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https://www.allmusic.com/artist/cecil-taylor-mn0000988386
Cecil Taylor
(1929-2018)
Biography by Scott Yanow
Soon after he first emerged in the mid-'50s, pianist Cecil Taylor was considered one of the most radical and boundary-pushing improvisers in jazz. Although in his early days he used some standards as vehicles for improvisation, Taylor is largely known for his often avant-garde original compositions. To simplify describing his style, one could say that his intense atonal percussive approach involved playing the piano as if it were a set of drums. He generally emphasized dense clusters of sound played with remarkable technique and endurance, often during marathon performances.
Born in 1929, and raised in Corona, Queens in New York City, Taylor started piano lessons at the age of six, and attended the New York College of Music and the New England Conservatory. His early influences included Duke Ellington and Dave Brubeck, but from the start he sounded original. Early gigs included work with groups led by Johnny Hodges and Hot Lips Page, but, after forming his quartet in the mid-'50s (which originally included Steve Lacy on soprano, bassist Buell Neidlinger, and drummer Dennis Charles), Taylor was never a sideman again. The group played at the Five Spot Cafe in 1956 for six weeks and performed at the 1957 Newport Jazz Festival (which was recorded by Verve), but, despite occasional records like 1958's Looking Ahead, work was scarce.
In 1960, Taylor recorded extensively for Candid under Neidlinger's name (by then the quartet featured Archie Shepp on tenor), and the following year he sometimes substituted in the play The Connection. By 1962, Taylor's quartet featured his regular sideman Jimmy Lyons on alto and drummer Sunny Murray. He spent six months in Europe (Albert Ayler worked with Taylor's group for a time although no recordings resulted) but upon his return to the U.S., Taylor did not work again for almost a year. Even with the rise of free jazz, his music was considered too advanced. In 1964, Taylor was one of the founders of the Jazz Composer's Guild and, in 1968, he was featured on a record by the Jazz Composer's Orchestra. In the mid-'60s, Taylor recorded two very advanced sets for Blue Note, but it was generally a lean decade.
Things greatly improved starting in the '70s. Taylor taught for a time at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, Antioch College, and Glassboro State College. European tours also became common. After being awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1973, the pianist's financial difficulties were eased a bit; he even performed at the White House (during Jimmy Carter's administration) in 1979. He also recorded more frequently, delivering albums like 1976's Dark to Themselves, and 1979's Cecil Taylor Unit. Taylor also started incorporating some of his eccentric poetry into his performances.
The death of longtime associate Jimmy Lyons in 1986 was a major blow, but Taylor remained active over the next few decades, issuing albums on labels such as hatART, Soul Note, Leo, and FMP, including 1986's For Olim, 1993's Always a Pleasure, and 1996's The Light of Corona. He also formed a trio with bassist William Parker and drummer Tony Oxley. During the 2000s, the pianist slowed little, often working often with his various ensembles, including his trio, and his big band. Having never compromised his musical vision, Taylor's stature grew in his later years. He was the subject of a 2006 documentary All the Notes, and in 2013 was awarded the Kyoto Prize for Music. In 2016, the Whitney Museum of American Art hosted a retrospective of his career titled Open Plan: Cecil Taylor. Taylor died on April 5, 2018 at his home in Brooklyn at the age of 89.
https://www.allaboutjazz.com/musicians/cecil-taylor/
Cecil Taylor
"One of my wishes has been realized. I found love. It was difficult, but I found it. Because when Billy Holiday sang, 'You don‘t know what love is,' great singers will tell you… it‘s a partnership. It‘s a sharing." —Cecil Taylor
"Practice, to be studious at the instrument, as well as looking at a bridge, or dancing, or writing a poem, or reading, or attempting to make your home more beautiful. What goes into an improvisation is what goes into one's preparation, then allowing the prepared senses to execute at the highest level devoid of psychological or logical interference. You ask, without logic, where does the form come from? It seems something that may be forgotten is that as we begin our day and proceed through it there is a form in existence that we create out of, that the day and night itself is for. And what we choose to vary in the daily routine provides in itself the fresh building blocks to construct a living form which is easily translated into a specific act of making a musical composition." - Cecil Taylor
Cecil Taylor has been an uncompromising creative force who is a testament to his own existence and personal experience since his earliest recordings in the 1950's. In the 1960's, his music would become a leading exponent, along with that of John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman, of the budding "free-jazz" movement. This movement shook the very foundations on which jazz music was securely resting and marks a major turning point in the history of the music that challenged the structures of form and the tonal harmonic system. Taylor has said of his characteristic rhythmic playing that he tries "to imitate on the piano the leaps in space a dancer makes" and his orchestral facility on the piano has allowed him to innovate new musical textures in small ensemble performance. Taylor's playing has always been technically sophisticated, but as he once said, "technique is a weapon to do whatever must be done".† The personnel in his bands over his almost five decades in jazz comprises a list of astounding talent including: Steve Lacy, Jimmy Lyons, Albert Ayler, Buell Neidlinger, Dennis Charles, Archie Shepp, William Parker, Max Roach, Tony Williams, Mark Helias, Mary Lou Williams, and Bill Dixon. Additionally, he has worked with several notable dancers and choreographers including composing music for Diane McIntyre, Mikhail Barishnokov, and Heather Watts.
While his music has always been controversial to mainstream audiences, he has always been totally true to his artistic vision, and this has extended into all aspects of his life including his passions for reading, dance, theatre, and architecture. He is also an accomplished poet, and has incorporated this talent into many of his performances and recordings.
Born in New York on March 25, 1929, Cecil Taylor began playing piano and at the age of five at the encouragement of his mother. From 1951-1955 he attended the New England Conservatory where he concentrated in piano and music theory. His early professional career began working with Hot Lips Page and Johnny Hodges (c. 1953). In 1955 he formed a quartet with Steve Lacy and soon released his first important album, Jazz Avance (1956). An engagement shortly after at the Five Spot helped to establish the Greenwich Village club as a forum for East Coast new jazz. During this period he also made an appearance at the Newport Jazz Festival and the Great South Bay Jazz Festival. In 1960 his "free-jazz" quartet controversially temporarily replaced a "hard-bop" band in the play The Connection.
In 1962 he was awarded Downbeat's "new star" award for pianists while ironically unable to get work for most of the 60's. He claims he was forced to live on welfare for at least five years during this period. In 1964 he took part in the October Revolution in Jazz, a series of New York City Concerts self-sponsored by Bill Dixon's Jazz Composers Guild (consisting mostly of musicians of the avant-garde variety). In the 70's, he briefly taught at Antioch College, the University of Wisconsin, and Glassboro State College in New Jersey.
Virtually all of Taylor's recorded music between 1967 and 1977 was recorded and released in Europe. After 1973, his career began to gain momentum and he began to tour regularly as a solo pianist and leading his own groups. He was also awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and ran his own record label named Unit Core. In 1975 he was elected into the Down Beat Hall of Fame. In 1979 he composed music for the play "Tetra Stomp: Eatn' Rain in Space".
In the late 70's and early 80's Taylor began to collaborate with Diane McIntyre and her dance company Sound In Motion. This company focused on combining jazz and spoken poetry into dance. In 1988 he was honored with a month-long festival of his music in Berlin, involving many of Europe's prominent avant-garde jazz musicians. In 1990 he was named a NEA Jazz Master and in 1991 he was awarded a McArthur Foundation "genius" grant-in-aid, which provided him with considerable financial security. He was not invited to play at Jazz at Lincoln Center because of certain accusations that his music did not fit into the artistic directors' definition of "jazz", so he rented Alice Tully Hall and gave an unaccompanied piano concert, which won him a considerable amount of critical acclaim. In October of that year he gave a concert with orchestral accompaniment in San Francisco and in 1999 he appeared at a Library of Congress concert in Washington, D.C.
Taylor, now in his almost 82nd year, continues to compose music and poetry. At a time in his career when most artists of his stature could sustain themselves with a victory lap of regurgitating the past or to slip into silent retirement, Taylor continues to push new boundaries with his art. Taylor is unquestionably an artist of the highest rank, and a direct link to America's art music. His very personal and distinct artistic vision has taken him through much innovative and unexplored musical territory, demanding much of his listeners but also providing content that can be enjoyed. The musical world is awaiting the next step of Cecil Taylor.
Awards
MacArthur Foundation Genious Fellowship in 1991, Doctor Honoris Causa Columbia University, Doctor Honoris Causa New England Conservatory
“Musical categories don’t mean anything unless we talk about the actual specific acts that people go through to make music, how one speaks, dances, dresses, moves, thinks, makes love...all these things. We begin with a sound and then say, what is the function of that sound, what is determining the procedures of that sound? Then we can talk about how it motivates or regenerates itself, and that’s where we have tradition.” --Cecil Taylor, 1966
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/cecil-taylor-and-the-art-of-noise
The New Yorker
In 1993, I briefly met the composer György Ligeti, one of the towering musical figures of the past hundred years. As often happens when one is in the company of greats, I seized the opportunity to ask an idiotic question: “What do you think of Cecil Taylor?” Ligeti possessed a comprehensive knowledge of the world’s musical traditions, including jazz. But he had little more than a vaguely positive impression of Taylor. I failed to hit whatever interpretive jackpot I had been expecting.
Ligeti died in 2006, at the age of eighty-three. Taylor died last week, at eighty-nine. In truth, the two had little in common, other than a propensity for seething, maximalist textures. What united them in my mind was how they guided me as brilliant beacons at a time when I was discovering the full extent of twentieth-century musical possibility. We tend to think of genres as distinct land masses, with oceans of taste separating them. Yet, as I observed when I wrote about Taylor and Sonic Youth, in 1998, there exist polar regions where the distinctions tend to blur—namely, the zone that is often labelled “avant” or “experimental” in used-record stores. When dissonance and complexity build to a sufficient degree, works of classical, jazz, or rock descent can sound more like one another than like their parent genres.
I grew up with classical music and came late to rock, pop, and jazz. I took the northern passage between genres, and Taylor was, somewhat perversely, the first jazz figure who caught my ear—perversely because he had only one foot in jazz, as conventionally defined. The pianist and composer Ethan Iverson, commenting on a 1973 trio recording, writes that Jimmy Lyons and Andrew Cyrille, Taylor’s partners on this occasion, “sound like jazz musicians.” Taylor, however, “didn’t sound like that. He had another kind of poetry, some other kind of sheer strength of will.” The New Yorker’s Richard Brody observes that, even on the début album “Jazz Advance,” from 1956, Taylor had “left chordal jazz behind and spun musical material of his own choosing (whether harmonic, motivic, melodic, or rhythmic) into kaleidoscopic cascades of sound.” The question of whether Taylor was “really jazz” was once a hot topic in the jazz world, and he elicited a few sharp putdowns from fellow-musicians. “Total self-indulgent bullshit” was Branford Marsalis’s notorious judgment on Taylor’s modernist philosophy in the Ken Burns documentary “Jazz.” Miles Davis said, of a Taylor record, “Take it off! That’s some sad shit, man.” Such is the fate of the outsider in any genre.
For me, Taylor was the untouchable emperor of the art of noise. I first saw him in 1989, at the Western Front, a club in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Also on the bill was the David Gilmore Trio; Marvin Gilmore, Jr., David Gilmore’s father, owned the club, which was best known for its reggae nights. Several shaggy-haired patrons audibly expressed their bewilderment as the performance unfolded; it turned out that they had come expecting to hear David Gilmour, of Pink Floyd. I don’t remember much in detail about Taylor’s set, in which he was joined by William Parker, on bass, and Gregg Bendian, on drums. I do recall that for the first five or ten minutes the music was dense, intense, driving, ferocious—and then it started. Some frenzy of figuration under Taylor’s hummingbird hands set off a collective pandemonium that became purely physical in effect: I felt at once pressed backward and pulled in. It remains one of the most visceral listening experiences of my life.
Taylor always shunned labels. He often used “jazz” in virtual quotation marks, even though he recognized it as his home tradition. He was also wary of the word “composer.” A graduate of the New England Conservatory, he was rigorously trained in classical composition and performance, and could fire off precise references to Webern, Xenakis, and, yes, Ligeti. But he disliked the idea of the composer as a mastermind controlling every aspect of music behind the scenes. In 1989, Steve Lake wrote, of Taylor: “In a dismissive tone, he can make ‘composer’ sound like ‘dictator’ or ‘megalomaniac.’ ‘I don’t think I’d ever want to be considered a composer’ (accompanying the word with an expression of acute distaste).” In this Taylor was akin to his idol, Duke Ellington, who resisted European archetypes of composition and sought to create his own jazz-based African-American version of it. Ellington and Taylor were vastly different: the one suave, aristocratic, buoyant, popular; the other irregular, anarchic, confrontational, anti-commercial. But Taylor emulated Ellington’s way of composing with and through his groups. Taylor would give his collaborators notated material, yet they had the freedom to express themselves through the written notes or abandon them altogether.
Taylor could indeed create atonal music on the fly, as if he were improvising a Charles Ives sonata or a Stockhausen Klavierstück. At his most diabolical, he sounds like several of Conlon Nancarrow’s hyperkinetic player-piano rolls playing simultaneously. Those splatters of notes are hardly random, however. He pummels the piano in different registers and then repeats the gesture with startling precision. His hands always go where his brain directs them to go. And he would return to tonal groundings after long spells in a gravity-free environment. Something I particularly loved about his recordings and performances—I saw him a handful of times in the nineties and the aughts—were the grand, mournful, minor-mode themes that would periodically loom out of the harmonic fog. They struck me as fundamentally Romantic in contour—perhaps a bit Brahmsian, for lack of a better point of reference. I have stitched together a few of them, from “3 Phasis,” “Winged Serpent,” and “Alms / Tiergarten (Spree),” which you can listen to here.
The last example comes from a set of eleven CDs released by the Free Music Production label, documenting Taylor’s residency in Berlin in the summer of 1988. “Alms,” a two-hour marathon featuring a seventeen-piece group called the Cecil Taylor European Orchestra, included such avant-jazz luminaries as Evan Parker, Peter Brötzmann, Peter Kowald, and Han Bennink. The music moves in like a weather system, a slow-gathering, all-engulfing storm of sound. On the FMP recording, the orchestra is plainly working from a score and periodically settles on a particular figure, though crisp unisons are not the point. (Taylor himself often ignores the big patterns he has set in motion and dances deliriously against the grain.) I witnessed the same mighty convergence at a live show at Iridium, in 2005, with a fifteen-piece band. As the music swayed between quasi-symphonic utterances and every-which-way melees, it presented a totality, a sprawling structure built in real time.
As Iverson says, no one else played like Taylor, and no one will. Nonetheless, he leaves a potent legacy for the ever-growing body of music that unfolds in the spaces between jazz and classical traditions, between European and African-American cultures, between composition and improvisation. With Taylor, the refusal of category, the resistance to description, was rooted in an attitude of defiance that seemed variously personal, cultural, and political. At a famously contentious discussion at Bennington College in 1964, Taylor said: “The jazz musician has taken Western music and made of it what he wanted to make of it.” As a queer black man—he rejected the label “gay”—he experienced racism in the wider world and homophobia within jazz. As the purveyor of music that most people found incomprehensible, he encountered a disdain that frequently boiled over into irrational hatred. His imperious indifference followed the example of the European masters who looked nothing like him, and whose company he joins.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Alex Ross has been the magazine’s music critic since 1996. His latest book is “Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music.”
