Taborn
began working professionally in the 1990s in a variety of musical
contexts, ranging from more straight-ahead jazz to more outside music,
with young jazz musicians, seasoned veterans, and even techno artists.
In his hometown of Minneapolis, Taborn
studied piano, composition, and music theory with area university
professors before going away to college. Before he graduated from
college, Taborn had already performed on three recordings as a member of the James Carter Quartet. After graduating with a liberal arts degree from the University of Michigan in 1995, DIW released Taborn's first date as a leader, The Craig Taborn Trio. He then moved to N.Y.C., and by the close of the '90s he had performed on two more Carter releases; Roscoe Mitchell's 1999 ECM release, Nine to Get Ready; Detroiter Carl Craig's techno-jazz project Innerzone Orchestra; and Hugh Ragin's Afternoon in Harlem. His second album, Light Made Lighter, was a piano trio date for Thirsty Ear in 2001.
Over the next decade, Taborn became one of the most in-demand musicians in New York. Although his time with James Carter would come to a close, the Roscoe Mitchell and Hugh Ragin projects continued and Taborn formed another longstanding collaboration with Tim Berne. He also played in projects for Drew Gress, Chris Potter, Dave Douglas, and Mat Maneri on the jazz side as well as serving as a hired gun for Bill Laswell and Meat Beat Manifesto. In 2004, he issued Junk Magic on the Thirsty Ear label, turning away from the traditional piano trio and incorporating all kinds of electronic elements. Junk Magic is now generally recognized a watershed album for jazz meets electronica. The late 2000s saw continued work with Berne in a number of groups (including with David Torn) and albums for David Binney, Eivind Opsvik, and old college bandmate Gerald Cleaver.
He has become one of the best jazz pianists alive — by disappearing almost completely into his music.
The
jazz pianist Craig Taborn often goes to museums for inspiration,
carrying a notebook to record ideas for compositions and song titles. He
also sometimes performs at museums, becoming a sort of art object
himself. This is a complicated situation for Taborn, who is very
private. His mother, Marjorie Taborn, remembers seeing him at the Rubin
Museum of Art in New York, where he played a recital to a full house at
the debut of his solo album “Avenging Angel.” After the show, she was
chatting with his friend Tim Berne, a saxophonist, while her son signed
copies of his album, smiling graciously and patiently fielding
questions. She and Berne looked at each other, because they each knew
how much effort this required from Taborn. “Look at Craig,” Taborn’s
mother recalls telling Berne, “he’s getting everything he never wanted,
all the attention he’d never seek.”
Taborn,
who is 47, is used to attracting attention he’d prefer to avoid, and
not just because of his extraordinary musicianship. He is an
African-American man from Minnesota with features that often draw
curious looks: a very pale complexion, reddish-blond curls and hazel
eyes. “I have never had a day when someone does not look at me with an
openly questioning gaze, sometimes remote and furtive, sometimes polite,
sometimes in admiration or awe and sometimes with disgust,” he told me.
“It comes from appearing as I do, and not fitting into anyone’s
preconceived category.”
Taborn’s
music, too, has an elusive aura, both in its spectral, moody textures
and in its proud refusal to cater to expectations about what jazz, or
even music, should be. A lot of advanced jazz today has the feel of a
self-conscious hybrid, combining (take your pick) punk rock, hip-hop,
Indian rhythms or Middle Eastern modes. Taborn is a musical omnivore,
too, but his explorations of other forms never sound willful: He has so
fully absorbed his influences as to camouflage them, in a musical
language of casual authority. The beauty of his art resides in large
part in his ability to discover new sounds in the piano, from the keys
to the strings; his playing inspires something rare in music today, a
sense of wonder. Taborn is revered by other pianists and considered by
many to be one of jazz music’s few contemporary innovators — a judgment
likely to be reinforced by his stunning recent album, “Daylight Ghosts.”
Yet he is not widely known even among jazz aficionados. A resident of
Brooklyn for the last two decades, Taborn still has the unassuming,
somewhat bashful demeanor of a native Midwesterner, and a Midwesterner’s
discomfort with self-advertisement. He does not have a website, handles
his own bookings in the United States and is barely present on social
media. He admires his better-known pianist friends like Vijay Iyer, who
started a doctoral program at Harvard, and Jason Moran, who presides
over jazz programming at the Kennedy Center, but says he has no desire
to shape an institution, being “leery of the impact this would have on
my creativity.”
I
first met Taborn in the late ’90s, when we were neighbors in Brooklyn,
and I was struck even then by his air of unapologetic solitude. Our
relationship mostly consisted of long, impromptu stop-and-chats on the
street. I mainly listened. I thought I knew something about jazz, but
Taborn was a practitioner who had also excavated the forgotten B-side of
the music’s history: what musicians really thought of one another, the
drugs they used, the people they slept with. Taborn wasn’t just a
musician; he was an intellectual with a recognizably nebbishy demeanor.
Talking to him was like talking to another writer, and I felt an instant
sense of kinship. Fascinated by his artistry, dazzled by his erudition
and curiosity, I would occasionally suggest a coffee or a drink. He
always replied yes, but whenever it came time to make a plan, he’d
retreat into silence.
This,
I realized, was the condition of his creativity, and I grew to respect
it. James Baldwin wrote that “perhaps the primary distinction of the
artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men,
necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.” Taborn has embraced
this state, which echoes powerfully through his probing, introspective
music. He replies to email erratically; “sent on the fly from God knows
where,” reads his signature. His girlfriend, a composer, lives in the
Bronx, on the other side of the city; when he isn’t on tour, he can go
for days without socializing. Years into our acquaintance, he briefly
dated a relative of mine, but we never spoke of their relationship,
during or after it. (They remain friends.) He is so fugitive a presence,
and so difficult to track down, that some of his musician friends refer
to him as “the Ghost.”
Taborn at home in Brooklyn.Credit
Ryan Pfluger for The New York Times
Taborn
claims to be unaware of this nickname, but he often invokes ghosts in
his song and album titles: “Love and Ghosts,” “Phantom Ratio,” “Silver
Ghosts,” “Daylight Ghosts.” He believes that “creative endeavors are
informed by the interaction with metaphysical forces,” and that this
dialogue with ghosts and spirits is what distinguishes “the black
improvisational tradition” — a term he prefers to “jazz” — from Western
art music. “Music functions as a means to ‘call down’ those spirits,” he
says, “so in a very real sense I am not doing anything when the music
is truly being made. It isn’t really me doing it.”
This
doesn’t mean that Taborn isn’t supremely focused on his instrument. He
has refined a technique of using the piano’s sustain pedal and his
attack in order to bring out the upper partials of a note, so that when
he strikes a key, he can control the “cross-talk” between two notes,
throwing into relief what he calls “the entire shape and bloom of a
note,” from its inception to the moment when “it ceases to be audible
and becomes imaginary” — ghostlike, you might say.
Musicians
often describe their work as surrender to a superior force, but Taborn
does so with a self-effacing insistence that is all the more striking
coming from such a virtuoso. He calls this force “the process,” and his
ability to give himself over to it has, in turn, made him one of the
popular sidemen in jazz. He has been a member of at least 20 groups led
by other people, as well as five of his own. He has appeared on more
than 80 albums, but only half a dozen or so under his own name, because
he hasn’t felt “much of a compulsion to document process.” In an “age of
almost profligate documentation,” he told me in an email, “I see it as
almost a discipline to be more selective about releases.”
Taborn’s
habit of vanishing, both literally and figuratively, has perplexed, if
not frustrated, some of his friends. They wonder why he still performs
as a sideman and why he doesn’t take longer, or more fiery, solos; they
fret over the long pauses between his recording projects as a leader.
The pianist Ethan Iverson, of the popular jazz trio the Bad Plus, speaks
of Taborn’s control of harmony with something like awe but complains
that Taborn “serves the music to a fault,” disappearing into the music
when he could be “playing some burning piano.” Another admirer, the
pianist Matthew Shipp, who produced two of Taborn’s early records,
wonders whether “he is creating a name for himself as the ultimate
sideman or as a leader.” The saxophonist and MacArthur genius fellow
Steve Coleman has urged Taborn, who used to play in his band, to focus
more on his own work and to document it more consistently. “If he wants
to make music, go out to the desert and never have it documented, I’m
fine with that, but Craig wouldn’t have heard a lot of the people he
likes if they hadn’t documented their work. Documenting the music is a
part of the process, because if you’re the only one who knows about it,
why even go out and perform?”
I
first approached Taborn about a profile in the fall of 2015. I felt
somewhat reluctant about it: Taborn’s father had died that summer, and
he was still in mourning. I proposed that we try our own process, a
series of informal, open-ended conversations that I thought might put
him at ease. We could meet up whenever he was in town and correspond by
email when he was on the road. Sometimes we met at museums, where he
would freely muse on the relationship between visual art and music. Tim
Berne speculated that Taborn might secretly be “dreading” the article,
but I never saw any sign of it. As long as we were talking about the
process that informs his music, that is. Whenever I tried to talk to him
about his personal life, he would quickly steer the conversation back
to topics that feed his art: cinema, contemporary painting, Javanese
shadow plays, Egyptology, the survivals of ancient African practices in
black American culture and, of course, music.
On a sweltering
day in August, we went to the Museum of Modern Art with Dave King, the
drummer in the Bad Plus and a member of the quartet on “Daylight
Ghosts.” Taborn was wearing a black polo shirt and Top-Siders; King, who
was in town from Minnesota, looked more like a retired punk rocker, in a
T-shirt that exposed a riot of tattoos all over his arms and neck.
Taborn
and King grew up together in the Minneapolis suburbs, and they have
been playing together since they were teenagers. With Reid Anderson, now
the bassist in the Bad Plus, they gigged at house parties, watched
Hüsker Dü and the Replacements at local rock clubs and studied visiting
jazz musicians at the Walker Art Center. Taborn was “effortlessly
mysterious,” King recalled. “He appeared to toss things off, but his
aesthetic was dialed to the smallest particle.”
Taborn
grew up in Golden Valley, just a few minutes by car from downtown
Minneapolis, not far from the childhood home of the filmmakers Joel and
Ethan Coen. His father, John Marvin Taborn, was an academic psychologist
and chairman of the African-American and African studies department at
the University of Minnesota. His mother, Marjorie, who still lives in
Golden Valley, was a social worker in the Minneapolis public schools.
The Taborns moved to Golden Valley shortly before the birth of Craig’s
older brother, John Gregory, a psychologist who works as a career
counselor at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., and
they became part of the small, tight-knit community of black
professional families who integrated the Minneapolis suburbs. (One of
Marjorie’s acquaintances was Mattie Della Shaw, the mother of Prince.)