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/postscript/the-revolutionary-genius-of-cecil-taylor
One warm summer evening in the mid-nineteen-eighties, the pianist Cecil Taylor was scheduled to give a solo performance at a concert hall on the Lower East Side, all tickets sold at the door. Expecting a clamoring crowd, I got there an hour early; I was the first person to arrive. When the doors opened, there were only a handful of enthusiasts. We trickled into the hall, a converted school auditorium that could easily have seated two hundred. There was a piano onstage; at the scheduled time, some monosyllabic incantations could be heard from the wings, some shuffling of feet. The pianist poked himself out onto the hardwood stage, doing a sort of halting, tentative chant and dance, approaching the piano mysteriously, a Martian pondering a monolith. He tapped and rapped and knocked the instrument’s solid wooden body; he probed it from all angles; then he found the keyboard, struck a note, and then another, and another; his theatrical probing gave way to radiant musical illumination.
Taylor had to have noticed, as he circumnavigated the instrument, the sparse audience; he pretended that it didn’t matter. For the twenty lovers in attendance, Taylor approached the piano bench, sat down, struck a chord, crystallized a motif, and worked it out in thunder. For an hour, all by himself onstage and nearly by himself in the hall, he performed a colossal, exhausting, self-sacrificing concert of pianistic fury, filling the room with a torrential, polyrhythmic, rumbling, crashing, shattering whirlwind. It resembled the music that I had loved on records since I was a teen-ager a decade earlier, but now erupted, in my presence, with an improvisational explosion and a spontaneous compositional complexity that put it both at the forefront of modern jazz, of modern music as such. It was the mightiest and most generous musical exertion I had seen. To this day, I’ve only seen Taylor himself surpass it.
Cecil Taylor died on Thursday, at the age of eighty-nine. Of all the jazz musicians who wrought definitive, revolutionary changes in music in the late nineteen-fifties and early nineteen-sixties, Taylor’s advances went further than anyone else’s to expand the very notion of musical form. His ideas built on the emotional and intellectual framework of modern jazz in order to extend them into seemingly new dimensions—ones that have remained utterly unassimilable by the mainstream and are still in the vanguard, rushing headlong into the future.
by Ben Ratliff
June 21, 2013
New York Times
The improvising pianist Cecil Taylor, a pioneering, influential and highly experimental musician and a longtime Brooklyn resident, is one of this year’s recipients of the Kyoto Prize, awarded each year by the Inamori Foundation in Japan, the foundation announced on Friday. Mr. Taylor, 84, is this year’s laureate in the category of arts and philosophy; different fields across technology, science, art and philosophy are considered on a rotating basis, and there has been a recipient in music every four years. (The last musician laureate in 2009 was the conductor and composer Pierre Boulez.) The prize comes with a cash gift of 50 million yen (approximately $510,000), to be given at a ceremony in Kyoto in November. This year’s other laureates are the electronics engineer Dr. Robert H. Dennard and the evolutionary biologist Dr. Masatoshi Nei.
Kyoto prize to pianist/improviser Cecil Taylor
Taylor has previously been honored with Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellowships, and named an NEA Jazz Master among other awards and prizes. I posted a lengthy appreciation of him on the occasion of his 84th birthday. My personal favorites among Taylor’s approximately 70 recordings include the solos Fly! Fly! Fly! Fly! Fly! and Air Above Mountains, and his ensemble masterpieces Unit Structures and Conquistador.
The Kyoto Prize was established by Kazuo Inamori in 1984; Dr. Inamori is also the founder of the Kyocera Corporation, an international firm dealing in a wide range of products including electronic components and consumer cellular phones and cameras. It is one of the highest honors conferred in Japan. Taylor, a longtime resident of Brooklyn, will be awarded his diploma, 20K gold Kyoto Prize medal and prize money of 50 million yen (approx US$500,000) in Kyoto, November 2013. His next scheduled concert is a solo performance at the Willisau (Switzerland) Jazz Festival, on September 1.
howardmandel.com
necmusic.edu/cecil-taylor-awarded-kyoto-prizeCecil Taylor Awarded Kyoto Prize
July 25, 2013
New England Conservatory Alumnus Cecil Taylor
Awarded 2013 Kyoto Prize
The prize is an international award presented in three categories to those who have contributed significantly to the progress of science, the advancement of civilization, and the enrichment and elevation of the human spirit.
The Kyoto Prize Presentation Ceremony will be held in Kyoto, Japan, on November 10, 2013. Each laureate will be presented with a diploma, a Kyoto Prize Medal (20K gold), and prize money of 50 million yen (approximately $500,000).
As the Kyoto Foundation notes on their website, Taylor is “an innovative jazz musician who has fully explored the possibilities of piano improvisation. One of the most original pianists in the history of free jazz, Mr. Cecil Taylor has developed his innovative improvisation departing from conventional idioms through distinctive musical constructions and percussive renditions, thereby opening new possibilities in jazz. His unsurpassed virtuosity and strong will inject an intense, vital force into his music, which has exerted a profound influence on a broad range of musical genres.”
Ken Schaphorst, Chair of the Jazz Studies program at New England Conservatory, notes: "NEC has had many notable alums. But Cecil Taylor is in a class by himself. Very few musicians have influenced the course of jazz history more than Cecil. And no one has been more uncompromising in the pursuit of artistic honesty and truth."
A key figure in the birth of free jazz in the late 1950s and a revered improviser and composer who helped redefine the stylistic language of the piano, Cecil Taylor remains at the forefront of contemporary avant-garde jazz.
Born in New York City in 1929, Taylor visited relatives in Boston following World War II, which led to his enrolling at NEC. Taylor completed NEC's diploma in Arranging in 1951, attributing his education not only to his NEC studies in piano, arranging, harmony, and advanced solfege but to experiences "outside of the school or from the nonacademic aspect of school," including a friendship with saxophonist Andy McGhee that opened many doors in Boston's jazz community.
After short sideman stints with Johnny Hodges and Hot Lips Page, Taylor formed the first of his own ensembles, which, over the course of the next decade, included such significant improvisers as saxophonists Steve Lacy, Archie Shepp, Jimmy Lyons and Sam Rivers, and the drummers Sonny Murray and Andrew Cyrille.
By the time of his earliest recordings in the late 1950s, Taylor’s revolutionary style was already in place: his virtuosic technique coupled with his startling use of tonal clusters, polyrhythms, applied dissonance, and open collective ensemble improvisation was as vitally important to the growth of free jazz as the work of his contemporaries Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler, and John Coltrane. His seminal albums of the ’50s and ’60s—including Looking Ahead, Unit Structures, and Conquistador!—were signposts for a new musical era.
Over the succeeding decades, Taylor’s astonishing work as a solo pianist—as heard on such landmark recordings as Spring of Two Js—as well as his collaborations with ensembles ranging from duos to large jazz orchestras, brought him international acclaim. Acknowledged as a master musician by jazz, new music, and classical circles, Taylor has influenced countless artists from Anthony Braxton to Sonic Youth. At 84 years old, he remains as daring as ever, an inspiration for adventurous players of all musical stripes.
Photo by Tom Fitzsimmons shows Cecil Taylor's solo improvisation during 2003 celebration of the centennial of NEC's Jordan Hall.
Find more on jazz studies at NEC here.
ABOUT NEW ENGLAND CONSERVATORY JAZZ STUDIES
NEC’s Jazz Studies department was the first fully accredited jazz studies program at a music conservatory. The brainchild of Gunther Schuller, who moved quickly to incorporate jazz into the curriculum when he became President of the Conservatory in 1967, the Jazz Studies faculty has included six MacArthur "genius" grant recipients (three currently teaching) and four NEA Jazz Masters, and alumni that reads like a who’s who of jazz. Now in its 44th year, the program has spawned numerous Grammy-winning composers and performers. As Mike West writes in JazzTimes: “NEC’s jazz studies department is among the most acclaimed and successful in the world; so says the roster of visionary artists that have comprised both its faculty and alumni.” The program currently has 114 students; 67 undergraduate and 47 graduate students from 12 countries.
Contact: Ann Braithwaite
Braithwaite & Katz
781-259-9600
ann@bkmusicpr.com
Message from Mr. Cecil Taylor on the 2013 Kyoto Prize:
The 2013 Kyoto Prize Commemorative Performance in Arts and Philosophy"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CihuLOouH8w
The 2013 Kyoto Prize Presentation Ceremony:
Published on December 10, 2013:
Each laureate received Diploma, Kyoto Prize medal and 50 million yen as prize money from Hiroo Imura, Chairman of the Inamori Foundation in the presence of Her Imperial Highness Princess Takamado and other audience (about 1,550) from political, business and the academic worlds. If you are interested in the Kyoto Prize and Inamori Foundation, please access to "http://www.inamori-f.or.jp”.
http://burningambulance.com/2013/07/04/cecil-taylor-in-paris/
Cecil Taylor In Paris
Written by burning ambulance
Here’s an amazing 45-minute film, Cecil Taylor à Paris – Les Grandes Répétitions 1968. It features performance footage of Taylor, alto saxophonist Jimmy Lyons, bassist Alan Silva, and drummer Andrew Cyrille, as well as clips of Taylor being interviewed. It’s amazing stuff, especially the performance footage, which isn’t from some nightclub or even a theater—the band is located in a beautiful old Paris apartment. At one point, Lyons is standing facing the empty fireplace, blowing into it. Watch!
All,
HAPPY BIRTHDAY CECIL!
Kofi
Cecil Taylor: The Piano As Orchestra
by Kofi Natambu
“The whole question of freedom (in music) has been misunderstood, by those on the outside and even by some of the musicians in ‘the movement.’ If a man plays for a certain amount of time...eventually a kind of order asserts itself...There is no music without order--if that music comes from a man’s innards. But that order is not necessarily related to any single criterion of what order should be as imposed from the outside. This is not a question then of ‘freedom’ as opposed to ‘nonfreedom’ but rather it is a question of recognizing different ideas and expressions of order.”
Don’t look away or even blink. See the sweating boxer’s arms connected to elegant steel fingers raised in cat’s paw claw action now racing in a whiteheat blur across the tonal spectrum of 96 keys glittering? See his painter’s hands grip, jab, caress, stroke and maul the digital slabs of shining white and black ivory? As he dives into the thunder range of the now liquid instrument you glimpse his leaping fingers dancing in quick rhythmic steps across the linear tracks of the piano. The crystalline shower of notes are ringing in spiralling waves of overtones that seem to swallow up the air. Lost in a tornado of lyricism and a pulsating hurricane of instrumental virtuosity, you detect within the maelstrom a beautiful haunting song long since forgotten. It is then you discover that you have not been asleep after all. It is a waking dream and its name is Cecil Taylor.
CECIL TAYLOR. The very name has come to represent all that is truly creative, vital and innovative in contemporary 20th century American music. In an amazing career that spans some thirty years he has earned the right to be called that which is reserved for only those rarest of individuals: GENIUS. Another member of this esteemed pantheon, Edward Kennedy ‘Duke’ Ellington, called these same men and women “beyond category.” Their greatness is not dependent upon the ever changing blandishments of stylistic trends. All forms are subordinate to their compelling vision and spiritual force. It is to this magnificent realm that Cecil Taylor belongs.
Possessing tremendous energy and range, and an astounding technical facility on piano, Taylor is widely considered one of the greatest virtuosos in the world on his instrument. However, this is only a small part of what he does. A former drummer in his youth and a serious student of percussion, Cecil’s concept of the piano (derived from the African folk tradition) reminds everyone that it is technically considered a percussive instrument. In fact his explosive, riveting touch on piano led the Jazz writer Valerie Wilmer to refer to his keyboard as “eighty-eight tuned drums.” Cecil is a world-class composer whose improvisational skills are unlimited. There is no one who plays as fast, with as much power or as intensely as Cecil Taylor, yet there is a precision and structural control that is also unequalled. Cecil has the kind of stamina that allows him to play for hours(!) at a time. Many times the tempos are set at a demonic speed, yet he will just as often overwhelm the listener with a soft, aching tenderness and translucent ballad style. In order to enter the singular world of Cecil Taylor one must simply be prepared to open up completely and put aside all conventional notions and expectations about music. Since Taylor is always involved in a vigorous redefinition of what is called melody, harmony, and rhythm, there are rarely any stylistic cliches in his playing.
Taylor’s music is characterized by the creative use of sound as color and texture expressed in overlapping and pyramidal layers of melodic lines, riffs, motifs, tonal clusters, and polyrhythms. Timbral dynamics and constrast, as well as a highly sophisticated use of blues-based call-and-response voicings are also integral aspects of Taylor’s orchestral approach to the piano. In ensemble settings Taylor is deeply indebted to the master Duke Ellington for basic organizational principles. Of this influence, Taylor states” “One thing I learned from Ellington is that you can make the group you play with sing if you realize each of the instruments has a distinctive personality; and you can bring out the singing aspect of that personality if you use the right timbre for the instrument.” This lesson is applied in a particularly striking manner by Taylor and his saxophonist of twenty-three years, the outstanding altoist Jimmy Lyons.
Born in Long Island City, New York on March 15, 1929, Taylor began playing at age five encouraged by his music loving parents who early on exposed young Cecil to pople like Duke Ellington. His mother was a dancer who could play the piano and violin. His father, a butler and chef by trade, sang blues, field hollers, and shouts in the home, and was also somewhat of an oral scholar in black folklore. Aside from being exposed to a very wide range of black music, Taylor was also learning about the European classical tradition.
It was because of the example of Ellington that Taylor, after high school studies at the New York College of Music, decided to go to Boston and attend the New England Conservatory of Music in 1951. Because of Ellington’s obvious mastery of large scale orchestral forms, and a casual, ironic remark by Duke that “You need everything you can get--you need the conservatory with an ear to what’s happening in the street”, Taylor decided that no music should be beyond his understanding, or more importantly, absorbed in a creative, dynamic way in the development of his own unique vision of the African American improvisational tradition. as Cecil so eloquently points out: “Musical categories don’t mean anything unless we talk about the actual specific acts that people go through to make music, how one speaks, dances, dresses, moves, thinks, makes love...all these things. We begin with a sound and then say, what is the function of that sound, what is determining the procedures of that sound? Then we can talk about how it motivates or regenerates itself, and that’s where we have tradition.”
Ironically, it was while Cecil studied at the conservatory that he discovered in just what specific ways he could find a functional use for his experience as an African American artist in a hostile and overtly racist environment. While attending this academy Cecil realized that he could learn much more about the creative aspects of music from working musicians in the black music tradition than he ever could from the elitist teachers in the conservatory. As Taylor pointed out: “I learned more music from Ellington than I ever learned from the New England Conservatory. Like learning an orchestral approach to the piano from Ellington, like, I could never have gotten that from the conservatory.”
It was during his stay in Boston in the early 1950s that Cecil heard many of his idols in live performance for the first time. It was in Boston in 1952 that Taylor first heard the legendary Charles ‘Bird’ Parker at the local Hi-Hat club. Cecil also heard the great pianist-composer Bud Powell at this time, as well as the outstanding pianist/composer/arranger Mary Lou Williams. By this time Taylor had already plunged into an extended and intensive study of many of his major influences, such giants of 20th century piano music as Fats Waller, Art Tatum, Erroll Garner, Count Basie, Horace Silver, Thelonious Monk, and of course, Duke Ellington. However, Cecil’s deep and on-going appreciation of these artists did not keep him from also checking out people like Miles Davis, Lennie Tristano, James Brown, Igor Stranvisky, Aretha Franklin, Anton Webern, Marvin Gaye, and Bela Bartok (who Taylor said, “Showed me what you can do with folk material”). It’s important to note that Taylor not only considers these individuals to be seminal sources of inspiration in his music, but that his attitude toward this myriad of influences is not that of the blind, indiscriminate eclectic. Taylor has a very sharp and critical understanding of the relative value of the artists (and art forms) that he chooses to draw from.
Upon graduation from the conservatory in 1955, Taylor immediately made his considerable presence known with an outstanding group that recorded in December of that year when Cecil was twenty-six. It was Cecil’s first recording (Jazz Advance for the Boston-based Transition label). Many people consider this to be the first so-called” Jazz “avant-garde” recording of the modern era. This recording is now a cherished collector’s item.