Race,
roots and identity were frequent topics at the dinner table. John
Marvin was raised in Carrier Mills, a township in Southern Illinois that
provided a sanctuary for freed slaves (and later runaways) who had fled
the South. A quiet yet very determined academic who also served as a
captain in the Navy Reserve, he specialized in the study of
institutional racism and instructed his children, Taborn told me, not to
be “dominated by anyone’s attempts to limit your identity based on
their own crises or failures of imagination.” Craig inherited his
father’s shyness and his passion for learning; he also inherited his
father’s pale skin tone. “We come in all shapes and colors,” Marjorie
explained to her son. “Some of us look white, but we are not.”
His
appearance, however, created no small amount of cognitive dissonance
for whites in Minnesota who had never seen a black person who looked
like him. Although Golden Valley was “quite a liberal place,” kids asked
him if he was black or white; strangers stared at him. Worried that he
might be traumatized by these encounters, Taborn’s mother had her hair
dyed red so that it would look just like her son’s. “When kids saw me
picking up Craig from school,” she told me, “they would say, ‘So that’s
where you got your red hair from,’ and Craig would say, ‘Yeah, right.’
And I’d say, ‘His is from his father; mine is from a bottle.’ ”
His
father did not read music, but he could play piano by ear and had a
talent for improvising. After dinner he would repair to the basement and
relax by playing blues, mambo tunes and songs by Ray Charles and Horace
Silver. When Taborn was around 9 or 10, he asked his father to teach
him the basics. A few years later, Majorie heard someone playing Dave
Brubeck’s “Blue Rondo à la Turk,” a tricky piece from his classic 1959
album “Time Out.” She went downstairs, expecting to see her neighbor,
who was a musicologist at the University of Minnesota, at the piano, and
instead found her son. “I grabbed him and hugged him and said, ‘My baby
can play!’ ” She never had to tell him to practice.
‘Music
functions as a means to “call down” those spirits, so in a very real
sense I am not doing anything when the music is truly being made. It
isn’t really me doing it.’
In
high school, Taborn took lessons with a classically trained jazz
pianist, Peter Murray, whom he credits with shaping how he thinks about
music. Murray stressed the importance of melodic ideas, expressiveness
and musicality over ostentatious displays of technique. Taborn went
through a brief Bill Evans infatuation, like many young pianists, only
to become disillusioned with Evans’s impressionist lyricism.
“It’s the
first thing that’s easy to do,” he said of Evans’s widely imitated
style, based on chord voicings that owe much to composers like Debussy
and Ravel. “You can play it, and it sounds right; it’s the jazz
equivalent of a Hemingway sentence. But what Evans did, a lot of other
players were doing, pianists like Wynton Kelly, who don’t get credit for
these innovations.”
While
he admired Keith Jarrett, Herbie Hancock, McCoy Tyner and Chick Corea
as much as the next young jazz pianist, he was even more drawn to
mavericks like Thelonious Monk, Cecil Taylor and Sun Ra, the psychedelic
bandleader from Birmingham (born Herman Poole Blount) who claimed to be
from another planet and helped invent the surreal, off-kilter
sensibility known today as Afro-futurism. Ra, who led a carnivalesque
big band he called the Arkestra, fashioned himself as an explorer of
what he called “other worlds they have not told you of, that wish to
speak to you,” and Taborn was eager to join him.
What
he wanted to explore was not so much new techniques as new sounds, the
weirder the better. He had been dabbling in electronic music since he
was 12, using tapes and an old Moog synthesizer his parents gave him for
Christmas. He was fascinated by work that laid siege to conventional
understandings of music: postwar avant-gardists like John Cage and
Karlheinz Stockhausen; German kraut rock and musique concrète;
and the experimental jazz of the A.A.C.M. (the Association for the
Advancement of Creative Musicians), a Chicago-based collective whose
slogan was “great black music, ancient to future.” In high school,
Taborn became a kind of long-distance student of the A.A.C.M.; he would
go on to play with several of its greatest figures.
“I
think the complexity of finding an identity in Minneapolis in the early
1980s, as a black kid in a very white place, fed into my aesthetic
life,” Taborn said. “It was an active choice to embrace anything that
interested me, whether it was the Replacements or Anthony Braxton, and
to seek my identity in inclusion and eclecticism rather than exclusion.
So practicing bebop and then going to see an almost anti-technical
punk-rock band did not faze me at all. I think all of these things were
ultimately connected, that my enjoyment of them unified them enough for
me, and I came to crave this kind of aesthetic diversity. It is still
hard for me to listen to one kind of music for extended periods. I am
always hearing strange connections that make me want to listen to music
from different perspectives.”
In
1988, Taborn enrolled at the University of Michigan, where he took
classes in “cultures and arts largely related to the African diaspora.”
He was attracted by Ann Arbor’s rich tradition of experimental music and
punk rock (Robert Ashley, Gordon Mumma and Iggy Pop had all been
residents) and, even more so, by its proximity to Detroit, where some of
his favorite pianists (Tommy Flanagan, Hank Jones, Geri Allen) got
their starts. It was in Detroit that Taborn met the saxophonist James
Carter, whose band he joined in the early ’90s. The men had been hired
to play in a band led by Darryl Duncan, a local trumpeter. On one tune,
“Craig and I started dialoguing, and I realized this wasn’t the usual
‘I’m soloing and you’re gonna comp,’ ” Carter recalled. “It just built
up to a lather with Craig, and Darryl saw that the rhythm section was in
the way, so he waved at them to back out of it.” Taborn played in
Carter’s various groups for nearly a decade. In 1994, he released his
debut as a leader, “Craig Taborn Trio,” with the drummer Tani Tabbal and
the bassist Jaribu Shahid, Carter’s rhythm section, to admiring
reviews.
Taborn
seemed headed for a career as a leader, but not for the last time, he
revealed an unusual hesitance. He waited seven years to release his next
trio album, “Light Made Lighter,” and his third album, “Junk Magic,”
was a radically fractured piece of electronica. Taborn told me he has
been tempted to make more albums like “Junk Magic” — the title is a line
from Sam Shepard, who once described the rusted old Southern California
towns of his youth as having “a kind of junk magic” — but it’s hard to
imagine him abandoning the piano. He has always been drawn back to its
physical majesty, the power and variety of its sound.
More
than any musician of his generation, Taborn knows how to turn the piano
into an 88-key drum, as Cecil Taylor called it, and drummers have
always been particularly keen to play with him. At MoMA, while we were
admiring “Glenn,” an enormous canvas by Jean-Michel Basquiat, a bald,
muscular black man in his early 70s walked up to Taborn. “You a
pianist?”
Taborn nodded, sheepishly; he vaguely recognized the man but couldn’t quite place him.
“Craig,
it’s William Hooker!” the man exclaimed, with a wide smile. Hooker is a
free-jazz drummer, celebrated in downtown circles for his high-energy
style; he was practically bouncing in the air. “Let’s play! How can I
find you?” They exchanged email addresses.
On a freezing day
in December, I met Taborn at the Guggenheim. He apologized for being a
few minutes late; he had run into an old friend, the avant-garde harpist
Zeena Parkins, in the lobby.
Taborn
had suggested that we see the Agnes Martin retrospective, and soon I
understood why. Her pale, austere, meditative canvases, based on slight
variations of the grid, exhibited a faith, very much shared by Taborn,
in the radiant effects that can be achieved by the subtle play of
repetition and difference. In Taborn’s account, Martin emerged as a
kindred spirit: an unclassifiable artistic loner who had placed her
trust in patience, precision and process. He looked worshipfully at her
rendering of the pencil line in a 1979 series called “The Islands.” “She
used different rulers to get different lines, but if you step back, you
wouldn’t notice this. There’s an infinity of details, but you have to
get very close to see them.” He walked up very close to a 1958 painting
called “This Rain,” in which two square forms, one violet, the other
cream, float upon an off-white backdrop — so close I thought we might
attract the attention of the Guggenheim guards.
“There’s
so much evidence of the hand here, and I’m sure it’s intentional,” he
said, admiring her brushwork. “It’s not performative, or only in a very
subtle way, not in some swaggering Abstract Expressionist way. The
colors aren’t ultravibrant, but the varieties of shading are so subtle.”
I asked him if he saw any parallels between her work and his own.
“Martin thought of music as the ultimate art, because it’s so
nonreferential, and there are similarities in terms of process. When you
improvise, you’re observing and creating at the same time. To make the
next move, you have to really get close to what’s going on. A lot of
jazz musicians never get close enough to find out.”
Taborn performing in March at the Village Vanguard in New York.Credit
Jack Vartoogian/Getty Images
In
2003, Taborn made a discovery that helped him to get closer than he’d
ever gotten to his own process. While preparing for a solo concert at a
club on the Lower East Side, he decided to improvise the entire
performance from scratch, rather than on the basis of scores. He
recorded the concert and compared it with previous performances of his
compositions. (Taborn is sparing in his releases, but he documents much
of his work for the sake of his own private research.) What he found was
striking: “When I was improvising, I was able to really play in the
moment, away from any preconceived notions. The improvised performances
sounded as organized as any of my composed pieces, and they had so much
more life.” Now whenever Taborn performs solo piano, he improvises
freely, or, to put it another way, he composes in real time, drawing in
part on motifs and structures he has developed while practicing.
In
giving evening-length recitals with little more than a mental map,
Taborn invited comparison to pianists like Cecil Taylor, Paul Bley and,
above all, Keith Jarrett, who made history with his 1975 solo concert at
the Cologne Opera House. After dinner at an overheated Italian
restaurant, Jarrett was in a foul mood (this wasn’t unusual for him),
and he wanted to cancel. Instead, he took the stage and, on a
tinny-sounding Bösendorfer, gave a performance of disarmingly lyrical,
almost folkloric simplicity. With its gospel chords and hymnlike
melodies, “The Köln Concert” became the best-selling solo piano record
of all time. For the next decade or so, it would inspire other pianists
to take up the challenge of a fully improvised concert, as the ultimate
test of their melodic resources and imagination.
By
the time Taborn entered this daunting arena, it was all but empty,
aside from a handful of obscure avant-garde pianists and Jarrett
himself: “The Köln Concert” had become a somewhat quaint symbol of ’70s
sprawl and flowery romanticism. Taborn’s solo concerts announced the
birth of an original aesthetic, long in gestation. They were often as
lyrical as Jarrett’s, but they were also fierce, concentrated and
erudite. “When you hear Craig play solo, you hear a whole history of
music: heavy metal, jazz, classical music, the whole tradition from Bach
to Schumann to contemporary music,” Derek Bermel, a composer friend,
points out. “It’s like you’ve just gotten a history lesson with a great
sense of form, and it’s not didactic, it’s expressive.”