As a fiercely independent and iconoclastic black artist, Taylor has had to pay the severe price of uncomprehending and often ignorant music critics judging his music using alien criteria. This kind of reception to his music by agents, promoters, clubowners, and recording executives who cannot neatly package Taylor’s sound for mass commodity sale has caused Cecil’s public career to be interrupted for long periods of time. For example, the general hostility of the music industry in the U.S. kept Taylor from being recorded in America from 1963-1966 and again from 1969-1973. There were also infrequent opportunities to work in clubs or on concert stages during the sixties and early 1970s. Consequently, Taylor has only appeared on 23 records as a leader, and just two other recordings as a featured artist, in thirty years.
However it a great testament to Taylor’s integrity and inspiring dedication and perseverance that he has not only survived this criminal neglect but has partly compensated for it by performing and recording widely in Europe and Japan (since 1967, ten of his last fifteen recordings released in this country have been for his own, or foreign-owned labels). He has also taught at the University of Wisconsin, (where he taught the largest class in the history of the school--over 1,000 students--and then proceeded to flunk over 70% of them in 1970!), Antioch College and Glassboro State College.
Cecil’s career, like that of so many great artists, is full of strange ironies and paradoxes. Despite leading recording sessions with many of the finest musicians in the world over the past twenty-five years (e.g. John Coltrane, Sam Rivers, Bill Dixon, Steve Lacy, Albert Ayler, Andrew Cyrille, Jimmy Lyons, Tony Williams, and just recently Max Roach); despite winning a Guggenheim Fellowship in Music (1973); despite playing a masterful performance at the White House in June, 1978 (that literally made then President Jimmy Carter leap up and embrace Taylor), and despite winning countless awards and kudos from all over the globe (and being written about by more poets than any artist in “Jazz” today), Cecil Taylor is still virtually unknown in the United States, even among the artistic cognoscenti.
Obviously, this shouldn’t be. For there is nothing self-consciously precious or ‘academic’ about Cecil’s playing. Steeped in the rich blues tradition (expressed in an abstract expressionist style) the music is very physical: passionate, sensuous, rigorous, and athletic. The pervasive influence of Dance is forever present in Cecil’s work. In fact, Taylor, who has often collaborated in live performances with dancers, playwrights and poets like Mikhail Baryshnikov, Diane McIntyre, Adrienne Kennedy, and Thulani Davis, has often said that he likes to “try to imitate on piano the leaps in space a dancer makes.” His music has a dancer’s grace and fluidity.
Taylor, who repudiates the traditional Western idea that form is more important than, or separate from, content in art has said that he is a constructivist (which he explains as “one who is involved in the conscious working out of given materials”). In Taylor’s music the emphasis is on building a whole, totally integrated structure through the application of the principle of kinetic improvisation.
Cecil is always quick to point out that the real basis of the music is emotional and spiritual. He has stated that “to feel is the most terrifying thing one can do in this society” and that “The thing that makes Jazz so interesting is that each man is his own academy...If he’s going to be persuasive he learns about other academies, but the idea is that he must have that special thing. And sometimes you don’t even know what it is.” Finally he states: “Most people have no idea what improvisation is...It means the most heightened perception of one’s self, but one’s self in relation to other forms of life. It means experiencing oneself as another kind of living organism much in the same way as a plant, a tree--the growth, you see, that’s what it is...I’m hopefully accurate in saying that’s what happens when we play. It’s not to do with ‘energy.’ It has to do with religious forces...it is the ability to talk coherently through the symbols.” Today Cecil is at the pinnacle of his artistic powers. Justly lionized in Europe and Japan, and a “living legend” among musicians in the U.S., Cecil commands SRO audiences wherever he performs. For the first time in his career he can afford to pay his rent and live decently on the income he earns from playing. We are the fortunate ones, for despite the on-going attempts of ‘official culture’ to deny the very existence of the contemporary black creative artist (especially as innovator and ‘cultural leader’), people like Taylor continue to provide leadership. At 57 Cecil is one of the major artists in this country. He has changed the very form and content of American music in his lifetime. For this, we owe him and his peers in African American creative music an enormous debt.
The Cecil Taylor Trio: Live at Sweet Basil’s
by Kofi Natambu
The City Sun
Brooklyn, NY
In one of his all-too-rare New York appearances, the legendary Cecil Taylor proved once again why he is one of the most important figures in the Afro-American improvisational music tradition.
In last week’s exhilarating performance at Sweet Basil that left this reviewer and a packed house of very attentive music lovers in awe, Taylor led a stunning trio ensemble. The set projected the sonic range, power and instrumental virtuosity of a large orchestra without ever once sounding bombastic, pretentious or cloying.
With a compositional precision and telepathic interplay that suggested inspired alchemy as much as great technical proficiency, Taylor and cohorts gracefully segued from one melodic/rhythmic tonal episode to the next. In an endless multilayered suite of haunting thematic motifs, riffs, sound clusters and harmonic intervals, the ensemble presented a mesmerizing ritual of interlocking rhythms and mercurial chordal movements, full of detail and passionately played. Crashing waves of sound from Taylor’s piano were deftly complemented by the masterful rippling strokes of Tony Oxley, a drummer and percussionist from Sheffield, England, Oxley’s architectonic pyramids of rhythms served as a perfect foil for Taylor’s in tense jabbing, slashing and conga-beat stylistics on piano. The sonorous orchestral tapestry was held together by the insistent buzzing big beat of the extraordinary bassist, William Parker.
Taylor, who is justly famous for possessing one of the most explosive piano techniques in the world, is much more than a mere virtuoso. He is also one of the finest organizers of sound in the world today. This profound ability was demonstrated throughout the set where he played continuously at demonic, white-heat tempos that spread out into achingly romantic arpeggios of love-talk, but without dumb sentiment gumming up the works. From there Taylor slipped rapidly into blistering multi-noted runs, leaping into liquid fire displays of lovely melodic shapes that conjured elegant images of Ellington and a richly abstract Tadd Dameron.
As Taylor tore off huge shards of melody, implying a broad canvas of harmonic colors with his delicate filigreed piano musings, Oxley pounded heavy bass drums and rode a gigantic cymbal hovering just above Taylor’s head. Parker, meanwhile, dived and swayed on his bass, as if rocking to a cosmic metronome that only he could hear.
Suddenly a torrent of notes flew from Taylor’s keyboard, cascading quickly onto a typhoon of crackling snares, rumbling bass ostinatos. A rainbow tide of tonal colors filled the air. This was the noble, magisterial Taylor using disciplined fury to display his virtuosic range. Taylor could be heard rising out of the collective storm playing a moaning blues. Stabbing, inquisitorial notes were punctuated by ominous silences. Then, just as mysteriously and defiantly as the set began, it ended with a shattering, yet, open-ended chord. Then a resounding silence. Taylor shot up from the piano bench and strolled into the back of this club. As he disappeared like a ghost, I remembered his famous quote: “to feel is the most terrifying thing one can do in this country.” Tell the truth, C.T. I just hope we’re listening...
http://www.furious.com/PERFECT/ceciltaylor.html
CECIL TAYLOR
Interview by Jason Gross
January 2001
Q: This has been sort of an interesting year for you in that you've had the chance to reconnect with several of the key drummers you've worked with over the years: you performed duets with Max Roach at Columbia University, with Elvin Jones for an album last year and a couple of performances subsequently, then with Andrew Cyrille, and just now with Tony Oxley over in Den Haag.
Well, when I think about it in retrospect, that's never happened to me before in that there were four different drummers in that period of time... All of them quite different, too, all of them a part of history. Andrew's magnificent. He's a wonderful person and a good part of my musical life. Andrew, who is really part of my skin you might say, is a great accompanist, a superlative percussionist, and one of the most amenable personalities. Playing with Mr. Jones for the fourth time was a great musical experience As you know, in September he played mostly with mallets and brushes. When I played with him the most unifying musical characteristic was that we played as if we were one person. He understands the music that I construct, all the dynamics, the aspects of form. And then the last time, even more so. Then Mr. Roach, well it was quite a phenomenal situation playing with him at Columbia in front of ten thousand people, and then Tony Oxley, he is a joy just to be with. He is immense in what he does, his conception of sound. Then again, I'm leaving out the guitarist, Derek Bailey, who was sort of astounding [during his springtime collaboration with Taylor] at Tonic. He was, well, hysteric. I don't think there's anyone else quite like Derek. So I've been very fortunate.
You know, I played in Johnny Hodges' band for about a week in 1955, in Chester, PA. That experience was so wonderful, such a pleasure I didn't even touch the piano for the first four days, until the wonderful [Ellington band trombonist] Lawrence Brown said, "er, Cecil, the piano has 88 keys, it'd be nice if you'd play one note occasionally." (laughs) Then of course, Basie's band was lighter, and their conception of that single stem or motif, which the word "riff" doesn't describe the organic nature of how that band created it's magic.
And Miles, he was the mean devil incarnate! But such a mind, such a mind. And such creative growth, from those days of genuflection to Diz and Bird. And that remarkable record that the master Bird made, it was merely the ground theme of "Embracable You", and Bird took this extraordinary solo, and then you heard Miles come and pause and make sound then, we knew that was the beginning of another voice. And soon after that, Birth of the Cool with the great master Gil Evans, and we heard the fluidity and love of Mr. Davis...Davis was one of the greatest organizers of musical sound this country has ever known.
When you think of virtuosity, how can one not talk about the extraordinary Albert Ayler and what he laid down? Technically, I don't think I've heard a saxophonist with that kind of articulation. And Eric Dolphy, he was a very considerate man, a very warm man... You know, the last two performances he did in America, I was fortunate enough to be there and I said to him, "Eric, you're the first level of greatness." Some die too soon. Albert died too soon. When you think about the implications of that band, with Albert's brother who compressed that trumpet sound, and the brilliance of that sound. There's one trumpet player alive today who comes closest to that sound, and that's [former Taylor Unit trumpeter] Raphe Malik.
What I'm saying is that we have such a rich tradition, until we get to a man like Bill Dixon, who is undoubtedly one of the great voices in American music today. I had the great pleasure of hearing he and Tony Oxley and two bassists playing in Berlin last November, absolutely extraordinary. Beyond the ken of what's thought to be important here. But, one has to allow for the decadence of merchandising...
I mean, it's such a history of accomplishment, that has gone down in America. The music has its roots in America, in the soil of America... The traditional legacy of the music which went on in Africa, that exists here by Native Americans... And when I talk about soil, grandfather on father's side was Kiowa, coming from the same region as Mingus' wonderful drummer Dannie (Richmond). And mother's mother, growing up in Long Branch think about that, that's a Native American name she was full blooded Cherokee. So having the last name Taylor, yep, there's the European. But there's also West African and Native American, so my roots in this country go very deep.
Q: Well, certainly you've known and played with some remarkable players over the years.
I think we've had fun. There's a book called The Most Beautiful House in the World [Wharton professor and urban planner Witold Rybczynski's personal account of designing and building a new house, in which] there was one chapter that had a three letter word: F-U-N. I think about that a lot. What I mean, actually, is that the fun becomes a celebration of those great practitioners who've preceded us, and the honoring of the attempt we're making. It becomes a celebration of life and becomes a joy to be permitted to attempt to create that kind of sound environment. I also find that there is in my life, a certain water rising, or a wave, the ebb and fall of it. The pull is only occasioned by things that producers perhaps don't understand.
Q: Are there some younger players whose music you enjoy?
This idea about technique, people don't understand what that is. They talk about a certain wonderful trumpet player from New Orleans. That man has no technique! The reason he has no technique is because he hasn't developed a language. And the nondescript Roy Hargrove? Clever guy, but I heard him recently, ain't nothin' happenin'. He better practice!
I'll tell you an interesting guy that I heard, was a man named James Carter. The night before, I spent with [members of Carter's current electric band, drummer] Calvin [Weston] and Jamaladeen [Tacuma, electric bassist]. And the next night I go into practice, and in walks James Carter. So I ask him, he talked about his control over his instrument and he went into [talking about] Eric Dolphy. And I asked him what he thought about Anthony Braxton's music, and he dropped his head and said, "What can you say?"
So I said to him, "One courtesy deserves another. I'll be there tonight when you play," and lemme tell you! I'm backstage, and that band starts, and Jamaladeen and Calvin... you know there's a difference between the blues and rhythm and blues, and man, when that band started, the intensity of the new rhythm and blues that they played! Carter is off stage, and when he walked in he stunned me with what he do! Know what he did? He made one harmonic sound, [imitating] eeerrrrrrrrgh, and then he walked off the fucking stage! And he comes back and makes another sound. Now, when he starts playing, when he was confronted, when he had to deal with that rhythm and blues shit, it wasn't about notes. And when James did this obbligato, man, it wasn't just technical, it was passionate! So James, at the end of that first number came and gave us his theme that demonstrated all of his control, and it was something.
This is where I almost cried. He starts a piece, alone, and he's got a sense of humor, and he knew he had the audience, and he started playing "Good Morning Heartache". Gross, I was almost reduced to tears by what he did. I thought of Charlie Gayle, and he gave us that, but he also gave us Don Byas, and then he played softly, and went into a bossa nova...
When he walked off, I'm standing there mesmerized, and he sees me and comes over and I say, "Hey, give me some more of that shit!" [laughs] I gotta hear that band again, cause man, the music is alive!
Q: We've been talking about various different styles of music. Do you ever feel insulted when people use the term "jazz" to describe what you do?
Well, Ellington said to Mr. Gillespie, "Why do you let them call your music bebop? I call my music 'Ellingtonia'!" It's about American music that never existed in the world until we did it.
http://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2010/apr/14/cecil-taylor-jazz-piano
50 great moments in jazz: Cecil Taylor's jazz piano revolution
This 1956 interpretation of Thelonious Monk's typically flinty Bemsha Swing might not sound revolutionary at first. But listen closer..
Then you remind yourself that this was 1956, when the popular notion of jazz was Chet Baker and the lyrically purring Cool School. Pianist Cecil Taylor's 1956 album, Jazz Advance, heralded new approaches to jazz that would transform the music. Taylor's uncompromising stance brought him a tough decade for work opportunities after this, but he never stopped exploring and experimenting, and by the mid-1960s was regarded as one of the key figures in the free-jazz revolution alongside Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane and Albert Ayler. His piano vocabulary grew voluminous, his full-on virtuosity was dazzling, his performances were improvising marathons.
I first found myself in the path of just such a Taylor piano typhoon when I heard a 1968 recording by New York's Jazz Composer's Orchestra, a co-operative that, at the time, included free-jazz luminaries Pharoah Sanders on sax and Don Cherry on trumpet. Taylor was the improvising soloist for more than half an hour on a two-part piano concerto entitled Communications (which at the time seemed like an ironic title to me). The eddies and whirlpools of jazz motifs and classical references in that playing were so densely intermingled they seemed almost impossible for the untutored listener to unpick. For years, it was a radicalism that consigned one of the great 20th-century virtuoso improvisers to dishwashing jobs in clubs that wouldn't let him on the bandstand.
In later years, when his singular vision was recognised, Taylor would pick up art-music citations by the barrow-load. He found himself sharing prestigious panel discussions on contemporary music with Pierre Boulez and playing for the ballet legend Mikhail Baryshnikov (who claimed Taylor revealed to him "another dimension about dancing to music").
Raised by an adoring mother, Taylor was a piano prodigy. He studied Stravinsky, Bartók and Elliott Carter at the New England Conservatory, and Thelonious Monk, Bud Powell and Duke Ellington in his spare time; the latter influences are fitfully clear on Bemsha Swing. The fruit of this education was one of the most culturally diverse piano styles in jazz.
Taylor's self-discipline, isolation and unwavering focus perhaps resulted in an approach so demandingly personal as to influence mainstream jazz piano hardly at all, but the inspiration of his unflinching courage to the international avant garde has been immense. European free-improv stars such as Evan Parker, Han Bennink and the late Derek Bailey became his playing partners, and the innovative British percussionist Tony Oxley has been his regular drummer for years. Taylor's breakthroughs in changing the notion of swing, improvising without chords, and spontaneous composition – combining the timbres and intonations of jazz with the vocabulary of contemporary conservatoire music – opened up new avenues for both improvisers and composers.
I interviewed Taylor in the late 1980s for the Guardian, and two remarks of his stick in my mind. One was the piece of advice he said he received in his youth from the pianist Freddie Redd: "Cecil, whatever you're doing, and I'm not sure I know what that is, don't let anybody tell you not to do it." The other concerned the impact of his mother's belief in him. Taylor described "the difficulty that I had with certain major jazz impresarios on the rare occasions they claimed they were going to make me star. Mama had already made me a galaxy. So I knew those people don't really give you anything. They say, 'We will give you money, but we want you to play this, or that'. And I always thought, if I'm going to do that, I might as well go back and be a dishwasher."
http://www.themorningnews.org/archives/profiles/cecil_taylor_explains_it_all.php
by John S. Wilson
New York Times
wenty years ago, when the jazz world split into two violently opposed camps of "moldy figs" and
"beboppers," the schism appeared to be just another in the series of intramural spats that had
occurred from time to time in jazz. It could be presumed that, like earlier splinterings, this one
would eventually heal over as both factions were absorbed by the mainstream of jazz. To a degree,
this did happen--but the battle between the figs and the boppers has taken on a special significance
because it coincided with what has proved to be a crucial dividing point in jazz history. Before that
time, jazz was entertainment. Since then, most musicians have been trying to present jazz as a
serious art form, despite the fact that they have had to do it in a milieu that is still geared to
entertainment.
This "peculiar cross-pollination of show business and serious modern jazz" is what A.B. Spellman refers to as "the bebop business." To explore the problems that the mixture raises for contemporary musicians--specifically, for the black American musician--Spellman has examined the careers of four unusually talented jazzmen who have tried to cope with these circumstances with varying degrees of success: Cecil Taylor and Ornette Coleman, two of the most controversial jazz musicians of the past decade (and, in Spellman's view, two of the three most important new musicians off the decade--John Coltrane is the third); Herbie Nichols, a pianist whose potential was unfulfilled when he died in 1963; and Jackie McLean, a teen-aged prodigy of the bebop era, who has survived to find a prominent place in present day jazz.
Survival, often under the direst circumstances, is one of the recurring notes in all four stories. Coleman has actually been beaten up, had his saxophone smashed, by people who did not like the way he played. Taylor is a pianist who has to express himself on, at best, half an instrument. He showed Spellman his own piano.
"Not more than half of it works," he said. "In a way, this piano is me: It half works. I get to work about half the year. Everything that's wrong with it, I did to it. I knocked those keys out. I can look at that piano and see my work from the last few years. But you know, a cat playing classical music who had come this far would be getting free pianos, because it is good for the industry. Not me, baby. The pianos I get to play on are never more than 60 per cent, have most of the ivory off the keys, and they are never in tune. Now what is that going to do for my music?"
Taylor, Coleman and Nichols have encountered relentless antagonism, not only from night club operators who were reluctant to hire them and from audiences that wanted familiar sounds, but from fellow musicians who refused "to play with them. McLean was never an outsider in this sense. But he started down a path that destroyed many young musicians of the bop period, one that included narcotics addiction.
Spellman steers clear of the misty romanticism that often colors writing about the struggles of jazz musicians. He views these men with a perceptive and understanding eye, digging through the protective surfaces and telling much of their stories in skillfully edited direct quotations that have the ring and bite of reality.
His piece on Taylor is a particularly provocative portrait of a thorny, adamant and penetrating individual with a delightfully mordant wit. It sums up much of the essence of the book. It is Taylor who provides Spellman with a microcosm of the endless, Job-like adversities that can follow an innovator through the contemporary jazz world. And it is Taylor's thoughtful analysis of the relation of European music to the cultural aspirations of the white American and the black American that clarifies not only for justification for "serious jazz" as opposed to jazz as entertainment but also the underlying reasons why he and other likeminded musicians persist in the face of alienation and frustration that are their steady lot.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
http://www.chrisfelver.com/films/taylor.html
Seated at his beloved and battered piano in his Brooklyn brownstone the maestro holds court with frequent stentorian pronouncements on life, art and music while demonstrating his technique and views infusing his super clustered playing. Students at Mills College, where Taylor has a regular teaching gig, devise an avant-garde “free composition” under his generous tutelage. Taylor plays with his band at Yoshi’s in Oakland, NYC’s Lincoln Center, and the Iridium with his large ensemble Orchestra Humane.
Since the 1950’s Taylor has steadfastly represented jazz’s avant-garde, a fact reinforced by notable commentators Elvin Jones, Amiri Baraka, Nathaniel Mackey, and Al Young. The recording of the UCLA Royce Hall solo performance is an example of his astounding mastery of complex musical constructions. All the Notes is an intimate portrait of a consummate musician and sound thinker in triumphant maturity, bringing out Taylor’s nobility, devotion and belief in a truth that can only be found after a lifetime of invention.
Cecil Taylor - All The Notes (2006) | Full Documentary
being matter ignited...
an interview with Cecil Taylor
text by Chris Funkhouser
published in Hambone, No. 12
Fall, 1995
Nathaniel Mackey, editor
Pianist-composer Cecil Taylor is internationally known for the brilliance and audacious beauty of his music. He has recorded dozens of albums as a solo performer and with various ensembles over a period spanning five decades. He is currently working with a large ensemble called Phthongos. He has incorporated poetry into his work in a number of ways over the years; in 1991 Leo Records released Chinampas, a recording which presents his poetry accompanied by multiinstrumental improvisations. The following interview, conducted by Chris Funkhouser, took place at Mr. Taylor's home in Brooklyn on September 3, 1994.
Funkhouser: Let's explore the literary side of the work that you do. With the exceptions of people like Sun Ra, Archie Shepp, and a few others, there aren't many jazz players who choose to work with words as a mode of expression. I wanted to ask you about your poetry, where you're coming from when you write it down or are presenting it vocally.
Taylor: Well, I don't know what jazz is. And what most people think of as jazz I don't think that's what it is at all. As a matter of fact I don't think the word has any meaning at all, but that's another conversation...
It seems to me that one of the things that is true with every--oh, for instance--like this Irish writer, William Kennedy. In reading some of his stories about life, his family members in Albany--the thing that struck me, the similarity, and the things that makes human beings who are vital electric, is the way they use language to manifest their live responses to the culture that they are in. So I got that from that. In a way, in its own way, it's like when I was very young I read Langston Hughes' Simple stories and it whetted my appetite for the possibility of using language to move outside of the self.
One of the most important things that happened to me, really--I've always had difficulty with teachers in school. Right after Pearl Harbor I wrote this poem about December 8th--I don't even know why I remember this--and the teacher said, "Oh, that's a very bad poem." Well, I knew that I should write poetry then. If she said it was bad, then it must be okay.
When I was in the Conservatory, there was a Southern woman who taught English the first year that I was there. English--well, English--American language is quite different, actually. She was talking about Tennessee Williams, and she was talking about Streetcar, and she said, 'The language in that play...there are sections of that play that are so good,' she said,'...that I could actually taste it.' And that was one of the most remarkable things that happened to me in the whole four years that I was at the Conservatory. Cause I only had three teachers, really, that were interesting, and all three of them were women. I was sixteen when that was said to me, and I remember of course when Streetcar was on Broadway--I certainly didn't see it, but I did see Talleulah Bankhead do it years later--this was a time when I was in a new environment for me. A new musical community environment, The New England Conservatory [laughs], and whatever that was about. But I was also at that point beginning to construct certain things musically. I was beginning to. And because what was important about this English woman--this English teacher--I wish I could remember her name cause I can see her--and what she gave to me--because she gave it in a not punitive way. Mother always had me reading. Mother spoke French and German and brought Shopenhauer to me when I was eleven years old, but that was something else--that was-- you didn't have a choice there with mother. Boom! That's the way that went. But here was this woman who just said this, and it I heard it. And her emotional dedication to a word--I said, "Wow...that's my dedication to music...you mean it is possible to have that kind of dedication to another art?" So, that.
I never understood how musicians could play music for poets and not read poems. I don't understand musicians who can play for dancers and not know how to dance. I mean, it's very interesting to me, you were talking about your research; well, one of the things--before I put words down, I probably have read a thousand words.
I have a lot of interests. Dance is certainly one. Architecture, particularly structural engineers. I look at basketball. I'm not interested in it though. I love horses, horseracing. I've never seen a horse race. I can remember Sea Biscuit and those things, though. I used to run when I was young. I do all these exercises everyday.
I did write a poem about Nureyev, when I saw him dance. I also wrote a poem about Albert Ayler, too. I think that for me the idea is to--I mean it changes, you know, every ten years or so--but right now I'm going through this whole thing about making these belated discoveries about mother dear. And what that really means is these few years that I have left here to really deal with a certain kind of upward- mobile bourgeoisie nonsense that entrapped a lot of--but anyway, the poetry saved my life, actually.
If you have the opportunity to play for people all in different countries, one of the things you begin to discover is that people are--you can find oppressed people all over the world, therefore somewhere along the road you get the idea that it is certainly not about yourself. Any gift that you have is not about that at all. It's about a force that is about the ungiven, the uncreative. It is about the amorphous, and you are at best merely a vessel. And once you begin to understand that [laughs]--the wonderful thing about it is--I was thinking about it today--that the first time I heard Billie Holiday, I heard it in the room of a member of the family who was not very well thought of, and the other part of the family all liked Bing Crosby. And that was alright, but there is a qualitative difference. So in our small way what we attempt to do is to look and see and receive and become a sponge and attempt to make anything that exists as part of the palette to describe whatever it is we think we want to do. And what you want to do is to be as beautiful and as loving and as all-consuming as possible, so that the statement has many, many different implications, and it has many different levels. The only way to do that, seems to me, is to research.
I think what my mother did give me unquestionably was that--maybe she didn't quite perceive it this way but--it is wonderful to be able to enjoy what it is I do now as opposed to the disciplinary aura that I had to grow up under. Now I do what I want to do because I love doing it, and it rewards me and I've been fortunate in that I've been told that other people have gotten something from what it is. It is possible to do what it is you decide you want to do with your life. For me that has been the thing that has cured whatever despondency, whatever anger, you know...well, that's that.
Funkhouser: You couldn't have been very old when you wrote a poem about Pearl Harbor--so you've been writing from elementary school onward?
Taylor: Well, actually, you know teachers--I ran into a lot of teachers where it was very clear to me that if you didn't do what they told you to do, they would try to stop you from doing anything at all. That's what that teachers do. When I went to the Conservatory, it was the same thing, and boy did I fight with those people up there. Actually, I can tell you when I started writing but that wouldn't be very interesting, cause that was all about romance. And of course that's what it is about, isn't it? But I really started writing in 1962 when I went to Europe for the first time. I was writing letters to this poet, who I was quite taken with at the time. That's when I started writing.
Funkhouser: You were playing before that. Was there a point where the writing and playing began to coincide somehow? I know I've seen you perform and it's chanting, and all sorts of...
Taylor: That's the wonderful thing about maybe never being allowed to get into the business--the music business-- because I was not a very well-behaved person according to the gangsters who control the business. I'm lucky to be alive, really. So what you had to do--and also the fact that what I was doing was considered not very viable. [Laughs] That's a cute word to mean it didn't make any money, or they didn't see how they could make any money. And they would tell you what you were supposed to do. That's the way they are. So, not being malleable that way, the resources that my mother and father gave me, since I didn't have any money--but my father would always give me money. When I wasn't working I always went to see plays on Broadway. Then years later, this woman that I was sort of involved with worked at the Living Theater. So I got a whole new concept, and a whole new thrust of beauty right there, you see. And actually I ran into Baraka around '57. So, what I mean is that one dedication leads to another, especially if it is very important for you to continue to grow, especially when they tell you that "We're not going to allow you to grow in this area." So what does that mean? Meant I had to practice at home. It also meant that I had to look around for other sources of beauty that could aid in what I was doing with the main thing. Then finally, you see, these things mesh, and it takes a while for it to happen. But then, you know, it does.
And so therefore there is no possible way that I can have any regrets about not working, where these other people did. Cause I was always working. I just didn't make any money. [Laughter]
Funkhouser: You said poetry saved your life . . .
Taylor: Yes it did. I had one or two friends that helped. But the work always brought me back. For instance, this work that I'm working on now, which has a lot to do with my mother, actually, and my relationship to her as a property of hers. Unwanted property, it seemed to me, possibly. I mean I have to think of that as a certain reality because of her attempts to kill me at a certain point. Literally. However, the fantastic thing about all of this is that if you survive, then you understand that your parents had parents too. And that must have been a trip. The extraordinary anger that I began to see that was in my family, and resulted in, really, her death at the age of thirty-four, and the death of all people in the family who followed her conception of living, because she was very powerful and very persuasive. And there were at least three people in the family who died of cancer at the age of thirty-four. Given the fact that she had been in silent movies, and that she recited poetry, and that she'd walk into a room and the room would stop--but then she found father, and father was from North Carolina, and he was an agricultural person and she was his dream. She could speak French and German, she knew how to wear clothes, and all of that shit. And then she stopped because we had the only brick house--there were only two brick houses on the block--and pop owned one. She became the lady of the manor. And I became her--so I was tapdancing when I was six. I was entering contests for young virtuosos--I was never a young virtuoso--but she tried to make me--so I was playing Chopin when I was six and all this nonsense. And I was driven. There was no--I was telling someone the other night, I said, 'I've never--I could not be idle'--you had to be doing something. And so of course, she died when I was eleven, twelve--twelve, yeah--and I had a peptic ulcer when I was thirteen. It was just a glorious experience growing up in her house. However, she gave me certain things. She was the eldest of six children, after all; her mother was Cherokee. Her father was never mentioned. Father's father--he had a great deal of problems with him-- he was Kiowa. And all of this I had to discover, and this is the language of--the language of the word is now coming to deal with all of that.
Funkhouser: Is it much different than what you were doing with Chinampas, where you were going back to another set of . . .
Taylor: Well, Chinampas is about those extraordinary Aztecs. You see, the Aztecs, you might say, are my distant relatives too because there is Kiowa and Cherokee. So we're dealing with native americans, and I'm interested in--oh, man, the culture. Like there is an extraordinary Mexican structural engineer named Felix Candello, who has done this restaurant--his most famous work--the only one that I know, actually--is this restaurant that he has constructed outside of Mexico City.
In order to deal with this, it becomes--there is like a difference between therapy, because I've been in therapy-- the last therapist I had was really very much like my father. He ended up in A.A., too. I don't even know whether he's even alive now. When you have the choice to work out your own, or to begin to see into your own emotional mechanisms, and then begin to discover who set them up for you, who gave you these intrapersonal tactics that keep you from being ever-vulnerable--and when you do it through your own experience and maybe you have one friend who does not allow you to get away with certain things--then there's always the whatever we are as people.
Our work is always perhaps more whole than we, and when you really begin to move as a human being then you begin to see the disparity between what is not an abstraction but becomes an emotional force that is akin--it is the same thing as the intellectual perception, which I feel-- cause all of the most amazing poets that I've ever--and when I use the word poet I mean Ben Webster or Billie Holiday, or Maya Pelisetskaya or the incredible Carmen Amaya. You know, these great dancers who when you see them you know that that's a life, and when you look at them they've taken yours. Because you see them and you say, "Jesus, if I ever grow up that's what I'd like to do, that's what I'd like to give."
Funkhouser: It's inside your body, something that enters your body, then . . .