Taborn’s
solo concerts, which his fans began posting on YouTube, were as
sensuous as they were cerebral. He used repetitive loops that felt as if
they’d been imported from electronic music, and contrapuntal rhythmic
patterns that made the mind whirl. Without using the sustain pedal, he
would hold chords, minor seconds and thirds, with his right hand, then
pop single notes really hard with his left hand in the lower registers
of the piano. The harmonics of the right-hand chords would swell
continuously in a cloud of color, punctuated by dark, staccato left-hand
jabs. Not unlike Agnes Martin, Taborn would stay with a pattern, a
sound, even a single note, and just keep digging.
One of those who
took notice of Taborn’s solo concerts was a fellow admirer of Martin’s
work: Manfred Eicher, head of ECM Records, the Munich-based label that
has recorded Keith Jarrett since the early 1970s. Eicher and Taborn met
in the late 1990s, when Taborn played on another recording for ECM,
“Nine to Get Ready,” by the avant-garde saxophonist and composer Roscoe
Mitchell. Eicher was impressed by Taborn’s touch and “his ability to
listen and react in very unforeseeable ways.” In 2010, Taborn recorded
his ECM debut, the solo album “Avenging Angel,” in Lugano, Switzerland,
in an auditorium where Eicher remembered hearing the great classical
pianists Martha Argerich and Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli. (The piano
Taborn played at the session is said to have been one of Argerich’s
favorites.) He warmed up with a Bach prelude and, after a long pause,
began improvising. “There was so much dedication and concentration in
every note, and his use of color contributed to a very personal music,”
Eicher recalls.
“Avenging
Angel” is now seen as a benchmark of solo jazz piano, and Eicher calls
it “one of the dearest solo records I’ve made.” It is not simply the
range of expressive forms on this album — ballads, fugues, minimalist
dirges, wispy atmospheric statements — that beguiles, but the powerful
inner coherence that governs the 13 tracks, their exacting sense of
narrative arc. (Before the recording, Taborn listened to three of his
favorite solo piano records: Sun Ra’s “Monorails and Satellites,” Cecil
Taylor’s “For Olim” and Keith Jarrett’s “Dark Intervals,” all of them
composed of terse, rigorous pieces that examine “a few simple elements,”
like ostinatos, or tone clusters.) It has the feeling for rapture, the
sensitivity to space and silence, that have marked the so-called ECM
sound, but it evokes an inner landscape, gloomily introspective and
darkly elusive, that might be called Tabornian.
At
the Lugano session, he recorded more than enough material for a sequel
to “Avenging Angel,” which Eicher would have been happy to release, but
Taborn chose instead to shelve it, perhaps for a retrospective release
later on. “My concept and playing had moved on,” he said, and he wanted
to develop his ideas further in live performance.
In
April 2016, I traveled to Cambridge to hear him give a solo concert,
also titled “Avenging Angel,” at Harvard, where his friend Vijay Iyer
had organized a festival. Taborn had been preparing for the concert for
weeks. He practiced compositions by Bach, Shostakovich and Thelonious
Monk, and wrote passages that he could invoke in a moment’s notice in
performance. He read poetry, watched old avant-garde films by Stan
Brakhage and Kenneth Anger and kept a record of his ideas on a
chalkboard that he couldn’t avoid looking at. For several hours a day,
he conducted a grueling set of exercises designed to cultivate finger
independence and dexterity. In one of those exercises, he held down one
finger while playing a series of notes with another, a move that can be
very damaging if executed too quickly. The purpose was to improve his
command of dynamics, attacks and releases, something he admires in Cecil
Taylor, a pianist with “complete control.”
His
final form of preparation was listening to his iPod in the rental car
he drove to Cambridge. It contains about 45,000 tracks, and Taborn
prefers to listen to it on shuffle. “Moving from Xenakis to some metal
thing creates a space where you don’t know what you’re listening to
anymore,” he told me in his dressing room. “You’re making inferences and
connections, and that’s really what composition is. So I don’t worry
what I’m listening to. I just like the experience, the change in moods,
the feeling of going from a 20-minute composed track to a 30-second
blast of metal. Even the discontinuity creates its own logic.”
At
the John Knowles Paine Concert Hall, Iyer introduced Taborn as “one of
the greatest living pianists.” Wearing a blue suit and red Uniqlo socks,
Taborn sat down at the piano, struck two high notes with his right hand
and pounded a chord with his left, creating a stop-start minimalist
groove. He played for more than 40 minutes, without pause. At times, he
seemed to be battling the piano (Taborn is a man of medium build but has
very powerful forearms); at others, to be caressing it. He was
inspired, he told me later, by the “beauty of the instrument,” and
“things just flowed,” leading him to linger for longer than usual in “a
more romantic space.” Young people in the audience bobbed their heads as
Taborn concluded his performance with a fast, jagged sequence of
dancing, interlocking rhythms — a variation on a theme I’d heard him use
before in concert.
By the time Iyer returned to the stage to sing his praises again, Taborn had vanished into the night.
‘I’m not
always sure where people think they’re going and if they ever get there,
anyway. To some extent I think it’s all an illusion.’
A month after his
concert at Harvard, Taborn was at a studio in Hell’s Kitchen, recording
“Daylight Ghosts,” his third album for ECM. For this record, Taborn had
put together a quartet with the drummer Dave King, the bassist Chris
Lightcap and Chris Speed, who plays tenor saxophone and clarinet. Four
years had passed since “Chants,” his previous album as a leader, was
recorded, and after the death of his father, he wanted to make a more
direct and melodic statement, something “simple and clear.” The sheer
beauty of his playing is abundantly present — the clarity of touch, the
rhythmic invention, the mastery of harmonics — but Taborn hardly takes a
solo. It is the interplay of the quartet that interests him: The music
on “Daylight Ghosts” highlights the process of mutual creation, rather
than any single voice, including his own. In “Ancient,” for example, the
quartet snakes around a bass vamp in C, in a series of contrapuntal
variations, before (in Taborn’s words) “falling together,” as if the
four instruments had fused into one.
Except
for Roscoe Mitchell’s “Jamaican Farewell,” a slow, plaintive waltz in
3/4, all of the songs are Taborn’s, and they feel at once unpredictable
(composed in distinct sections, often moving between different time
signatures) and inexorable. Their taut energy and brooding propulsion
imbue them with a diamondlike beauty. Illuminated by discreet, painterly
touches of electronics — Taborn also plays the Farfisa organ and
synthesizer — the music reflects an imaginative quilt of influences:
minimalism, African rhythms, punk and kraut rock, among others. Yet it
never feels contrived.
On
the day that I visited Taborn at the studio, the band was working on a
floating, ruminative ballad called “The Great Silence.” Speed began with
a swirl of long, sustained tones on clarinet that reminded me of French
Impressionist composers like Francis Poulenc. Taborn played piano with
his right hand and the Prophet 6 synthesizer with his left, creating
firefly effects as King and Lightcap joined them in a lush, atmospheric
melody.
“The
bandleader has found his glasses!” Manfred Eicher declared in the
sound-check room. “That reminds me of Arvo Part, the tintinnabuli!” This
was high praise coming from Eicher, who introduced Western audiences to
the Estonian composer’s mystical minimalism. Eicher is a
sometimes-tempestuous producer, with very strong views of what he wants
from his artists, but he was tender, even humble, in his dealings with
Taborn. Later that afternoon, the two men listened to the playback of
another section of “The Great Silence,” a gorgeously spectral piano solo
that did not make it onto the record. “Is that piano or synthesizer?”
Eicher asked. “I left the room when you were playing the cadenza.”
“Piano,” Taborn replied.
“It
sounded so remote, like it was coming from a different perspective, so I
couldn’t tell if it was piano or synthesizer. It was like a slow
falling star, hitting the ground and blinking!”
Eicher,
who seemed almost giddy, revised the metaphor. “Like a distant star
that falls and then disappears.” He then suggested they try a “sparse
improvised piece based on listening.” Taborn led the band in a sublime
short piece that had the quiet intensity of the best chamber music, with
Speed’s tenor evoking memories of Wayne Shorter’s work with Miles
Davis. (It didn’t make the cut, another casualty of the process — Taborn
told me it would have “unbalanced the architecture of the album.”)
“Good form, good length, and the ending was beautiful,” Eicher said.
When Eicher left the room, Taborn said, “Manfred isn’t often that cheerful, so I’m really pleased he’s glad.”
Craig Taborn’s friends
often described him to me as a mystery, but this usually turned out to
be a polite way of expressing their frustration that he has chosen not
to be better known than he is, or ought to be. Many of them told me how
relieved they were that someone, at last, was profiling him, as if he
were being forced out of hiding.
Steve
Coleman, his former employer and still a great admirer, remembers
hearing Taborn play at the Village Vanguard, where he was leading a trio
with Gerald Cleaver and Thomas Morgan. He was astonished by the degree
of innovation that he was hearing. “It’s finally going to happen for
Craig,” he recalled thinking. “He’s making a real contribution, he’s not
just doing a gig, and you can say that about only a small handful of
people.” The trio toured widely and made a brilliant album, “Chants,”
but Taborn soon went back to his work as a sideman, joining the bassist
Dave Holland’s band. “Momentum is the real thing, and you can gain
momentum in a situation, like he had with Gerald and Thomas,” Coleman
said. “But you can’t recreate something once the time is past.”
When
I mentioned this argument to Taborn, he conceded that Coleman had a
point about focusing on your own work, and said he “might be on the
verge of doing just that.” But he added: “I’m not always sure what
momentum is, exactly. I’m not always sure where people think they’re
going and if they ever get there, anyway. To some extent I think it’s
all an illusion.”
What
Taborn means, I think, is that he is deeply involved in his process, no
matter what music, or rather whose music, he’s performing. As he sees
it, his body of work includes the music he has made as a sideman as much
as his music as a leader. What matters — all that matters, really — is
his presence in the moment of musical creation; the rest is commentary.
If this attitude seems a little perplexing to some, it’s because we live
in an age of incessant commentary, when instrumental music invariably
is discussed in relation to personality and worldly ambition, or some
nonmusical experience, culture or history that it supposedly reflects or
expresses. As if music without words weren’t enough; as if it could
refer to something beyond itself.
I
still had trouble imagining that Taborn’s process could be so simple,
so pure and self-sacrificing. After all, a lot of musicians pay lip
service to these ideas. Was it really possible to live them? Surely
there must be some secret, a story that might expose, or at least
account for, this surrender to the process of music making. Yet I’ve
come to believe that if Taborn has a secret, it’s hiding in plain sight:
his faith in what Stravinsky called music’s “essential being,” its
radical self-sufficiency, its nonreferential nature. Taborn has remained
loyal to this principle, sometimes at the expense of his own career.