Taylor: A spirit! That force, you know--I realize that my mother had that force. But what she decided not to do with it--and if you have that force and you don't use it, then you die. Because if you kill that force your body follows afterwards. My uncle, her only brother, he could live in the house with us as long as he would not be a musician. And he died of cancer at the age of thirty-four. He gave me drum lessons.
A lot of my rage was really dealing with the hypocrisy of the upwardly mobile middle-class aspirations of certain groups of people that I grew up with. And they all--I mean for instance, I had a cousin who had a beautiful voice, and they convinced her that she was too ugly to sing! [Laughter]
Funkhouser: You feel certain kinship with Aztec and the sensibilities that they developed? There was a group that ran into all kinds of trouble--and what a highly developed sense of spirit...
Taylor: What I am saying is two things: because mother insisted that I do certain things, there was a seed so that when it was left up to me to find certain things, the richness of these other poetical universes I had already had reference to.
Now, I'd rather not talk about my political adventures, beyond saying this: when I was very young, I went to the second Peekskill rally. Paul Robeson was there, [W.E.B.] DuBois was there, and it was in an area that my father's boss lived in. And what happened to me then, and I was thirteen--and the family read the Daily News at that time-- and we were lucky to get out of Peekskill alive. When I got back Monday and I read the Daily News reportage of what they said had happened, then I knew that I had to have other options because that is not what I experienced. And if they were going to say that that's what was happening then I knew that I had to choose another course.
And nothing has happened since, with the exception of those young adults who died at Kent State, those young people who forced this country to stop the Vietnamese massacre. But what happened to those people in twenty years? When the hosannas of democracy blare the loudest, it's when personal options--in terms of choices--become the narrowest. It's at that point that the poet really sees the dimension of the work that is possible.
So right now I'm in a very high state--and this is very interesting since I haven't smoked a cigarette in over a week and I don't know what's happening to me--and I'm feeling extraordinary about all of this. There's a lot--I'm writing a section of this piece today that I've never written anything quite like this before. So I don't know what's going on--except that it feels marvellous--and I can't believe what I'm seeing on television. I can't believe what I'm hearing on the news.
Funkhouser: In "Garden" one thing that begins to emerge from the layers and layers and layers--you invoke some heroic figures from black culture, the lines, "Lines here/have an echo in distant valleys," and then you speak also of "stamping/heredity to a new definition." There is a resonance--however one wants to interpret distant valleys-- taking things to a new place, or transformation in a larger sense, not necessarily a personal sense. You bring in a lot of things. We all know that there room for transformation: what fascinates me with your use of language and form of expression is that it is--in addition to using poetry to make more music, you're saying something and different tensions develop, different almost apocalyptic things come about--so you're there, you're at a certain precipice...
Taylor: The people that I love, I love. The spirits--they're the ones that have changed my life, and the ones that I really--they're here, and it would not have been that way had they not lived. So I always genuflect. I feel that way about certain writers, certain dancers, certain architects, certain women singers, and certain organizers of musical sound. I mean I remember when I saw Carmen Amaya for the first time. And the loveliest thing about it--when they built the national monument--cause she died in this villa in Begur, they asked me to come.
What I am doing is creating a language. A different American language. I feel that. Genet is fascinating because of the intellectual--and it wasn't for him intellectual. Then again, I don't make a separation between intellect and emotion. I think with the great artists that I love there was the same thing. By that I mean they had a structure, technique, and the thing that made the technique and the structure move was their passion. The thing about Le Roi Jones was he's never really had loving emotion.
There's so much destruction that is going on in the world today--all around us--I mean this extraordinary thing with these--did you see where these two eleven year old children killed another fourteen year old--and this business--this Crime Bill? They don't seem to understand that they can build all the fuckin' prisons they want--if we don't get to the root of the violence that is in the air here, then it's all for naught. I mean, of course, Schwarzenegger is connected with the Kennedys, so he can make all of these violent films that he wants to, they're box-office and that's acceptable. Some of the television skits for children on tv: it's just not human! So, now, what do we do? Without becoming literal but using imagination and creating metaphors that confound the senses, and that confound those who are not de-tuned? To disorganize one's whole apparatus in facing all of this, then it's possible to surprise yourself.
Obviously I'm fascinated with words. And without thinking of rhythm in language, but knowing that it's there, and reading a lot of different people, finally what happens is the same thing that happens when we are involved in music. I listen to a lot of different music. For instance, today I listened to Chinese Classical music--which I really didn't dig too much, but I'll listen to it again--I listened to Islamic chants that really knocked me the fuck out. And just single voices. I listened to Duke Ellington's Orchestra circa 1945-- there was one piece that was just amazing. I listened to Victoria de los Angeles singing Purcell's "Diedere and something or other..." and then I listened to Gary Grafman playing the first movement of the Brahms piano concerto. Brahms, boy I tell you--then I listened to Leonard T. Price singing the last movement of Richard Strauss' "Solome." Boy--what what a-- wheeew--boy, that guy--I have to go to see that guy. A lot of shit was up. And then, of course, of course--I listen every day to something by Ligeti. Today I heard "Ramifications" and this choral piece, and "Atmospheres." Then I listen every day to [he chuckles] Marvin Gaye, of course. Then I put on Sarah Vaughn, then I put on Xenakis--oh, this fucking guy--this orchestra piece, and then I'm--god, I mean I practiced the piano four hours today. I spent two hours completing another section of this poem this morning. I cooked, I mopped all the floors in this house, and I've done all this stuff. And not one cigarette I can't understand it. No champagne, anything...
But I'm onto something. I really want to surprise Min [Tanaka, with whom Taylor performed in NYC, 17 September, 1994]. We'll surprise each other. I've been listening to this Kathleen Battle, and this guy who's the head of the Met Orchestra, he was interviewed by Charlie Rose the other day, and he said a couple of things, but anyway he's playing with Battle--she's singing Shubert leider--and she [he chuckles] no, it was Schumann--I don't know--Shubert, Schumann, whatever. Any way, boy, boy, o boy, wow-- mmm-mmm-mm. Such music. Then I listened to Billie Holiday singing, and I started laughing because I'm having such a good time. I'm not seeing many people. I crossed out a whole bunch of people--I do think about them--and you know I have all of these things that I've been doing.
After you do this a number of times, you develop a kind of spiritual touch. For instance, I will go into a bookstore and I will just stand there and I will pick out a book, manytimes, just because I like the way it looks. Then I might not read it for about five years then when I pick it up I know then why I bought it. And so, there are all of these different kinds of self-indulgences, perhaps, but anyway these great pleasures.
Funkhouser: So your expressiveness comes from these various architectures, histories, musicians--Marvin Gaye!
Taylor: Yeah, it comes out of all of that. All of these people. Marvin was an extraordinarily gifted man. All of these people that I'm involved in are. So you can't go wrong. I mean Aretha Franklin, boy, that was so great at one point. Oh! I listened to Etta Jones today, she was wonderful! I mean, you know, all of these...
Funkhouser: Did you talk with [Kamau] Brathwaite about Aretha when you saw him? He raves about "Pullin'" in BARABAJAN POEMS.
Taylor: "Pull 'em"?
Funkhouser: "Pullin'". It's some kind of train song.
Taylor: Well, you know, he--as a matter of fact--I was downstairs when he was reading [at the Naropa Institute, Summer 1994], cause I was trying to get my nerves together. I mean what are you going to do when you're reading with all these great people? What do you do? I don't do anything. And all of a sudden [Anne] Waldman comes running down and she says, "You got to go upstairs, he's [Brathwaite] just reading a poem about you." I said, "I don't want to hear it--I mean I have to live with me, I don't need to know..." Then when I got up there he was talking about Billie Holiday, so that was great. That I can understand.
Oh, here's another view of this building (We are looking at a book of [Salvador] Calatravas buildings).
Funkhouser: It is incredible. Just solid. You could never push that down: it probably won't crumble in an earthquake!
Taylor: Well, they know about that. Wright built that hotel there, and in the great earthquake that they had, when--in the twenties? Wright's building did not fall, and they--I think it's criminal what they've done to Wright's Guggenheim Museum. I can't bear to look at it. I mean, they've put this new addition. Well, I'll have to get over there, I suppose, and look at it. But the Japanese, they are-- the main thing about the Japanese is that they have utilized their cultural longevity to regenerate themselves in a way that spirits must regenerate in order to continue. On a literal level, all the techniques of American production and German production the Japanese have mastered. The other reason I think the Japanese have become the economic power that they've become is because we weren't given the correct information after the second world war. MacArthur and all of those people told us that they would not get rid of the emperor because he was a spiritual leader. Well, of course he was. But the other thing that they didn't tell us is that Hirohito owned fifty percent of all the Japanese industries. You're not going to...
Then, of course, the other shit is that they were not allowed to indulge in the most unproductive kind of thing after the second world war, which is to make arms. So they took all of that and built this extraordinary infrastructure. I mean, the Japanese trains, to ride on a Bullet train--Amtrak is ridiculous! To ride on the French supertrain--Amtrak is ridiculous. Before we talk even, about the Germans, the infrastructure here in this country is falling down. I mean, every time I go over the Manhattan Bridge I'm always grateful that the greatest splash in the world didn't happen, the bridge didn't collapse. You will see, now, that the Manhattan Bridge--when I moved here originally, you could go over the top of the bridge. You could see this extraordinary view of lower Manhattan, with all those Wall Street buildings. But, more important than that is what happened in the American aspiration, with all of that business--although it's not all that. What do you think of the Sardabs that are in, when you think of Harmachis and you think of all of those monuments in Giza, and how they were constructed? We don't know.
But you know, there are other forces, and, you see, with the emergence of technology, science and technology, there has been the defacement of all that is spiritual. And we must... [laughs, pausing] So the point is that now when I go over the Manhattan Bridge and I'm looking at this, where I used to run, and had this extraordinary view before: now we're down here, and they're building this shit, and over here you can see where they're taking part of the roadway off. And, you know, it's all falling. When I went by the Williamsburg Bridge--they've got all of that shit going on. All of it is going to fall into the river and there's going to be a great flood. And this building is not tall enough!
Oh, and the other thing that I should show--that you've got to see--well, you've been to Germany, haven't you?
Funkhouser: Actually, I haven't . . .
Taylor: Well, do you know about those cable-stay box- girder bridges? Oh, you must see them. They're the most extraordinary. You know, the Golden Gate and George Washington--that's okay--but if you have not seen a cable stay box-girder bridge--where are those books? Those are the most extraordinary bridges, and they're cheaper and they're stronger. The forces of liberation during the second world war destroyed all the German suspension bridges, and all of the beam bridges. So they came up with another concept.
For me it's more interesting, in a way, to look at the construction of bridges than it is to look at musical scores. Here we are. Here are the cable-stayed bridges. The first ones, of course, were done in Germany. The Germans also came up with the heliacal bridges, which the first one was done in 1953. And these were all over this river. I think it's the Rhine, too. It's an extraordinary. They come in two different kinds, there's the fan shape and the harp shape, you see. When you go into Cologne by train you'll see the most extraordinary. It looks like a huge piece of sculpture.
But then, oh, boy, I wish I had that book--I don't know--I lost it. The Calatravas bridges. Now, Caletravas bridges--and his teacher, Christian Mann--he's got another conception of bridge building now, and roadways that we just--we just don't understand that shit here. Give us time, however.
Anyway, some of those pictures, they're incredible...
Funkhouser: You said you're are doing a performance with Min Tanaka in two weeks, at the Guggenheim?
Taylor: Yeah, two weeks from tonight as a matter of fact. Down on Mercer Street. He's going to dance. We might both dance, actually, even though I have this support thing here [on his lower leg/ankle], I'm going to do something. I am working it all out.
Funkhouser: You've worked a lot with dancers. Another type of movement, which relates to both your music and poetry.
Taylor: Well, you know, I think Western musicians, fine art musicians, what they call fine art musicians--European fine art--they're the only ones who don't dance. Every other--of course these certain stupid Americans--but you'll find in all other cultures, like third world cultures, musicians dance. What they don't understand is when you--when you are playing, whether you know it or not, you're dancing. I always got great enjoyment watching great musicians dance when they play. I mean, to watch Elvin Jones or Art Blakey. Horace Silver, Ellington had a way--and Billie Holiday--those movements. Or Betty Carter.
Funkhouser: I am interested in your connection with poets. What were your connections with Robert Duncan, and Charles Olson, and Robert Creeley, who are mentioned on the liner notes to Nerfertiti?
Taylor: Those were the names that LeRoi Jones gave me thirty years ago, that I should read.
Funkhouser: And so you read them?
Taylor: Oh, yes. Yeah.
Funkhouser: Duncan's work, for instance. Some was written for dancers...
Taylor: Wasn't Isadora his cousin or something? Yeah, I think she was his cousin. That wouldn't mean--yeah, I like Duncan very much.
Funkhouser: His writing I see working in cyclical and mythological projection in the same way that your writing does. I was wondering about the influences, though I know how difficult it is to talk about writing . . .
Taylor: I would say that it is difficult. Do you know Creeley's book The Island? Well, I read that. The thing-- Olson, Charles Olson might be easier to talk about, or Bob Kaufman, but the thing that allows me to enter into what they do is the feeling that I get. It's the way they use words. It's the phraseology that they use, much the way the defining characteristic of men like Charlie Parker or Johnny Hodges is the phraseology. And in the phraseology would be the horizontal as well as the vertical. In other words, the harmony and the melodic. Well, I also see that in word structures. One of the things I've found maybe odd about Quincy Troupe was that--and you used the phrase before, the tensions were always the same, the ideation was always bracketed in a particular kind of language with no abatement. Always the same kind of thing. And I find that true in a lot of rap that I hear. But then again I don't even want to talk about that kind of necessarily--I mean that's something else.
I'm very moved by the Kabuki theatre, and the usage of the voice there, and the movement there. And, of course, the Butoh dancing comes, is the modern development perhaps of the Kabuki.
Yeah, Olson, and particularly Duncan and Creeley--their syntactical structure was the thing that got, that I really liked. And I hear--Roi at a certain point had that too, had that. His of course was different. Ishmael [Reed] had it at a certain point but I wasn't too interested in it with him. In other words, what I'm talking about is the music, the music, the language. Like Genet has a language that is fascinating because it is so multi-faceted. It's real but it's not unreal, and what is unreal to us is real to him, and what is real to us is unreal to him. And yet when you really follow what Edmund White [Genet's biographer] is talking about, he's like making this man come alive by in a way not denuding of his magic, but making his magic more accesible to others. It's a dense book. It's also history of Cocteau, and of course that Sartre, and [Simone] de Beauvoir. And there was an Algerian poet who wrote a very small book about Genet, about a hundred pages, and that book was fascinating. When I asked Allen [Ginsberg] about this Genet book, he said, "Well, yes, I looked at it." He said, "Burroughs read it." He said he looked in it to see if his name was mentioned. Indeed. [Laughs] No, he would not be mentioned. As a matter of fact, Genet was asked by this Algerian, what did he think of Tennessee Williams? And he said, "I never think of Tennessee Williams."
Funkhouser: There was one place where Baraka wrote about your music as having "an emphasis on total area...giving it means to evolve, to move as an intelligently shaped musical concept" which is an idea seemingly relates to Olson's concept of...
Taylor: Projective Verse? Hmm...
Funkhouser: A movement towards form via activity--or activity via form--whichever way it works, though it's probably form through activity...
Taylor: Form through activity, or, the function determines the form, or is it the form that determines the function? I think it's the function that determines the form. So, yeah, through activity, yes.
Funkhouser: And total area. Olson used the page, and there's more to that connection when I think of your writing. The way that historical concepts, those "distant valleys," and mythology, your present--present moment, past moment and future projected. It seems like since you know Duncan and Olson that maybe...
Taylor: Oh, certainly they had an influence on me, sure. Also Mike McClure.
Funkhouser: His work with forms, shapes?
Taylor: Yeah. But, I don't really concern myself too much about form. And the reason I don't is because I know it's there. I'm always surprised to find out how it's there. One of the things about Cormac McCarthy that I found interesting, and I had started doing something very similar. Because the awareness of the intricacies of what you do become plainer the longer you do it. Like Arthur Miller said the other night, that he was concerned with form. He said, "All writers are concerned with form, daddle daddle dah." I thought to myself, that's why you're such a dull ass.
But anyhow, what McCarthy does in Blood Meridian, he might give you the name of the chapter, but he lists all the events that are going to happen. And I realized that, for instance in this word thing that I'm working on now: a month ago I started writing certain things down that I was going to deal with in this work. And this morning I finished another section. What was really interesting to me was that I read four other sections of this work and I saw the relatedness in terms of this material. That's enough. I said, "yeah, well, I guess if I was pressed to, I could get into the unifying links with all of this stuff." But that's not fun. But it's there. And what I mean by it is, after you do it enough, you make a commitment to the magic. Then the magic asserts itself in ways that you don't have to worry about, because it is incorruptible. That's the whole thing. Integrity must stand. If it stands, then you don't have to worry about other things. You do your work and then it comes. Because that is the truth. That is the beauty. That is the force. However, you just made me realize something. I am not conscious of form but yet you cannot not be conscious of it. Because you look at the page. And the page let's you know certain things. So, of course, one of the things that I'm thinking about is how the next part of this poem is going to be different in terms of its architecture.
I mean, what are they doing, talking about form? I mean, you look at the rivers and the mountains. The forests that they haven't destroyed yet. Look at these rocks. I could have showed you a rock in that place across the street.
Funkhouser: I saw it. Gigantic...
Taylor: Yes. It's extraordinary. Can you imagine all the spirits that are coming out of that rock? And we are, after all, just animals and we are a part of nature. We are a part of, and we are probably the quickest in terms of duration of life. We are the transitory poems. The mountains will be here, and perhaps we will be part of a mountain. You know there are certain West African tribes that believe that life is just a part of death, and when the chemical composition changes--some of them believe that they may become a mountain stream, star, whatever. I think that we definitely go back to the earth. Which is interesting. It's called "mother earth." The Portugese say, "Portentosa", that's Africa. And actually, the oldest bi-ped was found in the Sahara, she was a woman species. But then again that's not really strange when you understand that salps, fish--it is the women who give birth, and without male--and the women, as they mature, they become male and that's how the unite. This is not acceptable by a Christian--but they don't know anything.
The other thing that works for me--I'm always amazed--I was watching some writer, and he said, "Yes, I write five hours every day." And I said to myself, "my, that's really disciplined." Though I don't think there's any one way of going about it. You may not write, but you may read. But you are always thinking about the object of what you're thinking about. So, I found this morning that I put out all of this information in front of me and I said, "what's gonna happen?" And it happened. And I'm already now thinking about the next part of this piece.
Funkhouser: Going back to the influences: were there people you read subsequent to Duncan, Olson, McClure, and the others who had an early impact on you?
Taylor: Oh, yes. Garcia Lorca. Kaufman. I knew--I had the--I spent time with Kaufman. One night, boy, I was at this building that was on First Avenue and First Street. It was a sort of triangular shaped building, and Ginsberg, [Peter] Orlovsky, Le Roi Jones and Kaufman and myself were in this room. And I just stood there. And there was no question in my mind who the force was in that room.
He was like a spirit. I met Kaufman through these two women that I was very close to at one point, and they had known Kaufman before. So finally when I met him, he came to the Five Spot one night I was working there, said "You've gotta come with me after you finish work." I said, "Look, Bob, I started working at quarter after nine, I won't be finished until four o'clock, I can't do this." So he said, "Yes you will," and he came at four o'clock and he took me over to what is now Soho, and he read poems to me until about quarter after one the next afternoon. And I remember walking out of that loft completely energized--I hate that word--but completely transformed. He was also, probably, the most extraordinary looking poet of his time, too. I mean that helped, of course. He was extraordinary. When he was in his last periods, and he didn't speak, I was in Frisco, and I saw him. He just came up to me and said [with a beckoning motion] like this, and we went and had coffee. And this happened twice. We went into coffee shops. And we just sat there. But I was very fortunate, I met [Jack] Kerouac in a same kind of way. Before On the Road.
You see, the trick about all of this shit is, if you're fortunate enough to have longevity, then you may get certain kudus that you're not really responsible for. Cause I don't know, really, who started the Beat movement. I have my own feelings about it, cause I heard--I know what Kaufman was about. That shit--what he was doing there--the nature of the language. And this is all happening when Norman Mailer is supposed to be the great American writer. I prefered Bill Styron, personally--well, the first Styron book Lie Down in Darkness, that one.
There's a fantastic poet, a black guy that's dead now, he wrote Harlem Gallery, Melvin Tolson. Do you know him? I loved Audre Lorde. I thought Audre Lorde was extraordinary. The last time I was staying in Berlin, I heard that there was this woman's bookstore that Audre--Audre, when she was having cancer, she was going to Berlin--I heard that she went into this woman's bookstore and that she was quite well known. So I go in there, I'm standing there ten seconds and this woman walks up to me and says, "We don't serve men in this bookstore." And I said, "You don't?" Well, I had certain words for that lady and I would never be welcome back there again. But the idea of this shit is so ridiculous. Well, I won't get into that. I thought Cancer Journals was an extraordinarily courageous book. Audre Lorde, that stuff that she wrote, man, that's the kind of stuff that really--she's another one of my favorites. It just rivets you, the truth of it, the pain of it. But the pain is not the pain the way people think, it's the glory of the ability to be able to penetrate that deeply that make you--I mean it's frightening to certain people! [Laughter]
One of the greatest things that I'll never forget, in 1962, I was working in this club on Bleecker Street, the three of us, Jimmy Lyons and Sunny Murray, and myself. We were working, and this guy came in--he was gonna--we would play one set and he would play one set, and he was playing the guitar. I'll never forget, it was on a Saturday night. He started playing and people just laughed and they thought it was great. And we went up and started playing and people knocked over tables, knocked over their drinks getting out of the club the minute we started playing. And I said, "Well, that's okay." Anyway, it turns out that this guy, within two years this guy was Tiny Tim. And they loved it. And whatever it was we were doing, it really did not please them very much. [Laughs] I love it!
Funkhouser: Who else do you think of as important artists?
Taylor: William Dixon, Bill Dixon is one musician. I think Anthony Braxton is, I think that's really something. I think that--oh, I think Calatravas, and you know the guy--the Englishman who did the Hong Kong Bank? What's his name? When that bank was completed in '76, that was the most technically advanced building at that time built. He's got a building now either in Japan or Spain which I didn't like too much. I think the Butoh dancers, Min is. I'm not happy--I mean, Arthur Mitchell got a MacArthur. I don't' know why. Bill D. Jones got an Arthur, I can understand that somewhat. Betty Carter I think is a great artist.
Funkhouser: There's not a lot of poetry, or your writing, that is out in print.
Taylor: Well, you know what Anne [Waldman] said to me, she said, "Why aren't you published?" So I didn't answer her. The reason I am not published is because the reason I don't go record companies and ask them could I record for them. Cause I've gone through them, I don't do that anymore. If somebody wants to publish you, then they'll publish you. It's not what I'm writing for. I'm writing cause I love to write. And, of course, when the time is right, I suppose--I just hope I have something that'll be of interest to someone other than myself, that's all. I just do it because I love to do it.
Funkhouser: Somewhere you talk about writing, or the artist's responsibility is to communicate with themself...
Taylor: I don't think that's all but I think that's a beginning. And when the artist gets a chance to communicate with others then you begin to find out something else. You begin to find out what it really means to have an audience be in front of you and not to even hear them breathe. Then you really know something else about what is happening.
Its already happened. It's passed. That's when it goes beyond yourself. That's when you're really serving. You're serving those group of people who have--you see, people are not there by accident. People who come to certain things have prepared themselves to do that. It is worth preparing yourself to be prepared to serve something, because art did not begin with us. It was here before we got here. We are just, perhaps, hopefully adding a little something to it. But there are whole groups of people who are not artists but who love it. So they become lovers of art. In that sense they become art lovers, they become artists. And they know when bullshit is happening. So if they come, and you're doing your little schtickt--whatever it is--and you don't even hear them breathe, then that's when you know you've achieved another state beyond. That's what you've been preparing yourself for.
And it really doesn't matter. Sometimes when they hoot-- that can be played within a wonderful way.
Funkhouser: Not to get into anything too complicated, or semantic, but how much have you considered poetry as form seperate from music? I see the structural similarities...
Taylor: It's obvious, but I'm not interested in separations. What I mean by that is what I'm discovering and becoming aware of every day now is that the similarity, although the nature of the material is different, the process of building the structure are very similar. This is a recognition of something that was gradual. And I rather delight in it now, because I know, thus far, how to practice. Practice is very important to me, musically. In other words, practice is-- forget that--the preparation, the spiritual--the preparation is to enter the realm of the spirits. And it is not practice because it is voluntary. It is. Practice has to do with discipline.
Discipline, in this society, to me, has to do with sin. It doesn't have anything to do with joy. The expression of life is confused as a result of sin. Whatever my mother's intent was, she insisted that six days of the week I practice. And I had to practice. And I mean practice. On Sunday she said, "You can do what you want." That's when the organization of my music began, was when she wasn't looking. Hopefully she wasn't listening. Factories have to do with treating people like they are machine, objects or machine. The whole idea of discipline is in the Army. It's like "Onward Christian Soldiers." And we're still doing the same thing.
This wonderful English writer said something about what he learned from--he came from the upper classes in England--when he went to Africa to study those so-called primitive societies, he said that, "in the West we think of freedom as a manifestation of our ability to compete. But it never entered into our minds what a certain primitive people knew. That the greatest human achievement was cooperation." And it's true. I mean, I'm a very competitive person. I was a very competitive person, cause that's the way I was brought up. But then, gradually, I had to decide that I was doing it because I really loved doing it, and it had only to do with the fact that it was the one thing in my life that I could be assured of, that would gratify my senses. And you move to the next stage when you recognize the reason the senses were gratified was because certain great spirits before you allowed you to see the potential of developing your senses to that level where you could obtain that sense of gratification. Then the next level is you begin to see that that's a responsibility you didn't even know you were going to be confronted with. That's when the fun begins. Or the tragedy. Because, after all, they also know the wealth of what it is you have, and they offer you things to make you be more in-tuned with their abilities to sell it. [Laughs]
Funkhouser: What about the idea of de-personalization. In your poetry, the writing that I've seen, it's not an "I". There's no I. In conjunction with the idea of sound being within the whole body so everything comes from within the body yet there is a clan. There's an idea of a process of developing a group of people you're speaking with or who tune in to what you're doing. Your writing is very personal, extended outward and becomes this cosmological bridge, meeting, a communion through the elements. You talk about spirits, but there's more than that...
Taylor: Well, there are sources of investigation. And what you're trying to do--the fun is to see what you finally learn from these, and how you--what is the end product of all this investigation, in terms of your own statement. Because, you know, the statement becomes more finite as it grows, if it's growing.
When I do it there are certain procedures that go down. For instance, there are the physical exercises which must be done, and the wonderful breakfast. Breakfast comes after the first stuff--no push-ups, no sit-ups. There are physical things that I do. I tried push-ups, it was too much labor involved. I didn't like it. Gravity is one thing, but--what I mean is, the wonder of all of this--and this is where the people people come in, and the different cultures come in. When you attempt to get involved with what is magical for them, even if you don't agree with it. But just to do it, and then to find out what the exposure means to you and to think about it and then to see gradually how it affects what it is that you do.
The writing is the last thing that happens.
What I'm also learning is, for instance, in listening to these august poets read, see, it was fascinating for me to try to imagine the dramaturgy that was going through their heads as they were reading. Like Anne [Waldman], for instance, had this friend of yours, Steven Taylor. He plays the violin or something? Well she had two of them, and she was singing, or something. I said to myself, "Well, now, well, hmm, that's an evening's work." I'm thinking, mmm, the two other times I heard Anne read, it was not that. Some people I would consider, but with her I had to digest. So all of this is wonderfully exciting because it's the unexpected. It had an effect. Because even though I was downstairs, I was right. A lot of times, when I listen to all of this music that I have scattered all around here I don't have the luxury of being able to--well, I suppose I could--I don't sit down and listen to them. Sometimes. Marvin Gaye is so powerful that when I'm doing my exercises, the rhythm that I have my exercises in are altered by what he does, so I don't play him when I'm exercising. If I want to dance, I'll play him. When I listen to Monk I laugh a lot, because that's so extraordinary, that's what that is.
Listening to music, I have to do things. I have things, like I love to wash socks, cause I love warm water on my fingers. If I really feel pissed about something, then I'll wash clothes. So, I learn from what's happening in music by keeping busy doing something else. Until, of course, my turn to do the music--and then I've discovered what I've learned. But that is also related to when I was really attempting to be a social person. Which meant I was going to--it hasn't been that long ago--going to bars with a lot of different people, and then somebody would say something that would make me very angry, and a day and a half later, when I'm practicing then I'd understand what made me angry about it, and what there was to do about it.
What is happening now is I'm beginning to understand what I do, and some of the effect that it has on other people that I'm not happy with in retrospect. So I'm doing this kind of self-examination. But, you know, in a nice way, a comfortable way. I'm also having my own nunnery. I'm deliberately not--Aretha Franklin made this wonderful record, with extraordinary piano, called Brand New Me. That's what I'm working on.
The whole thing is, the body is always changing. The cells in the body are always changing. When I look at a man like [Bob] Dole, for instance, he was leaving with his cronies--one of those official buildings in Washington--and the Crime Bill, supposedly, was just passed. One of the things he said, but he was looking away from the cameras, and he was walking away, he said, "And we feel safer already." [Laughs] Now that kind of cynicism is, that mindset, that kind of human shit is-- I don't want to touch that, I don't even want to see that. I find it in a lot of places and I don't think I need that. I've been around that enough. And you pick up those little devices and you know how to use them. Because the situations are just to be played upon, they're not to be made anything magical. It's just a game.
Funkhouser: Obviously, you're constructing something entirely different. You're using words, and improvising for a series of ideas and themes much differently than some senator.
Taylor: But, on the other hand, I do read The Economist, and I do read The Voice--not much, but I do it because I think The Economist is the best, certainly the most interesting "English" periodical that I can read now. And The Voice is probably the most provocative American paper that I can read. I have the feeling that if I could read German, Stern and some of those magazines in Germany that are like the equivalent of Time magazine, I have the feeling that Time--there's no way to compare them. For one thing, obviously the photography in those German magazines are much superior.
But you see, the thing is, growing up one of the reasons I was disturbed was because I was raised to believe all of these truths that turned out to be not even myths. This is the land of opportunity. What opportunity? Equality and justice? Took me a long time to understand that none of this was true. But when I finally got to that point, that's when my whole thing--there's a thing about the haunches. Haunches can be found in bridges. It can also be found in the attitudes of people. Like slow, Sitting Bull's nickname was "slow." I that is wonderful. I can't remember how they said it in the Sioux--Sioux is actually nassiew. Wonderful word. The French the ones who turned it in to Sioux. Anyway, he was a very deliberate young man, and when he was thirteen he won his first white feather.