His apparent selflessness may seem strange, but the whole point of his
process has been to avoid projecting “a self,” for the sake of a higher
musical goal. This is what other musicians find so compelling and yet so
peculiar — so mysterious — about him. It’s what makes Taborn’s musician
friends highly protective of him, as if to speak about anything other
than his music would be tantamount to betrayal.
Taborn’s
musician friends were, in fact, so unforthcoming about (or simply
unaware of) his life offstage that I asked a fellow writer, his friend
Wendy Walters, whether she could tell me something about him that didn’t
pertain directly to his music. She thought about it for a minute.
Several years ago, she said finally, when Walters was going through a
difficult divorce, Taborn sent her a witch-hazel tree, a breed that
blooms in winter. The tree reminded her of Taborn’s relationship to his
practice, and his need for solitude. “Music is almost life-giving for
him. It’s the way he survives the things we’re trying to deal with.”
A few days later, I asked Taborn what he meant by the gift.
“Wendy’s
house was beginning to feel like a cell in many ways, and it was
uncertain when or if she would be in a position to move,” he remembered.
“I thought it would be good to have something in the yard that would
blossom with color. It was symbolic of hope, renewal and healing.” He
paused. “But Wendy is, I think, hitting on something deeper about why I
make music. All the things people say when they talk about music have to
do with entertainment, or some kind of aesthetic advancement. Yet when
they talk about how music moves them, they talk about other things:
feelings, times of life, etc. So I suppose that for me, music is one of
the things we use to get ourselves through life.” By giving Walters a
tree that had not yet blossomed, he was giving her not so much a thing
as a process, and waiting for it to reveal itself, to blossom with color
over time, was central to realizing its mysterious power. “The
witch-hazel tree was doing the same thing that a piece can do. Just
saying: Here is this piece of music that you can have and listen to, and
enjoy. Some day it may blossom for you, and you may find that it gives
you something that you may not even know you need.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Adam Shatz is a contributing
editor at The London Review of Books and a resident fellow at the New
York Institute for the Humanities.
A version of this article appears in print on June 25, 2017, on Page MM55 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: Ghost Notes. Today's Paper
Craig Taborn and Rob Clearfield are both known as jazz pianists,
but their musical interests and projects range far and wide.
Minneapolis native Taborn first attracted attention as saxophonist James
Carter's pianist in the early 90s; since then he's worked with a
mind-blowing array of bandleaders including Roscoe Mitchell, Chris
Potter, and Dave Douglas. He also was a close collaborator of Detroit
techno great Carl Craig in his Innerzone Orchestra. He's a true ensemble
player, improving each project he's involved with, but that's come at
the expense of his own career as a leader; he's made only four albums on
his own. But his newest effort, a solo recital called Avenging Angel, has been deservedly turning heads.
Rob Clearfield
Clearfield is just as ubiquitous in Chicago, playing
with Fareed Haque, Zach Brock, Matt Ulery, Greg Ward, and the prog-rock
band District 97, as well as his own rock outfit Information Superhighway. He released an solo recital of his own, A Thousand Words, last year. Taborn performs with drummer Gerald Cleaver and Danish saxophonist Lotte Anker Sun 9/11 at the Hungry Brain. —Peter Margasak
The new record sounds really great. Was it your idea to do a solo thing?
I had been talking to Manfred [Eicher, who owns and runs ECM] about
doing a trio [recording]. But corralling everybody's schedule turned out
to be a challenge, and then Manfred said, "Why don't we do a solo
thing?" He asked me in April or May, and I had just finished a solo tour
in March. I had never done a solo recording.
How much of the record is improvised?
I would say 90 percent. A
couple of the more rhythmic, long-cycle things were preconceptualized. I
wanted to have stuff that's more developed. I can't improvise stuff
that's that complicated. We had two days to record. I recorded 33 or 34
individual pieces on Saturday, and when I went in on Sunday, Manfred
said, "Do you want to play some more?" I was like, "I think we're good,
let's just start listening." I felt so fried. I had no objectivity at
that point.
A lot of people ask you about your relationship to metal and punk. I was curious about your relationship to classical.
That's a huge piece of my musical interest and compositional thinking. I'm not a classically trained pianist at all.
Do you work on pieces not to perform but just to work on them?
Oh
yeah. When I was in high school, I was into composition and I had a
mind to be that kind of composer. My school had a music track that had
college-level composition courses. The school no longer does that. The
people in charge of the music department had doctorates in music. They
taught theory and comp for two years, and I was able to get a head start
on some of that stuff. They took us into grad-level thinking on
creative composition. There were only, like, four of us in the class. At
the time I was getting into a lot of free jazz and some contemporary
classical stuff. I was just into it all.
So what are you checking out now?
I tend to listen really
schizophrenically. I've been listening to a lot of Wynton Kelly. I mean,
I've always listened to Wynton Kelly. And then avant-garde post-black
metal, this band Virus that's Czral's—Carl-Michael Eide's—band. They've
been around for a while. It sounds like Bauhaus plays something
avant-garde. And I've been trying to get into this Beethoven sonata.
So, you're coming to Chicago next weekend. Who are you playing with?
Gerald
Cleaver and Lotte Anker. Lotte's a great saxophonist from Copenhagen.
It's all completely improvised. There are few groups where you can
really go into a zone where it's about complete trust and confidence,
and that's probably one of the most special groups I get to play with in
terms of that. It's just great chemistry and energy—the most pure
improvising that I get into. Not that the music sounds austere. We had a
tour maybe five years ago where we were supposed to play the Hungry
Brain with Lotte. We were coming from Toronto and Lotte got held at the
border and couldn't finish the tour. We had to leave her in Windsor,
Ontario, in some hotel, not knowing what would happen to her. Gerald and
I finished the gigs [as a duo] so we could get money together to [help
pay for] her flight back. It was a great tour, but at the same time
there was this dark energy around our circumstances. So we're really
looking forward to this.
How'd you originally get connected to the guys you know in Chicago? I've seen you play with Mike Reed and Joshua Abrams.
With
Mike, I think it was initially because of that gig at the Hungry Brain
that Lotte couldn't play. He was one of the people putting on that
festival. Mike called me to do a trio with Josh at the Velvet and it
kind of developed from there.
What else is on the horizon for you?
I kind of rolled the dice
this fall. I have a gig with [Polish trumpeter] Tomasz Stanko, I'm doing
this record with [saxophonist] Chris Potter, and then I'm going out to
Seattle to do some duo gigs with a great pianist named Gust Burns. And
then I'm doing a trio tour with Thomas Morgan and Gerald Cleaver, and I
have a solo tour in December. But the rest of the year is largely my own
projects, and in my time off from that I'm trying to write. Next year
is sort of full; I'm curious to see how that'll work. Like, I'll be
okay, but usually I'll have a couple tours that I'm sure will make me a
bit of rent money. Now I'm sorta like, "Oh, wow"—just 'cause it's my own
tour. You never know what can happen.
To get a handle on Craig Taborn’s expansive musicality, you need
to flee your comfort zone. If you think that his impressive piano
playing begins and ends with the free-bop he grooved while in James
Carter’s band, then you’ll miss the irresistibly funky keyboard work
Taborn did with Carl Craig’s Innerzone Orchestra on Programmed
(Astral-werks, 1999), a wholly unique blending of jazz and electronica;
his freer pianistic expressions with Roscoe Mitchell on Nine to Get
Ready (ECM, 1999); his wicked electronic textures with Tim Berne and Tom
Rainey on The Shell Game (Thirsty Ear, 2001).
Taborn’s latest album as leader, Light Made Lighter (Thirsty Ear), is
the long-awaited follow-up to his 1994 debut, T.S.: Craig Taborn Trio
(DIW). The new album follows its predecessor in the trio format, but
where T.S. is postbop oriented, the playing and compositions on Light
Made Lighter are more enigmatic and abstract. On tunes like the Monkish
“Bodies We Came Out Of” and the slanted version of “I Cover the
Waterfront” Taborn engages bassist Chris Lightcap and drummer Gerald
Cleaver with quick-witted conversations that, while playful, show great
maturity since his debut. “There’s such a span of time between the two
[recordings]. I’m a different player now than I was then in terms of
basic, technical, theoretical things that I’ve acquired over the years,”
Taborn says. “My control of sound, the integration of sound with my
harmonic sensibilities and my rhythmic approach is a lot more informed
now.”
While his acoustic playing is steeped in the expansive piano-jazz
tradition, Taborn’s bold electronic soundscapes escape jazz convention.
“My approach to electronics is really electronic,” he explains. “I do
keyboardlike things, but sometimes I don’t even touch a keyboard. I
might be turning knobs or just manipulating sounds. With electronics, I
can get away from conventional playing. I’m not looking for a
substitute piano or any other instrument. Melody, harmony and rhythm
come in to play in a different sense. It’s more interesting to me to
achieve harmony through sound design rather than just hitting a chord on
the keyboards.”
The magnificent pianist/keyboardist/soundshaper Craig Taborn turned
46 yesterday. For the occasion, I’m posting a Downbeat feature that I
wrote about him in 2008.