The thing about whatever happened to the native Americans--all of these societies, like this society, we're all animals in the sense that when we get ready to destroy, we know how to destroy. Like the Xhosa, for instance, the divining ladies--the diviners, among the Xhosa were usually women, and part of their body would be painted white and the other part would be black and then the lips would be red--the diviners were to find out who the amataki were. The amataki were the witches. Once they were found, what would happen is the divining ladies would come and do one of two things there. Their job was to eat, destroy the witches. They would either put hot stones--they would put the person flat on the ground, and tie them, put them in stakes. And then they would put these hot stones on their bodies. Or, a more delightful form of torture would be to put huge ants on their eyelids, in their ears, in their armpits, and then have them eaten alive. With the Sioux, it was first of all, bravery. Then generosity. And bravery meant, well, war.
So it comes back to, really, the great poets are the only-- the really great ones are the only ones who have a real feeling for the beauty that is possible through invention, which is, after all, what we are originally supposed to be here for. Because we were invented.
There all of this romantic myth about what one goes through. But I always ate well, I always knew how to eat. Mother was a dietician, father was a head chef, yeah, but okay I always knew how to do that. And I always knew the foods to eat. And I always had books. I always could get them. I always had clothes. I always knew how to go to the theatre when I wanted to. I just never had any money. But I always did it, I always got it. And when I really got depressed I would go to bed, and I would sleep. I'm not saying that I wasn't angry, but just when it got to the point when I thought I was going to do something really painfully destructive, that's when I would go to sleep.
What I am dealing with now is the fact that I've really realized for the last maybe twelve years I have been very destructive in a certain kind of way. Or maybe even longer than that. I have to deal with it now because it's beginning to, now--if I don't deal with it, then I won't get the work done that I want to get done. Because you can't continue to do that to your body, even though you have all these yeasts, and wheat germ oils, and all these gimmicks. But I did have fun, in my own Rapskallion kind of a way.
Funkhouser: I wanted to ask you about the voices in Chinampas. With your spoken stuff you make really great use of multi-tracking, moreso than the above average poet who gets in to a studio. I was wondering how it's done. Do you hear all the voices at once, all the sounds? How do you go about layering sounds? There's that great quote where you talk about being able to have four or five sounds going at once. Then you have multitracks...
Taylor: It's very interesting that you ask me that question. You know, when I was like ten or eleven years old, mother always took me, although she didn't want me to be a musician. She nevertheless took me to hear all the bands. So that when I would come home, and I'd go into my room, I would imitate with my voice. I would make orchestral sounds, I would hear all of this in my head. I could make certain sounds that would be the trumpet, certain sounds would be the saxophone.
And what you have to deal with, then, is you have to deal with these teachers who try to take that all away from you.
Anyhow, I don't hear anything, actually. What happens is that you don't even think about it, and you work on it. Once you've been touched by extraordinary beauty, they tell you what you're supposed to do. And of course everyone who has been touched comes up with their own methodological concept how to translate that into their own language.
Of course, on the other hand, one of the things that I have been doing, and this is why patience is so important--cause I won't fuck around with any of these recording companies who will not allow me to do exactly what I want to do, as much as possible. I've really been thinking for maybe a couple of years about this vocal ensemble of singing voices. What I've been able to do with musicians--I've had them chanting certain things--but I've got a really sort of mischievous idea about what I want to do. I have two men who have very high voices, I'm going to get two women with very low voices, and I'm going to have them all doing things. I'm going to have them changing parts, and then we'll see who the castrati are. But they can really sing, too.
Funkhouser: In a recording like Chinampas, how much is improvised?
Taylor: None of it. What was improvised were the instruments. What is also improvised is how the voice is used.
For this Min Tanaka thing there are three areas that I'm dealing with. I'm dealing with how to get to the piano, what kind of movement is going to be required. How the voice is going to be used, and what kind of language is going to be used. By that I mean, is it going to be translated African, or is it going to be translated native American Indian, is it going to be sung, is it going to be chanted, or is it going to be narrative? Then there's the music. Specific sound organization of music. So, I'm having a wonderful time preparing myself to do all of these things. And I know some people are going to come--cause they do come--and I would love to surprise them. So I'm working on certain things, to see if on the night of the performance I can achieve that level of trance to be able to forget.
Funkhouser: Somebody wanted me to ask you about a collection called The Mysteries, which was supposed to be published.
Taylor: Oh my god! A long, long, long time ago. It was never published. I never did anything about it. It's over there in the closet there.
Funkhouser: It's a manuscript of poems, among your piles . . .
Taylor: Well, I like to think of those group of words are dealing, in a way, they go back maybe fifteen years. Maybe twenty years ago. It was kind of beginning of something, and had a lot to do with voodoo. Had a lot to do with beginning with George Balanchine's conception of movement. Had a lot to do with the beginning of the emergence of the Kabuki and the Bunraku, and the Azuma kabuki. Also, it had to do with the battle that was going down with the bebop musicians who felt that their conception of swing was being violated, which is funny, cause they couldn't dance anyhow. You had to get over that and you had to develop a--fuck all of those people. All of them, all of them, all of them, who--not the great ones, for the most part, their greatness made them impervious anyhow no matter what they said. Their work stood. I mean, Miles Davis is a nasty motherfucker, but at one time he was an incredibly--I mean the lessons he gave were--I can still--I was thinking I don't listen to him at all now. Wouldn't even think about it, but it's funny: I listen to Monk. I listened to Monk today. I listen to a lot. There's something about Miles I don't want to listen to. I don't listen to him, actually, but he was so important. He wrote such beautiful...his conceptions were so wonderful. They live with me here.
What I'm really gonna try to find out now, and I was thinking about this today, is that I'm going to go back and do certain things that I did twenty years ago, to find out. Because most of the great artists that mean so much to me are dead. But they were very important to me when I was twenty years old. And I'm thinking now about rediscovering them.
Funkhouser: I'm wondering about what electronics and the various technologies, what that foretells, what is the future of art. More and more we move away from bodies. It doesn't seem to be a momentum that can be stopped. The arts are being suppressed in a widespread way. So, you're going back to the things that turned you on 20, 30 years ago, probably not a bad idea to keep those sensibilities alive.
Taylor: I don't like to accept the idea that the piano, or any instrument, is a machine. But I can understand that it is possible to say that because, unless it's electrified--I mean, when I was growing up, we had a piano in the house that you could put a roll in, and it would perform by itself for chrissakes, what an awful instrument. I don't really care too much, to the point of evaluating what mechanical devices are used. That is something--whenever that happens, that does. I am interested in seeing what happens, but I know what I have to do at this point, or, I don't know what I have to do. The point is, right now it's all changing. I've listened to more music in the past week than I have in years. I think it does have something to do with maybe some choices that I'm making in my personal life, and I'm having a wonderful time. It's rather scary in a way. It's okay. I know, in a way, what the alternatives would be, and they're not--I've done that already.
So, there are different ways to make surprises happen. The other thing about the technocracy of it is, of course, destroying the ozone layer. It is destroying forests and trees. For instance, now the native americans are now thinking--a group of them are really quite open to receiving this atomic waste on their land--and they're going to get a lot of money for it, which I think is really a very curious turn of events. And when one of the Chiefs was asked, well, suppose certain things happen? And he said, "Well, we believe that if that were to happen, technically there would be some device that would be invented that would ameliorate whatever the danger was." Now that's optimism.
I think maybe the best thing that can be said about New York, Manhattan, what they used to think of as skyscrapers, [laughs] simply that they're man-made mountains. But now that's all past because now the Japanese are building a super-skyscraper. And these things are, after all, pretty relative, because the amount of stone that went into the Giza, and how that was constructed, what, five-thousand years ago? We're dealing with a culture that had its own continuum for we don't even know how many thousands of years. This country is--the United States is a very young-- and of course time is different now.
http://www.mattweston.com/cecilpanel.html
Cecil Taylor Panel Discussion
"THE SHAPE OF JAZZ TO COME"
mweston_1917@yahoo.com
Taylor: Hall, may I ask you a question? I don’t understand your statement. What was actually done on “Intuition”? It was recorded in 1949…
Overton: Yes, ’49, somewhere around there. You know the record, yes. This was a very free improvisation, I think, in which someone started out with an idea, someone else followed in with it, and whether you think of it as successful or not, that’s not really important. It was an attempt. The first attempt, I think, to break away from the theme-variation form.
Taylor: And the fact that it was done, completed. It was an idea started and that’s what music is, partly, ideas. It’s just a manner of the organization of the idea. For instance, before Lennie Tristano when it was done, Duke Ellington had a concept of an idea – and he put this idea in a musical form, a musical shape.
Overton: What was the difference between what Duke and what Lennie did? Duke wrote it out, didn’t he?
Taylor: Oh…That’s another problem. What difference does that make? The only thing that we know about – the only thing that the listener knows about – is the sounds that he hears. I don’t think it makes any difference that the sound is notated because the symbol doesn’t make the music. It is the men striking the instruments, striking the pieces of wood or whatever. It’s the sound that we’re confronted with, not the symbol. Because in other cultures they don’t use our symbols, but they make music, they make sounds.
Overton: I would disagree on that one point because I would make a distinction, Cecil, between an idea that’s improvised and that just occurs at the moment, and an idea that is already arrived at, preconceived.
Taylor: How can an idea come, you know, into being without certain things happening? I mean, if you write a composition – all the great composers that you were talking about which happened to be in a particular school – all the great composers have been improvisors…
Overton: That’s right.
Taylor: Now, the only difference is that certain people wish to notate their improvisations. That’s all. And other people improvise – now what does that mean? It simply means that these people who choose to improvise utilize certain physical things in their characteristics and and transpose them to the instruments and, after a certain amount of years, these things take shape in a form…Like the Charlie Parker expression. He uses certain material, certain forms if you will, and he brings these to like his improvisations.
Overton: Well, Hadyn used to improvise every morning, I read in a book someplace. I wasn’t there, I don’t know, but I understand that he did and then in the afternoon he composed…
Taylor: Do you make a distinction between composition and improvisation?
Overton: That’s right. That’s exactly the point I want to make. I think that the music he wrote in the after noon was stimulated [sic] by his improvisation in the morning – but I think that it was better music because it was reflective and he spent time on it and he also undoubtedly changed things that he never would have changed if he just improvised them. And he had time to change them. He used more than his intuition in the afternoon – he used his mind and he used intellectual conscious control over his material and that’s what I think a composition is, and I believe that improvisation is just the opposite. I believe a truly improvised thing is a truly intuitive thing – a thing of the moment and undoubtedly conditioned by, you know, what you were saying before about your whole background. How you think about your condition – you are going to get certain ideas because of what you are and how you are going to think. But in real improvisation you don’t have time to polish those ideas – they come at the moment – they are what they are and that’s it because…
Taylor: That’s what we are and all we can ever be: what we are at the moment. Even if we reflect upon that which we have done in the morning, when we write in the afternoon that’s all we are – what we are at the moment. The sum total of the existance is like what it is up to the point that you die – that’s all. So that if a cat chooses to improvise, which is, you know, a technical mastery of certain materials put in the framework of certain forms. And we are talking about jazz, so we’ll talk about its first form which is the Blues. You cannot tell me – you’ll have to prove it to me – that, when after twenty years of playing, that Charlie Parker didn’t play the Blues as many different ways as was possible within his experience. And if he had sat down to write this it wouldn’t have been any more valid, because, in the final analysis, what we heard was what we heard..[Overton tries to speak, Taylor goes on.] Just a minute, just a minute, what you are negating there is that there is skill in improvisation. What you’re negating is that – wait a minute, wait a minute. Polish, you used the work polish before. When one sites down to compose one…it’s sort of like a spiritual – this is Sunday – a spiritual thing. You know, you sit down and you start writing and you become reflective and your mind works. But whoever told you that in order to play the piano, or in order to do anything, you don’t use your mind?
Overton: Nobody told me. I play the piano so I know what you’re talking about.
Taylor: Wait a minute, wait a minute. Now let’s get into this further. You talk about jazz community, you know, and I want you to define what you mean by community and how it actually works in, you know…like, for instance, what do you do?
Overton: By jazz community I mean the fact that…
Taylor: Perhaps before we go any further, we better define what jazz is.
Overton: No, I’m not going to get into that…
[Laughter]
Taylor: Why not? Why not? How can we talk about the future of something that we can’t even define? What are we talking about?
Overton: Let me define jazz community. You have to be able to play jazz with someone else. Well if you have four people, that’s a community. If you have three…
Taylor: Well, Haydn played with somebody too. Was he playing jazz?
Overton: No, he played by himself.
Taylor: No, no, no – his chamber work, you know, and his symphony, you know. People played together, does that mean it’s jazz because they played together?
Overton: The idea of a jazz community is that jazz is really based on more than one person playing together, and you have to be able to say, and you have to be able to agree musically.
Taylor: Well what is this thing you’re calling jazz? That’s what I want to know first and now let’s get that that [sic] before we start talking about…
Overton: I think that would be stupid to get into. We could spend all day – you have your ideas, I have mine…
Taylor: Well that’s what we’re here for, to express ideas, isn’t it?
Overton: No, I’ve been on panels like that and it’s the most useless thing that I’ve ever…
Taylor: Well what are we doing now but talking about ideas? You mean you’re expressing what you think is stupid. You see, so that’s an idea, that’s an opinion.
[Laughter]
Koenig: Lou’s getting restless and I think it’s his turn ‘cause he hasn’t said anything.
Calabro: I agree with Cecil very much about this idea of the immediacy which is the most important aspect of any temporal art. One doesn’t really care what, how you rehearse and all that kind of stuff. They care about what’s happening right at the moment. Well, we’d like to make some kind of defense for notation which I happen to…
Taylor: Why is it necessary to defend notation?
Calabro: Well, because in a way you’re slighting it. I think…
Taylor: I don’t feel slighted because from what I understand [Anna] Sokolow talked about improvisation as itf it were an unskilled something or other. Like, you know, you pick notes out of the air. I don’t need to feel defensive about what I know to be a reality and a truth and that is a spiritually beautiful and moves people all over the world. Why do you have to defend your Western concept of notation?
Calabro: I was going to talk about the fact that it is a Western concept…
Taylor: Ah, and the West is embattled now, isn’t it?
Calabro: …and is also a very developmental type thing. I think…
Taylor: Developmental? What do you mean by that?
Calabro: Well now look, you can’t get me on that.
Taylor: I’m not trying to get you. I am trying to find out about what you’re talking about.
Calabro: The idea that in Western culture we are concerned with developmental music – whether this is good or bad I don’t know. The thing is, when you’re in a system that depends completely on rote, I think that that system of music becomes extremely limited. I’m thinking of music that I happen to be very…
Taylor: You mean you don’t think Western music is limited. All right, so OK, tell me something that doesn’t have limits. The idea, what we’re trying to do, is to like go push beyond those limits. Whatever you do, you can’t tell me…
Calabro: I think that one has more of a chance of success if you have a command of notation.
Taylor: Why, find, OK, that’s your opinion. But what I want to get at is why is it so difficult for you to comprehend the idea if people spend all, the same creative evergy that you take to notate and these people, other people decide that they’re actually going to play…Why is it so difficult for you to accept the validity of like the fact that they are practicing, if you will, like the improvisation. So that when they get up on the stand they no longer have to practice. They play. They play what they feel – they play what they are at the moment.
Calabro: Who’s objecting to that?
Overton: No one disagrees with that, no one disagrees with that, Cecil.
Calabro: Who are you fighting?
Taylor: I’m not fighting anyone. I don’t feel the need to fight. I just want to get, you know, certain clarities.
[Laughter]
Overton: The fact that improvisation is here to stay…
Calabro: You sound so angry about it that…
Taylor: Ah ah ah – there’s the word. Angry. I sound angry.
[Laughter]
Koenig: Are we all happy again? Peace.
Taylor: Wait a minute. If I am angry, I wonder if there’s just reason for my anger.
Overton: Nobody disagrees with you on this point.