* * * * Home in Brooklyn during the first days of spring, Craig Taborn was
engaged in research and development. Among Taborn’s various self-imposed
tasks was to memorize 10 new Tim Berne compositions in preparation for a
three-week April tour in Europe with Berne’s Science Friction group, to
which, during the winter, Taborn had contributed—as he had done with
David Torn’s Presenz, which enfolds Berne’s band—slamming grooves and an
orchestral array of sounds from keyboards, synths and home-brewed
“junk” electronics. “With Science Friction, there’s a lot of electronics and reading,”
said Taborn, pointing across his living room to a concert upright
Bechstein piano on which Berne’s scores shared space with piano music by
Arnold Schoenberg. “Sometimes I’ll want to do a particular part on one
keyboard, another part here, then another there. It would be a real
problem to read music and also think about all the knobs and dials, or
to look at a computer screen and problem-solve while the part is
coming.” Taborn’s penchant for sustaining creative fluency through a
360-degree span of stylistic taxonomies, in contexts “inside” and
“outside,” acoustic or electronic, makes him a singular figure among
improvisers of his generation. But at this moment, his keyboard wizardry
was posing a peculiar problem. “I’m still deciding what to bring,” he
said. He wasn’t talking about clothes. A half-full fiberglass camera case, neatly stacked in two tiers, lay
at his feet. “Flights in Europe have been strict on overweight,” he
said. He added that during his winter travels he had drastically
exceeded the 20-kilo limit beyond which a 10 Euros per kilo fee is
imposed. “Now, this case is actually light for its kind,” he said. “Nothing
happens to it—it’s waterproof and you can throw it down the stairs. But
it’s 7 kilos empty, and there’s no way to avoid the overweight. So now
I’m thinking, ‘What do I want to deal with? What do I need and how much
do I want to take?’” A possible option would be to place the contents of the case into the
square bag that sat across the room, transforming it into an
unprotected, carry-on satchel. “You get on these little connecting
flights and they want to hand-check your stuff,” he said, nixing the
notion. “So you’re giving $1500 worth of stuff to somebody in Italy, and
God knows what happens once it’s out of your sight. You get to the gig,
and it’s just gone.” Taborn would bring a laptop with a hard-drive loaded with software
emulations of all the instruments he plays, and a contract rider
stipulated that each venue would provide an acoustic piano, a Rhodes,
and a virtual Hammond organ. “I’ve been trying to phase out my
laptop thing, because it takes me out of improvising,” he said. “It’s
wonderful, but I find I get more mileage out of one or two nice things
that do something.” Deciding upon those “nice things” was therefore the task at hand. One
essential was a coil of high-grade electrical cord in a corner of the
case. “This is the thing that makes the weight,” he said ruefully. Below
the cord was a Line 6 Delay pedal, for echoes, and a Berenger mixer
with two stereo and two mono lines. “A lot of people send everything to the house soundman, but I like to
mix myself,” he said. “I’ll plug in the Rhodes and the organ and a
couple of synths, then send all the lines to my own amp, and have them
mike the amp. That gives me complete control over my sound.” Taborn considered a keyboard and a wood-trimmed, knob-loaded
Creamware Pro-12 ASB synthesizer, built to capture the essence of the
Sequential Circuits Prophet-5, a popular synth at the cusp of the ’80s. “I’m an improviser, and I don’t know exactly what sound I want to
make until I hear what’s going on,” he said. “During the ’70s into the
’80s, as synthesizers became refined, the emphasis was put on
programmability and keeping presets—you designed your sounds at home
with the luxury of time and silence, and then could call them up with,
say, button No. 1 at a specific spot in the music. It’s like tuning your
TV to your favorite channels. You always know that exact sound will be
there, balanced the way you want in the environment. “I’m interested in the process of making and designing the sound as
part of the improvisation,” he continued. ‘I come more out of Sun Ra,
who approached synthesizers by turning the knobs, playing in real time,
and figuring it out as he went along. Those instruments were new, so
people didn’t know them, and they weren’t designed to be pre-programmed,
so you couldn’t call up a sound. Throughout the ’90s, hardcore
musicians from hip-hop, techno and electronica were buying those older
synthesizers to be able to personalize and improvise in real time. The
marketplace went way up, and now it’s hard to find things that don’t
have knobs and switches.” Taborn continued to ponder the issue of weight. “I have this whole
rig inside my laptop,” he said, referring to his Macbook Pro. “I could
plug it into the system, and use a little controller to do all this. I
could even emulate the knobs. I always take the laptop with me, and I’ve
used it a lot in the last couple of years—although I like to have
things dedicated, and I prefer the real thing, I don’t prefer it to
carrying all that stuff around. I do hear qualitative differences in the
sound. Also, if your entire setup is on the laptop and it crashes, then
what do you do? If I run one thing, for instance, it will probably be
OK. But if, to emulate a sound I get in real time, I layer a software
version of a Prophet-5 and then a software version of a delay, the
processors have trouble handling it. It takes a lot of number-crunching
in the computer to program things that have the subtle play of an analog
oscillator or analog filter, and their imperfections, such as going out
of tune a bit when it heats up. For what I do, a lot of real-time
manipulation, turning knobs frantically, the Sun Ra kind of thing, the
computers will freeze up.” Offering to demonstrate the virtual gear, Taborn transitioned to his
studio, a converted second bedroom. Among other things, it contained a
Mac Power desktop, Event 2020 reference-quality speakers, a Mackie
1202-VLZ3 mixer, a MOTU-2408 interface, a Kurzweil K-2500
synthesizer, an Oxygen-2 mini-keyboard, and a model 240B Wurlitzer
electric piano from the early ’70s with a broken speaker. A larger
wood-body 140B from 1962 was in the closet. His personal Rhodes was
parked at his parents’ home in Minneapolis. Taborn turned on the Mac, clicked Applications, pulled up his
Prophet-5 knockoff, a Native Instruments Pro-53, and waited. The
response was sluggish. “Something weird is going on,” he said. “If I
were live and it started doing this it would be a drag.” He opened the B-4 Hammond organ sample and uncorked a grooving line
on the QWERTY keys. “I don’t play the keyboard computer like that, but
that’s how it’s mapped,” he said. He switched the setting from “Funky
Kingston” to an idiomatic Joey DeFrancesco-generated B-3 sound. The computer was balking, so Taborn went to the closet. He pulled out
a bright-red keyboard-synth labeled Yamaha PSS-470, the kind musicians
once used, in Taborn’s words, “to play a cheesy samba.” Its wiring and
circuitry were transformed into random pathways and patterns by Taborn’s
friend Ryan Olcott. “You can’t emulate this on a computer,” he said. “I
have two of these. You could get them in pawn shops for $50–$100, and
then go inside it. Ryan is into these real improvising machines. This
one came out in the ’80s, and it has a WHAM! sound, like George Michael,
in its original functionality.” He played a skronky, distorted line. “It can do something like this
almost immediately, and when you turn on the switches it gets you into
some abstract areas. The mentality is avant-garde; it’s made to be
random, so you don’t know what it’s going to do. That’s why I like
improvising with it—responding to the sounds and dealing with them is
endless.”
As if to emphasize his affinity for radical esthetics, Taborn turned to a pile of books on a shelf, topped by the anthology Film Theory And Criticism.
“Film, dance and music all deal with time, and how these events unfold
in time is very influential for me,” he said. It was observed that, like
experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage, well-represented in that text,
or, for that matter, such formative musical heroes as Thelonious Monk,
McCoy Tyner and Cecil Taylor, Taborn thinks like a Modernist, focused on
the purity and elaboration of a particular idea, rather than
translating styles into ironic cultural signifiers in the Postmodern
manner. You’re not likely to hear David Torn play hardbop chordal lines
as Taborn did with James Carter during the ‘90s, or Berne to limn the
melody of Ellington’s “Stevedore Serenade” in an idiomatic manner, as
Taborn did with Carter some years ago at a Jazz at Lincoln Center
concert. But Taborn seems not to recognize hierarchical distinctions
between the idioms. He’s as committed to generating fresh ideas in one
environment as the other. After his April tour with Berne, Taborn would return to Europe for
the first three weeks of May with Scott Colley and Brian Blade in David
Binney’s quartet, interpreting Binney’s harmonically dense, long-form
jazz compositions on acoustic piano. Over the previous six months on
continent-hopping long hauls with Chris Potter’s Underground, he had
donned his Fender Rhodes hat, juxtaposing crisp, surging odd-meter bass
lines with simultaneously improvised melodic variations, supporting the
proceedings with informed, tasteful comp. Briefer trips and local
one-offs—with Roscoe Mitchell, William Parker, Gerald Cleaver, Drew
Gress and Susie Ibarra—augmented Taborn’s mix, as did a September 2007
acoustic trio engagement at the Monterey Jazz Festival with Cleaver and
bassist Thomas Morgan. A broadcast of the latter performance documents a six-tune, 55-minute
suite marked by fresh ideas and unending musical conversation. It fills
a gap—although Taborn, 38, has a large enough backlog of solo, trio,
electronic, and ensemble material to fill several CDs, his last acoustic
recording appeared in 2001 on Light Made Lighter (Thirsty Ear), while his most recent leader date is 2004’s Junk Magic (Thirsty
Ear), a seven-track suite on which Taborn convened violinist Mat
Maneri, tenor saxophonist Aaron Stewart and The Bad Plus drummer Dave
King to investigate themes executed with various circuitry and
computerized synthesis. “I’ve postponed my leader thing,” Taborn said with a shrug. “Because
of finances, I take the tours as they come, then everything fills up.” Taborn’s employers state unequivocally that his incessant sidemanning
in no way inhibits his ability to project his sonic personality. “It takes a lot of confidence not to go along with the crowd,” Berne
said. “If Craig wanted to, he could eliminate all this other stuff and
impress everyone with his piano trio. But he based all his decisions on
his interest in the music he plays, not only his career or being seen as
the great pianist he is. “I wanted to do away with guitar and bass, but somehow have the power
and range of both instruments,” Berne continued, explaining why he
first recruited Taborn around 2000. “I didn’t want synthesizers, and I
didn’t want somebody to play like a keyboard player, so to speak.
I wanted somebody who just played music on the keyboard.” “Craig is an idiosyncratic genius, which is a word I don’t use
lightly,” Torn said. “He’s not a chameleon in the studio sense of the
word; he has strong conceptual ideas about what he’s doing in any
context. But with the exception of his acoustic playing, which is
remarkable, he’s incapable of pinning himself down to an idiom or
particular sound. He’s the rare musician who takes the approach, ‘what
can I do with this instrument?’ rather than playing through its book of
techniques. Regardless of its organic or electronic nature, every
instrument is an expression of technology; Craig is able to eschew the
technological aspect in order to get out the sounds that he feels are
suitanble for the music he’s playing.” Furthermore, as Berne noted, Taborn directs his speculative
investigations towards the function of the moment. “Even playing
something complicated, Craig simplifies it to its fundamental
components,” Berne said. “He won’t do anything just to show he can; if
one note does it, that’s what he’ll play. He also has the guts to lay
out, to not play, when most people would feel obligated to. He’ll always
take the opposing view. He’ll pose another question or look at things
in a way you didn’t consider.” Potter noted that Taborn’s experimentalism stems less from a
contrarian sensibility than a desire to explore the ramifications of the
multiple vocabularies that comprise his frame of reference. “Craig has
spent a lot of time learning and thinking about the lessons of past
masters in the jazz tradition—and other traditions, too,” he said. “When
he improvises, he keeps the essence of what makes his influences work
musically but takes care not to copy what they did. Perhaps he’ll
introduce elements from other sources. He’s intellectually thorough
enough to take his own angle.” Particularly when deploying electronics, Taborn hews to textural
imperatives not dissimilar to those that impelled Mitchell and the
members of the Art Ensemble of Chicago—an early Taborn influence—to
incorporate “little instruments” into the sonic flow 40 years ago. “I’m always aware of sound,” Taborn said. “I approach the acoustic
piano somewhat as a sound device, which it is, but my relationship to it
contains a lot of pianism. I learn the Rhodes, the Hammond, the
Wurlitzer, the electronics, so that I can use them as devices to work
with ideas, but I don’t practice them like I practice piano. Electronic
music isn’t playing certain scales over certain chords, or working over a
particular form. You might play with the delay, or the rate of an echo,
or modify the reverb. It’s less about technique on an instrument, which
a lot of jazz is, and more related to visual and conceptual art.” But it’s also about being able to execute almost any idea he thinks
of—Taborn possesses a surfeit of technique. He doesn’t use it, as he
puts it, “play in one bag and then shift to another.” Rather, Taborn
prefers to borrow fluently rendered vocabulary from the diverse musical
languages he commands to create contextual gestures that support and
augment the flow. The architecture trumps the facade. “Prescribing notions of the parameters of bebop or hardbop or
avant-garde is to posit a sort of fixed thing that was never fixed
anywhere,” he said. “It’s useful as a model to construct and look at
things, but it doesn’t have much bearing on the creative process. I draw
specific influence from Frank Zappa, Blood Ulmer and Wayne Shorter, not
the note choices or harmony, but in phrasing and sound. What’s
interesting is that it doesn’t translate to piano or keyboards at all,
but comes out sounding like something else.” DB
Craig Taborn: More people are listening to jazz now than in the '50s
April 26, 2013 by Danny Sigelman CityPages
Originally from Golden Valley, Minnesota, jazz pianist Craig Taborn
isn't just a local boy done good. Taborn is considered one of the
foremost pianist and jazz composers of our time. Since leaving for study
at the University of Michigan he eventually graduated to the big
leagues of modern jazz, and maintains status as a heavyweight in New
York City.
Dropping just this week, his latest recording, Chants,
on German imprint ECM Records, finds Taborn and his piano trio
delivering a gratifying mix that hovers between ruminative baroque style
improvisations and abrupt structured composition. Coinciding with an
extra special homecoming to the Walker Art Center this Friday a return
to the local stage seems all the more overdue and the perfect occasion
for Taborn to showcase the immeasurable depth of his career as he'll
perform solo and with two quite disparate ensembles. Gimme
Noise caught Taborn by phone at his apartment in New York. We discussed
the new record and the numerous inspirations he witnessed as a young
jazz student on the very stage where he'll perform on Friday. Craig Taborn: Yeah, a handful of times. I don't
know. Is this the 4th or the 5th? Let's see, there was the one with Drew
Grass, David Torn, Dave King, Susie Ibarra. I'm forgetting one. This is
my first as a leader though. It's exciting. I grew up with the Walker.
Saw many of the most influential shows for me there. Most the people I
used to see when I was in high school at the Walker I ended up playing
with. Like who? Oh man, it's a random list. Tim Berne, John Zorn, Bill Frisell, Craig Harris. Roscoe Mitchell. Lester Bowie, tons of people.
Chants is
a nice progression as you listen to it. It starts out with more
structured tunes and then sort of dissipates and become more sparse and
ambient sounding. Musically, is it a more collaborative thing?
Everything
is. But then also not really. [Laughs] In a way it's probably the least
collaborative. It's a lot more of me as there is a lot of my writing.
Most of the time spent on that record was really alone in it's initial
form. But I really made these pieces for Thomas [Morgan] and Gerald
[Cleaver] to play on. Since we've been playing live together I wanted
the sound of how we respond to one another and create the shapes of the
music. Just being in separate booths in the studio wasn't my favorite
thing as far as working with one another. The dynamic of sound when we
play live was really different in the studio. There's so many thing we
rely on from the live experience. I like studio projects for what they
offer. But I'm not so interested in presenting the same music the same
way live. It definitely comes out as more of a collaboration live.
We've
been a group since 2007. Been touring a lot so the music has developed
over time. The way we play it and approach it it's a live group thing.
We just finished our sixth tour a few days ago in Europe. I don't recall
much of a setlist. We just start playing and each chosing different
pieces. There's a lot of written music that we can reconfigure live.
They either go or meld into each other. The structure from one tune with
the melody of another. It seems your efforts as a side man have allowed you to be pretty open with your trio. I'm
pretty hands off in terms of the fulfillment. All the writing is my
stuff that we are working with. But the way it comes together is very
open. The recording is really different as that process wasn't as easy
to do in the studio. There was a lot of music. There was a lot of tunes
that didn't make it on the record. There was talk about doing a double
CD. We wanted to make a certain shape for the record. It was hard to fit
it all on the record. Some of the decisions are built around that. What's your perspective on modern jazz and the audience? It
doesn't seem as pervasive as it may have been during the golden era of
jazz music? It
may appear that way. I suspect, I have never really studied this. All
that's a question of percentages. I have a feeling there's probably more
jazz listening now than they ever even listened to it in the '50s
actually. It was more popular in the larger culture. Popular music was
rooted in jazz. From the '20s through the '50s it was the popular music
like Frank Sinatra and big bands. As an individual artist these days,
not so many people listen that way. It's been a niche market for a long
time. But there's so many niche markets now. You can draw a thing around
jazz. It's not commercial pop music, but I play all the time. You can play the music for different people and they come out and
listen. Who listens and who sells is a different thing. Certain kind of
jazz, it's way more students but I am pretty sure there are more
musicians studying than ever before. That makes a market for it in a way
around the world. It's a lot more gender balanced too than it probably
was before. It's still out there and there's more people than were back
in the '40s. Relative to that there is really just more of everything
really. For jazz and improvised music it's a performance art and it's
different every time. Especially if you invest in the process for real
like the audience really does. People who know this music know that it's
worth spending money on as they won't ever see again the same way.
That's why they are into it.
Craig
Taborn will perform solo piano, with Junk Magic and his trio for Heroic
Frenzies: The Music of Craig Taborn, Friday, April 26 at the Walker Art
Center at 8pm. Tickets are available here. The full concert will also
be broadcast live on KFAI, 90.3 FM and 106.7 FM in Saint Paul.
(l. to r.) Chris Speed, Dave King, Chris Lightcap, and Craig Taborn
by Dan Ouellette, Senior Editor ZEALnyc February 28, 2017
The
best jazz is the music that’s embedded with surprise. That’s the modus
operandi of pianist/keyboardist Craig Taborn who’s going to be making
only his second six-night showcase at Village Vanguard in his career
that stretches back over two decades, beginning as a recording leader
with his 1994 debut Craig Taborn Trio on the DIW label. He’s a
brilliant surrealistic pianist who is also a bold explorer of the
electronic side of the keys, from a Farfisa compact electron organ to a
Prophet 6 analog synthesizer. It all comes from his background of
classical piano studies and his love of jazz, rock, electronic rock,
punk and metal music. On his brand-new ECM Records album, Daylight Ghosts,
Taborn plays pensive, playful, mysterious, searching, rollicking tunes,
many of which feature an electronic edge, from synthesizer loops to
electronic drumpads. “To listen to it and get a close experience with
it,” he says, “you really have to crank up the volume on a good sound
system and get lost in it. You definitely have to put yourself in that
sound world.”
As
for his absence from the Vanguard, Taborn—who books his own shows in
the U.S. while he uses an agent in Europe where he tours more—says that
he’s just too busy with his own group as well as sideman duties with the
likes of bassist icon Dave Holland. “The only time I played the
Vanguard as a leader was in 2012,” he says. “They’ve asked me back, but
I’m always booked up. I’m always too busy. So finally about a year ago
the stars aligned and I knew I could play during this week.” So last
June, he let ECM Records owner Manfred Eicher that he wanted to record
his new album—and third for the label—so that it could be released
around the same time as his week-long engagement.
Playing the piano, electronic organ and synthesizer at the date, Taborn will be joined by his band mates from Daylight Ghosts,
comprising saxophonist/clarinetist Chris Speed, acoustic/electric
bassist Chris Lightcap and drummer Dave King. Expect the unexpected, he
promises. “It’s a compact group,” he says. “This allows us to move
sonically, moving quickly from acoustic straightahead to the
computer/electronic music that sounds like music from the ’60s and ’70s.
I can use a transistor organ to can get that cheesy sound of the Doors
to the early electric Miles Davis music like Keith Jarrett using a
Yamaha transistor organ on In a Silent Way. And of course,
there was always Sun Ra playing a weird organ. It was the sound of
psychedelic rock from the times as well as Afro-funk. Even Philip Glass
used transistor organs to make his first loops.
Taborn
says there’s definitely a chamber-like vibe on the recording. But live?
Try raucous in pockets. “It moves into different places,” he says. “But
it’s also fully improvisational.” He cites the album’s opening tune
“The Shining One,” a pensive yet whimsical number with pianistic
scrambles and tumbles, rumbling tenor saxophone and tumultuous drumming.
“There’s a lot of high spirit in this one,” he says.”You an hear the
personality of the group come alive. There’s a playful camaraderie with a
lot of confidence but nothing too serious. We can play gnarly or
beautiful on it. The album is one thing, but live it’ll be all about how
the guys feel that evening. There are so many possibilities.”
Soft-spoken,
Taborn talks about synth loops on a tune like “Phantom Ratio” (“don’t
even ask me what that means…”) that is reminiscent of a ’70s Tangerine
Dream electronics soundtrack. “I love stuff like that,” he says. “You
can play austere but also place next to that raw, messy, organic shapes
of sound. I like hearing that dirty sound of analog synthesizer music
from the late ’70 and early ’80s.”
In
its essence, the music Taborn delivers are exercises in storytelling.
“I do see myself as a storyteller,” he says. “The compositions are
narrations. The notes are characters and [determine] where they go. I’m
aware of how things move through time, so I do function as a narrator. A
song has to have a theme, then we work on that to see what unfolds.”
Craig Taborn has been quietly dominating the jazz vanguard for more
than a decade now. Taborn, from Minneapolis via the University of
Michigan, first got known as the pianist in James Carter’s quartet,
where he matched supercharged post-bop licks with a saxophone player of
protean skill. But it was 2004’s Junk Magic for the Thirsty Ear
label that pricked the ear of anyone who was listening -- as Taborn
created a jazz/electronic masterpiece that demonstrated sensitivity
combined with bold vision, “inside” melodic grace combined with canny
avant-garde instincts, and artistic vision blended with a sense that
jazz could communicate beyond its usual boundaries. Taborn went on
not only to play with a who’s who of New York jazz but also to upstage
many of those leaders on their own albums. His improvisations and
accompaniments were so striking, original, and thrilling that you’d
wonder why Taborn himself wasn’t making more dates as a leader. But now he is not only recording regularly but on a leading label to boot. His third release for ECM is called Daylight Ghosts,
and it puts him in charge of another quartet featuring a tenor
saxophonist (and clarinetist, Chris Speed) with a top rhythm section
that defies expectations (Chris Lightcap on bass and Dave King on drums
and electronic percussion). It is a curious band for sure, but one that
is wonderfully quirky. Lightcap has cast Taborn in a leading role,
serving his churning, driving tunes in a brilliant band, Bigmouth, and
Lightcap returns the favor here with a strong presence. Dave King is
known for his role in The Bad Plus, working with pianist Ethan Iverson,
and he is versatile and utterly simpatico in his playing here. Speed
plays (and/or was recorded?) with a pastel tone, blending with Taborn’s
largely impressionistic work. Everything, but everything, on Daylight Ghosts serves Taborn’s tunes, and very little leaps out of the tapestry, including the leader himself. The title composition in this collection demonstrates Taborn’s
intentions and how the band works cooperatively. Set in a few different
sections, “Daylight Ghosts” begins as a wistful ballad between Speed's
tenor and the piano into the which Lightcap and King add some tension as
they enter after a minute. Once the melody is fully stated, Speed and
Taborn overlap for a bit before the leader rolls out a stately solo
followed by the melodic restatement. More than halfway done, then,
Taborn begins a simple repeated phrase with his left hand that rolls in
circles as Speed improvises in a calm, understated way. Lightcap thrums a
single note beneath the return of the written line, as King pushes
harder and harder on both cymbals and toms. This second section presses
rhythm as its theme but manages to retain the mood of the beginning. No
one player leaps out as the featured soloist. Just as Taborn surely
intended. “Ancient” is even more subtle and collective as it
builds to intensity. Lightcap starts it off with a quiet exploration of a
single chord, plucking and strumming his acoustic bass without flash
for almost two minutes before single notes from the piano and tiny
clicks and taps from Kind set the groove to “simmer”. Speed enters on
tenor, but he chooses light jabs and tender feints rather than a long,
serpentine line -- and this performance extends itself into being mainly
accompaniment to a punching, daring solo by Taborn. Eventually, each
member of the quartet is able to match Taborn’s energy so that King is
rocking, Lightcap is funky beneath, and Speed locks in with the piano,
creating a percolating counterpoint that makes you want to dance. Some other songs are grooving almost from the start. “New Glory” is a
joyous romp, grooving in the pocket like one of the gospel-driven Keith
Jarrett tunes from his European Quartet. The best thing here, if Junk Magic
was your jam, is “Phantom Ratio”, which starts as a ballad but evolves
into an electronic/trance funk, with a repeated electronic loop beneath
the quartet’s groove. Speed speaks in long, held tones above the ripple
for a while, but eventually all sorts of textures — toggling electric
bass from Lightcap, distorted electronic tones that echo the saxophone,
King’s splashes and slashes of cymbal — built into a roar of
inspiration. As much or more of the recording, however, is
atmospheric and subtle. "Jamaican Farewell” is a sumptuous ballad that
features Speed’s clarinet. After two minutes of “standard” jazz
balladry, the performance becomes much richer as Lightcap bows a long
note, King begins a thrilling metronomic cymbal pattern, and the four
musicians enter a harmonically static collective improvisation that
lifts, falls, and eventually fizzles into thin air. There’s one
performance here just for the trio. “Subtle Living Equations” is a
spare, freely expressed performance, with Taborn leaving huge open
spaces that King fills with wit and surprise. Taborn is masterful in
varying his dynamics from note to note. No piano trio anywhere can
hypnotize you so completely with so little music. The other potential masterpiece on Daylight Ghosts
is “The Great Silence” also uses Speed’s woody, natural clarinet tone,
but here mixed with chiming piano and traces of electronics, eventually
pulling the whole band for a gorgeous final two minutes of sounds that
might originate almost anywhere. With Taborn’s music, you become less
and less aware (or. more accurately, concerned with) who is playing
which notes. The soundscape simply enchants. For my money, Craig
Taborn is already one of the MVP candidates for jazz in the
twenty-teens. He defies categories, of course, but he’s even better than
that: all the music he engages in is an act of original imagination. Daylight Ghosts is among the best extended performances of his career. And that’s saying something. https://www.allaboutjazz.com/craig-taborn-and-his-multiple-motion-craig-taborn-by-giuseppe-segala.php?page=1
"The tradition I come from is one of innovation of established approaches."
Craig Taborn
is among the most creative musicians on today's scene. His music is
shaped by a deep intellectual curiosity towards a wide range of artistic
forms and sources of knowledge. His technical, stylistic, emotional and
mental versatility have allowed him to collaborate with a large range
of recognized masters in diverse styles of contemporary jazz.
Despite
such diversity and versatility, Taborn has a distinctive, recognizable
and focused approach. His piano style, especially evident on the solo
album Avenging Angel (2011, ECM), is based on a prodigious
polyrhythmic intricacy as well as on counterpoints which are at times
dense and at other times delicate and expansive. One can hear echoes of Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, Cecil Taylor and Sun Ra coming out of the creases of his playing. On Daylight Ghosts,
his most recent album, Taborn displays a striking capacity to write
compositions for his quartet which leave room for endless surprises
delivered through a flurry of ostinatos, counterpoints and unisons,
amidst highly organized structures.
All About Jazz: Why did you decide to pursue a music career and how did piano and keyboards become your instruments of choice?
Craig Taborn:
The instrument choice came long before the career choice. There was
always a piano in my house. My father, a psychologist and college
professor by trade, would play it in the evenings for his own enjoyment.
He played blues and jazz by ear. At some point, when I was more or less
eleven years old, I wanted to learn some things he was playing and he
showed me how to play them. After that, I began practicing in earnest,
soon starting proper piano lessons. As far as electronics are concerned,
a little later, when I was twelve years old, I asked for a synthesizer
and my parents bought me a Moog synth for Christmas. So I also also
explored electronics quite early.
I quickly took to music and
played in many bands, eventually playing piano in lounges when I was 17
or so, but I did not decide making music a career until later when I was
in college and the number of gigs I was doing began to interfere with
my studies. At that point I realized that i was already a working
musician and decided to continue down that path.
AAJ: What were the most formative moments and epiphanies during your music education?
CT: There were many. A major one was seeing the band Last Exit with Bill Laswell, Sonny Sharrock, Peter Brötzmann, and Ronald Shannon Jackson. I was 15 years old and I was trying to understand the complexity of artists like Cecil Taylor and Anthony Braxton.
Listening to their recordings was both intriguing and challenging. But
then I saw that Last Exit concert and their sound and weight was truly
shocking. I returned home feeling overwhelmed. After that experience,
the same Cecil Taylor recording I had been listening to with so much
difficulty sounded more clear and calm to me. I could finally understand
and hear its subtleties. It felt almost like, all of a sudden, I was
listening to a cool jazz album. So that experience really taught me that
any boundary which limits our perceptions and enjoyment can be moved
and expanded.
AAJ: You grew up in Minneapolis,
a city with an under-appreciated yet vibrant scene, with many
significant jazz players. How did that influence your musical
upbringing? Is there anything distinctively "Minneapolis" about your
playing?
CT: It is difficult to say. The
Minneapolis music scene was rich but mostly because of its openness to
music from out of town. Minneapolis gives a lot of support for the arts
and this makes it possible to see a love of music acts from New York and
other places. So i would say that much of my influences were actually
from New York. In Minnesota, however, musicians create their own
"dialect" out of a lot of influences, which we blend in an original way
as we are largely free from any notion of what the influences should
mean. So you see a lot of cross-genre music. Prince, for instance,
always included Funk, RnB, Rock, New Wave, Folk etc in his music. He
mixed it freely and moved from one to the other. You can see that same
approach in The Bad Plus, and many other Minnesota artists. I think that kind of eclecticism is very much a part of what happens there.
AAJ:
This eclectism is evident also in your music, thanks to a
well-developed amalgamation of genres spanning from Jazz to Classical,
from Rock to Contemporary, all the way to the more modern Electronica,
Metal, Punk, Underground and Noise musics. How do you manage to
synthesize such seemingly-distant influences so naturally? How do you
prevent this process from creating just an updated form of "Fusion"?
CT:
The influence of these kinds of music is organic. I am not trying to
combine them in any pre-established way. What I play is the result of
allowing what you listen to influence what you create. So i just respond
to my creative inclinations. The integration of "style" happens
internally, subconsciously. "Fusions" seem to come from consciously
trying to combine a number of styles to create music that is supposed to
sound in a pre-determined way. I am not thinking that way at all. What
comes to me is just ideas, the influences they derive from are not as
clear to me.
AAJ: How did you approach your
interest for these more energetic genres when preparing your projects
for ECM and what was Manfred Eicher's response in this regard?
CT:
I focus on the the sound and on what can work with that sound and how.
To a certain extent, I am aware of a different approach to sound when
working with Manfred, but for me that is the natural consequence of
working collaboratively with him. So, as much as i would work
differently with different drummers depending on how they sound, I am
aware of Manfred's aesthetic point of view and how it marries with the
sound of the project. Ultimately it boils down to a matter of musical
sensitivity aimed at understanding how these things may be implemented.
In the case of these "more energetic" genres it is a matter of
understanding how far and effectively that energy can be translated in a
recorded context, and how it might need to be changed to that end.
AAJ: How do tradition and innovation interact in your musical process?
CT:
Tradition and innovation are two aspects of the same process. The
tradition I come from is one of innovation of established approaches. As
a result, you cannot be a traditional Jazz musician without somehow
innovating the resources that you inherit. And, by the same token, you
cannot really be an innovator if you have nothing upon which to
innovate. So I find that both things are essential for my music making.
AAJ: In your more recent albums, especially in the solo record Avenging Angel and the most recent album Daylight Ghosts
featuring your quartet, the relationship between written and improvised
parts is tight and in continuous evolution. How do you integrate these
two aspects?
CT: Composing for improvisers is a
process of creating information and structures that invite
improvisation. The written material has to leave enough space for what
is still unstated or undetermined, so that there is room for
improvising. Conversely, it is equally important that improvisation
alters the written material. If you have the possibility for improvising
to change how the written things are interpreted and you have musicians
savvy enough to work with the written material in their improvisations
then the two approaches will work well together.
AAJ:
As a follow up question: what do improvisation (both solo improvisation
and collective improvisation) and composition represent for you?
CT:
Well, they are just two aspects of the same process. With improvisation
you are composing at the same time as you're performing, so you lose
the possibility for revisions. At the same time you gain the possibility
of experiencing the space you're performing in, an aspect that can
shape the music in a way you cannot know when you are composing in a
room you know. So each aspect has its own advantages. In the ultimate
process of making music I use whichever one will yield the most
interesting result.
AAJ: If you were to define your position in the musical spectrum of today, would you find the "jazz" label to be limiting?
CT:
Well it is not so much limiting as possibly incomplete. However, there
are so many definitions of "Jazz" that I am usually not concerned with
naming things. I consider Jazz a lineage and a process more than a style
or specific state of music. So am happy to call what i do Jazz. That
aligns with an identity and tradition that is close to me and most
accurately represents my approach. But I do not think that it conditions
how it sounds. For other people saying Jazz may create the need for it
to sound a certain way but that is a different story. So the limitation
is not in the term but in a person's own aesthetics. Music is music
aside from any labels and I certainly am never thinking whether what i
am making at any given moment is Jazz or not. I am more concerned with
whether what I play sounds cool.
AAJ: You have had formative collaborations with many prominent masters. Can you tell us about your work with Roscoe Mitchell and to what degree has the AACM school influenced your music?
CT:
I have listened to the music of many AACM composers since i was 12 or
13. The liner notes and graphics of some Anthony Braxton recordings
really fired up my imagination and changed how I thought about what
music could be. Therefore, I count the music made by many of the artists
in the AACM among my primary influences. I started working with Roscoe
Mitchell 20 years ago and it was one of the most important associations
in my life. I learned and continue to learn so much from his example and
approach. And this influence has had an effect on everything I have
done since, regardless of "genre."
AAJ: You
have been also influenced by personalities with whom you have not
collaborated. Can you tell us about Cecil Taylor's influence? And Sun
Ra's?
CT: Cecil Taylor was an early and
constant influence and really changed or expanded what i thought of as
possible on the piano. He made me realize how the piano could function
in any context. Sun Ra's example across the history of music and in so
many contexts (electronic music, composition, improvisation, band
leading, mythos, connection to old masters, etc.) is so pervasive that I
am not sure why he is not counted alongside Duke Ellington as one the enduring Masters of this music. Consistency and longevity are evidence of the strength of his conception.
AAJ: It seems that your approach to the piano is strongly characterized by a form of "spontaneous counterpoint." In your work with Tim Berne, for instance, this becomes particularly evident in the connection between your piano and Tom Rainey's drumming. Can you tell us more about this aspect of your playing?
CT:
I have always had an interest in counterpoint-or, to be more precisce,
in "multiple motion." I like the idea of distinct musical identities
operating in the same musical field. This can be melodic, rhythmic or
timbral but I like to identify separate elements and work with them. So
with Tim Berne's Hard Cell, for instance, I was always interested in
exploiting this possibility as much as possible, even though there were
only three instruments in that band. I used the electronics, and later
the piano, alongside Tom's gift for and awareness of rhythmic
complexity, to try to see how far we could go in terms of evolving a
multiplicity of musical identities in those improvisations. And this
extended very much from the way Tim Berne was composing for that
group-which often had 3 or 4 parts in the writing.
AAJ: Gerald Cleaver, Tyshawn Sorey, Dave King and Ches Smith
are some of the other prominent drummers with whom you have been
playing on a regular basis. What do you seek in a drummer? How do you
approach playing with drummers of such diverse styles?
CT:
It is essential for me that a drummer is fluent in many approaches but
also cognizant of the musical context and able to engage creatively in
any environment. One thing that stands out about the drummers you
mentioned is the fact that, while they are all fantastic and totally
unique drummers, they are also primarily composers and bandleaders. Each
of them has his own music and projects. They are not "just sidemen
drummers." I think this is essential. They have a creative point of view
and apply themselves to music primarily as composers, their choices
come from the angle of a composer not a drummer. Dan Weiss and many others would have to be added to that list as well!
AAJ: A fundamental drummer you have played with is Paul Motian. Can you tell us about working with his unique style?
CT:
Paul is one of the most influential drummers of all times. His
approach, which is informed by the essence of the music-melody and
sound-was truly revolutionary. Playing with him was another deep
learning experience. At those gigs you find your approach to everything
you do altered by the experience, no matter how specific it is. Paul was
like that for me.
AAJ: How do you write music
that successfully integrates keyboards and guitar, something that you've
successfully achieved for instance with Marc Ducret on Tim Berne's Science Friction or with David Torn on his album Prezens?
CT: For those projects i did not write any music-Science Friction is Tim's music and Prezens
is group music "composed upon" by David Torn. But to answer your
question i think that the integration of electronics and guitar is
something that comes from engaging with and understanding sound. Most
guitarists are heavily involved with their tone and sound and they make
music from that place. So, when playing with guitar players,
understanding their sound is more important than the notes that are
being played. Both Marc Ducret and David Torn are coming from an
advanced sonic space anyway, so when you play with them you're with two
sound designers more than two guitarists.
AAJ: What are the genres that trigger your musical curiousity today? What music do you listen to these days?
CT:
Truly all genres are inspiring. A list of artists would not be long
enough and to pick a few would not accurately characterize my listening.
For the sake of offering you something, the last recordings that I
purchased—and yes i still buy music! -were by Chrome, George Russell, The Lemon Twigs, Shostakovich, Damon Bell, Jute Gyte, and older Abbey Lincoln.
AAJ:
You've studied literature and you have a strong interest for visual
arts. To what degree do you draw inspiration from these art-forms?
CT: Completely. I find continual influence from all kinds of creative people and also from science.
AAJ: What are your next projects?
CT: Working on an electronic project, some more solo piano things, and a newer smaller "chamber" project.
An internationally renowned musician, composer and innovator,Roscoe Mitchellbegan his distinguished career in the spirited 1960s of Chicago. In Mitchell’s own opinion, his work is a product of his heritage in the fertile art communities of the AACM (Association for Advancement of Creative Musicians) and The Art Ensemble of Chicago. Both organizations spawned large networks of musicians and inspired radical approaches to performance and musical thought, thus informing his own practice for over five decades. Primarily known for his saxophone playing, Mitchell’s multi-instrumental palette also includes various flutes, woodwinds and a broad range of percussion.Mitchell’s monumental 1966 album,Sound, introduced new ways of freely improvising and composing and has long been cited as an essential building block of the “free-jazz” vernacular. Now at the age 73, Mitchell has recorded works on over 83 albums and has written over 250 compositions. Throughout his composed works Mitchell expresses ideas that embrace a broad span of musics from energetic free jazz to traditional music methodologies to complex compositions for chamber groups. Longstanding collaborations have continued with a coterie of diverse musicians: Muhal Richard Abrams, Anthony Braxton, Lester Bowie and Pauline Oliveros. Mitchell has been named Darius Milhaud Chair of Composition at Mills College in Oakland, California, where he currently lives and works.NYC pianist and ECM recording artist,Craig Taborn, has remained a ubiquitous presence on the jazz scene for the past two decades, performing with young jazz musicians and seasoned veterans as well as experimental rock and techno artists. His pianistic approach alludes to the explorations of Bill Evans, Keith Jarrett, and Cecil Taylor and expands further upon these models through his alternate use of Spartan subtlety and dense, hypnotic chord structuring. With regard to his performance sensibilities, Taborn explains that this takes shape by “listening to the really subtle details of instrumental sound, because you don’t just have to rest on notes and rhythms. You can rest on overtones and undertones and other nuances of sound to draw from. When you listen to silence, it’s really rich with possibility, and we start from that place.” At any given time his ongoing band/collaboration-list is over twenty names, which now include Tim Berne, Lotte Anker, Gerald Cleaver, William Parker and Vijay Iyer.
Buy tickets for Roscoe Mitchell / Craig Taborn.
Please note that tickets for this show are $25 (regular) and $15 (student/struggling music supporter).
Special Free Artist Talks!On Thursday DEC 4 at 7:30PM, NMC will sponsor afreetalk and Q&A with Roscoe Mitchell at theTavern of Fine Arts. The talk will be hosted by Dennis Owsley (host of KWMU’sJazz Unlimited) and Paul Steinbeck of Washington University. More detailshere.
On Friday DEC 5 at 2:00 PM, Roscoe Mitchell will present a guest lecture at Washington University to discuss the evolution of one of his best-known compositions. Mitchell’s talk“NONAAH: From Solo to Full Orchestra”will take place in Wash U’s Music Classroom Building, Room 102, 6500 Forsyth Blvd at Wallace Dr. The event is free and open to the public.
THE MUSIC OF CRAIG TABORN: AN EXTENSIVE VIDEO OVERVIEW, A CROSS SECTION OF RECORDINGS, MUSICAL ANALYSIS AND COMMENTARY, PLUS VARIOUS INTERVIEWS WITH CRAIG TABORN:
TipRingSleeve (Craig Taborn, Tomeka Reid, Ches Smith) - at El Taller / Arts for Art--October 8 2017:
The pianist and keyboards player Craig Taborn once estimated
that he was a member of "15 to 20" working bands. That says something
about how much fellow musicians value his playing; it also says
something about his versatility. He's as likely to be playing free
improvisation as straight-ahead jazz, as adept at electric piano funk as
electro-acoustic sound collage. He's not much for labels, which can
work to his advantage; his album of solo piano improvisations, Avenging Angel, won lots of plaudits from jazz critics last year.
Few
of those 15 to 20 bands bear his name, though, which makes it a treat
to see him at the Village Vanguard atop the marquee. He brought a
bassist and drummer, as on his first two albums — and his next, to be
recorded this summer. In an abstract set draped with generously warm
flourishes, WBGO and NPR Music presented a live radio broadcast and
video webcast of the Craig Taborn Trio, live at the Village Vanguard.
Set List
All compositions by Craig Taborn.
"American Landscape"
"Chorales" [working title]
"Gal 1" [working title]
"Light Made Lighter"
"Naelan"
Personnel
Craig Taborn, piano
Thomas Morgan, bass
Gerald Cleaver, drums
Credits
Producer And Host: Josh Jackson; Audio Engineer: David Tallacksen; Production Assistant: Michael Downes. Recorded April 4, 2012 at The Village Vanguard in New York, N.Y.
Kofi Natambu, editor of and contributor to Sound Projections, is a writer, poet, cultural critic, and political journalist whose poetry, essays, criticism, reviews, and journalism have appeared in many literary magazines, journals, newspapers, and anthologies. He has written extensively about music as a critic and historian for many publications, including the Black Scholar, Downbeat, Solid Ground: A New World Journal, Detroit Metro Times, KONCH, the Panopticon Review,Black Renaissance Noire, the Village Voice, the City Sun (NYC), the Poetry Project Newsletter (NYC), and the African American Review. He is the author of a biography Malcolm X: His Life & Work (Alpha Books) and two books of poetry: The Melody Never Stops (Past Tents Press) and Intervals (Post Aesthetic Press). He was the founder and editor of Solid Ground: A New World Journal, a national quarterly magazine of the arts, culture, and politics and the editor of a literary anthology Nostalgia for the Present (Post Aesthetic Press). Natambu has read his work throughout the country and given many lectures and workshops at academic and arts institutions. He has taught American literature, literary theory and criticism, cultural history and criticism, film studies, political science, creative writing, philosophy, critical theory, and music history and criticism (Jazz, Blues, R&B, Hip Hop) at many universities and colleges. He was also a curator in the Education Department of Detroit’s Museum of African American History. Born in Detroit, Michigan, Natambu currently lives in Berkeley, California with his wife Chuleenan.