Taylor: For instance you’ve implied that I might be stupid by asking you like to define what jazz was – and yet you use the term community…
Overton: I don’t want to spend my time…
Taylor: I agree with you. You don’t want to spend that time. You have that prerogative, you know, and also that license, but, unfortunately, me, you know, in my entirety, living in America, I don't have the same kind of licenses that you have so I have to know, like, as much as the history books allow…and they don’t allow me to know too much. Fortunately, there is a thing – folklore – so there are certain things I know about my historical predecessors, if you will, that is not written in history books. Like um gee – I can’t exactly say that my great great great great grandfather was George Washington…
Calabro: I can’t either.
[Laughter and applause]
Taylor: Well, of course you can’t because probably you didn’t come here until after George Washington. But some of my ancestors were here before George Washington got here – that’s the difference between us. Now the things is that in this community the realities are that jazz comes out of a particular community. Jazz begins in the Negro community. Now I don’t know what that word Negro means but you all know – like a certain economically and socially…[Laughter] Up until recently, education wasn’t allowed in certain places. Now however, it [MUSIC] began, we will say, when the slaves were brought here. And they had their shouts. And they had their work songs. Then all of a sudden their women were taken. And their women were raped. And so instead of my name being X, it’s Taylor…
Koenig: OK, buddy.
Taylor: Wait a minute, I’m not finished yet…
Overton: I want to get back to Lennie Tristano.
Taylor: I’ll get back to Lennie Tristano. I know as much about Lennie Tristano as Overton. The only thing, I don’t talk to Lennie Tristano – who reads the Journal American. And when I went to his studio he wasn’t very polite to me…
Koenig: I’ve never talked to him, but I’m kind of interested…
Taylor: How could I talk to a person who wasn’t very polite to me when I came as his guest, you see…Now, after the rapes, scenes changed. People went to Chicago, people went to other places. That’s why the integration movement is so funny – like you can’t look at me and see that I’m not integrated. Anyway, my name is Taylor: Scotch, English as well as African, as well as Indian and all that. However, I do live in a particular community and I am subject to certain things that MR. Hall Overton doesn’t have to concern himself with. And all the people that have created the most moving jazz – most moving in the sense that if they had not lived, the Lennie Tristano that this gentleman talks about would not have existed. You see, about Lennie Tristano – there was nothing particularly unique about the concept of Lennie Tristano when you really look at it harmonically and in terms of its organization. It was based on several of the things that jazz is. Rhythmically, the Tristano concept was based on Mr. Count Basie’s conception of swing. And today Mr. Tristano still hasn’t solved the problem. He still can’t find a drummer, he still can’t find a bass player, you know. That’s all right, but Powell solved the problem and so did Tatum before him. And the reasons are, what jazz is is simply an expression. It’s an American expression because the so-called Negro is American. But it is his feeling, it is the feeling that he has brought to the Western concept of music – you know, there are only so many notes. But it is his feeling which can be traced back to the shouts, the work songs. And when it came into the metropolitan and the industrial areas it began to mirror that. It began to mirror, with certain advantages that were slowly, of course – but you know, like theres a Negro ballplayer now, a rookie, for instance. He’s breaking in on some team and you know, they’re still calling this cat nigger, you know, in 1964 – the way they called Jackie Robinson nigger in 1946. Isn’t that funny? But anyway…
Man [from audience]: You say that jazz is Negro music and the white man can’t play it…
Taylor: Oh that’s a defense, baby. How can I say that when Toshiko [Akiyoshi], a Japanese woman, you know, played all Horace Silver’s things, you know. How can I say that like – one time when I was in Europe a lot of funny things happened. People responded to it. People were playing it. People were imitating physically the movements of Bud Powell you know, and Charlie Parker.
Overton: How about Jack Teagarden?
Taylor: I am saying that it is an expression of the Negro’s existence and his feeling about what America is. I am saying what white musicians do is simply to imitate that feeling. I am saying that’s all right, but I think we must understand where it begins and where it comes from and it comes from like the Negro’s existence. Now why do I say this? Simply because let’s not fool ourselves you know – we’re up here at Bennington. It’s lovely and it’s isolated but the problem is [TAPE BREAKS]…the social and economic conditions and just talk about music and imaginary communities.
Woman [from audience]: Can you make a statement about the future of jazz? I mean as the Negro community in your eyes – where changes all become integrated into the society. Then what will happen to jazz if the impetus is taken away from you? What is going to happen?
Taylor: That’s a good question. The only problem is that I am already saved, that I am integrated, I am integreated and it’s your problem, it’s not my problem. Because I exist – I know what I am supposed not to know. Everything that exists in America art-wise is for me to get what I can get out of it and to bring it to that mode of expression that is most pertinent to my existence which happens to be what some people call jazz. But there is not going to be any change, because you can’t see that I’m integreated. You can’t recognize that like as a human being my father took home, we’ll say, $3500 a year and your father took hom e $5800 and I’m saying that economic difference, that, that creates, that, that meant a completely different world. And one things I haven’t talked about whcich is very important is why is it that in the subculture that the so-called Negro has, that when he takes the initiative either as Southern students have done or as the jazzmen have been doing, that everyone gets alarmed. We have Polish folk music, we have Jewish folk music, we have, you know, Balinesian folk music. No one is upset about that. What is it that you want now that you didn’t want before? What has all of a sudden become so important now that you wished to ignore before? I think you have to ask that question. I think you have to bend aside, you know, to see me just as a man and let me have the cultural things that I don’t deny you to have. Let me have…[MUSIC]…it doesn’t mean that one is better than the other. They exist simultaneously together. The only time that – really, you know, integration is like for people to just recognize that they are people and they have culturally, historically, certain preferences, certain habits. It doesn’t mean that they are better or worse, that they are less or more. Why deny them? Now, Africa is your problem because the white people have been the ones who have been exploiting and tearing down and killing and before them it was some other people, you know. So like it’s your guilt and it’s your problem to have to work out, but don’t deny me what is mine. And I am not denying what is yours. I’m saying that there is one advantage that one has in being a so-called Negro: that if one gets out of the gutter, one can see everything from different points of view; one can assimilate everything because one knows what one is – which, up until recently, has not been interesting. I’m saying that people who are enmeshed in situations of subjugation and have to live, have to find ways to project their dignity as human beings – in spite of all the efforts of those around them to degrade them – I’m saying that this music is the manifestation of the dignity in the life that has always been present. And it ahs always been present in any art: the joy, the sorrow…[MUSIC]
Overton: …you said I couldn’t possibly feel what you feel. You don’t understand my background. You assume you understand me. I’d like to just bring out the fact that I have very close relationships with Negro musicians.
Taylor: Well wait a minute. Let’s get into that, let’s get into that – your relationships.
LeRoi Jones [from audience]: [inaudible]
Overton: LeRoi, did you see the TV show…How about channel 13? Did you see the shows I had last summer? Were they all white? [Jones still talking.] Yeah, I know, let me stick to your point. Well all right were there all white faces there? How many white faces? One white. There was five shows and it was shown three different times during the summer, LeRoi. Let’s stick to your point. Yes, there was one white man and five Negro bands performing.
Jones [from audience]: I’m talking about lives, not just performers. We see your soap operas all day.
Overton: You’re assuming again…like because I’m white, I’m a soap opera.
Taylore: The answer is LeRoi, the answer is LeRoi, it was his program and the creators of the music were put in the role of performers on his program…that’s all. Well, why wasn’t it Thelonious Monk’s program? The man you had such close association with, the man who really created the jazz music that you were presenting, you see. Now Roi brought up a great point. If you want to talk about images, you see, there is no Negro image. Like not even in the world of entertainment. They laud Sammy Davis and they laud Harry Belafonte and Lena Horne, but boy you never see them on any regularly sustained program on TV because they’re just not good enough…
Calabro: Can we take it for granted that it’s a terrible situation and all that…
Taylor: Well yes, you can take it for granted ‘cause you don’t have to live in it, but I have to live in it.
Calabro: This is getting to be a little too much of a sob story. I have a worse background than you have…[MUSIC]
Taylor: You’re more angry than anyone else. I’m just stating what happened.
Bernard Malamud [from audience]: We’re human beings, too. Why make enemies of us?
Taylor: That is your choice, wait a minute my friend, that is your choice. You use the word enemy, which like means something to you. All I’m saying is for you to understand what I’m talking about, all I’m saying for you do to is to face these facts that exist. And like you don’t have to accept them but at least analyze, at least hear me without getting emotional and telling me I’m sobbing. When I play the piano this afternoon we’ll see who sobs then, you see, and we’ll see who walks away.
Mrs. Calabro [from audience]: [inaudible]
Taylor: Of course it’s music, yes. I’m not interested in becoming integrated on the terms that are currently in vogue. I want to know who I am and what I am and that historical books do not tell you so you cannot know that.
[Noise and confusion]
Taylor: You have to begin; you don’t want to know that? Well you have that luxury my dear. I don’t have that luxury.
Saul Maloff [from audience]: In the course of getting to the question, let me say that you distorted Mr. Overton's point. He was not denying the truth of the oppression of the Negro people in this country when he made his limited observation. Let me ask you a question. Do you concede that it may be theoretically possible that by a tremendous act of the sympathetic imagination I could, in some way, come close to understanding the plight of the Negro people? Mr. Taylor, I grant that you are able to do that about the holocaust of the six million Jews. Why can’t you allow me the same token?
[Applause]
Taylor: I’LL TELL YOU WHY, I’LL TELL YOU WHY. Because…I’ll tell you why, I’ll tell you why…Although the Jews say that their home is in Israel, Israel isn’t Africa. Just let me finish…I’LL TELL YOU WHY, I’LL TELL YOU WHY. The Jews in America are white, they say, and they can change their noses or their names at any moment’s discretion. I can’t, I can’t and that’s the difference.
Maloff: I choose not to pass, I choose not to…
[Confusion]
Taylor: My friend, listen. That is no justification for what happens to me in America – what happened to the six million Jews in Germany – that’s no justification…What are you saying?
Maloff: Shall I restate the question?
Taylor: Do, If you feel the necessity.
[MUSIC]
Taylor: They are human beings. There are certain things that are true of all human beings, but I am saying that there is a blind in America…
Maloff: Granted.
Taylor: Granted? You grant so easily…[MUSIC and general confusion]…You grant so easily but you feel nothing except like the plight of the six million Jews. When I stand here and say that there are certain things I want clarified, the first reaction is hostility, the first reaction is a feeling of guilt. And why is it guilt, what’s bothering you? I’m not going to lynch you, I’m not going to kill you and I’m not going to brainwash you. I’m going to ask you to accept me on MY TERMS, on my terms. I’m asking you to accept me on my terms because I am standing and I have experienced certain things that I want to be evaluated on historical facts, and I say as long as history books in America don’t give us that historical fact…You use the word theoretical – and it is not a matter of theory. My life is a matter of being of really, of, of, of, existence. I have to put up with your magnanimous nature. Why can’t I grant you what you are granting me? Nothing is granted me, nothing is granted me. The only thing is granted me is that which I work for – and they don’t grant me, I take it, I make it. That’s the whole point: the jazz musician has taken Western music and made of it what he wanted to make of it.
[Confusion in audience, MUSIC]
Taylor: That’s your privilege, your problem, as you will.
[MUSIC]
Koenig: Would you say there is a difference between composing, improvising, and writing things down from experience?
[MUSIC]
Koenig: I think there is technically one thing moved in on that makes jazz different. You don’t have to write it down because you can keep it on recordings and the same applies that you can preserve and keep the feeling of improvisation – which makes it a very special thing of creativity as compared with what it takes to jell the thoughts when you put them down on paper. Do you have a question?
[MUSIC]
Calabro: I think it’s a misnomer to say the shape of things to come, the shape of jazz to come. You can’t really talk about any art in terms of “this is the way it is going to be” …Cliché things like “it’s probably going to be non-harmonic” – what does that really mean? What I’m more concerned about rather than the shape of jazz, is the shape of the world…
Taylor: We can’t possibly know for sure. The question is one of what you’re like going to do with the material.
Calabro: Well, jazz can be just traced beautifully from just the economic point of view. When Storyville closed down, this kind of thing…
[MUSIC]
Taylor: Martin [Williams] talked about theme and variation; what you’re talking about is not a sonata allegro form which happens to be a European concept organization of music. Exposition, development, recapitulation – and that’s what’s happening. Now I think the things that determine what ever form you use are things that happen so that on its most advanced level Webern saw the necessity of condensing that idea into perhaps four minutes, five mintues. The whole point about the sonata allegro form – the a, b, a – is that it’s a 19th century concept, you know. Now we are in jazz – we take certain, you know, technical devices and create a kind of [MUSIC]…where four players improvise but that’s not the entire music…[MUSIC]…theme, improvisation and return to the theme. OK that’s a…Then you get a person like Ornette Coleman that does not improvise on thirds, fourths, melodic fragments of ideas. He uses the, for instance, percussion and the rhythm in ways that perhaps have not been used before. The 1, 2, 3, 4, we now know, we don’t know that anymore. So that now what we do, we can hear that in our minds. We can dance that, we can sing that. The idea is, knowing that, to think other things and still have that, and retain that, and go on and create other things, other rhythms…In other words, we’re no longer thinking in terms of thirds, we’re thinking in terms of all combinations of notes – whether they be seconds, groups of seconds, groups of fourths, groups of fifths, or just a-musical sounds. Like this [bangs on table –] perhaps making that music.
Calabro: I would like to say that I think this concept – to people somewhat familiar with the history of jazz – is about forty years old. People who have been involved in serious music have been fooling around with this for a very long time. And it’s just, really, beginning to seep into jazz. The thing about a guy like Coleman is that his concept of form is extremely simple, where very oftentimes…[MUSIC]…play some kind of riffs together and then go off on a long improvisation and then maybe come back to give it some kind of semblance of a form. Sometimes it’s successful and sometimes I don’t think it is. I think what is an important point to talk about in jazz is whether or not jazz can really be free. Now, I’m thinking of Double Octet, a recording of Ornette Coleman’s which is supposed to be completely free jazz…
Taylor: Well, may I answer the question?…You see you can’t help it. You just can’t help it. Now, in serious music, he says. Ah, you mean I’m not serious…
Calabro: There’s no other name, there’s no other name.
Taylor: You mean Ornette isn’t serious in what he’s doing? What do you mean? What do you mean? But, however, if you want to talk about free…
Calabro: What do you call it?
Taylor: What do you mean free? What do you mean? What do you…Serious music, serious music? Well you made that distinction. You said in serious music we have been doing certain things for forty years.
Calabro: There’s no other name.
Mrs. Calabro [from audience]: It’s a semantic problem, I think another name should be coined for it.
[Confusion in audience]
Taylor: It’s a semantic problem, it’s a semantic problem, is that what you’re saying, my dear? It’s a semantic problem which manifests certain social concepts. Don’t you understand, don’t you understand the colored person in America has always been an entertainer?
Mrs. Calabro: You were saying something very good before and…
Taylor: Well, I’m glad you liked it, my dear. Just a minute, just a minute [Noise in audience] I’m still talking, if you’ll let me finish. The point is this: that colored people have been entertainers, colored people, when they went South…[MUSIC] Did you know that they were like the foremost exponents of English, Irish, and Scotch brogue? [MUSIC] That they could do all those kind of comedy things?
Mrs. Calabro: [inaudible]
Taylor: Well you want to hear that. You want me to do what you want me to do. And I’m saying I want to do what I want to do and I want to say what I want to say.
Mrs. Calabro: You can’t do everything and neither can I…
Taylor: But I am up here and you are down there and that is the difference. And like you are going to hear me or not, as you please. And it doesn’t really matter that much to me one way or the other. But like, now, about the serious music and the forty years and the heritage…Once again you can’t – well, why, why did it take forty years for it like to get into jazz please? No, if, if, for instance there were not certain social and economic, educational, prohibitive factors, perhaps it would have gotten there sooner. Maybe it wouldn’t have taken forty years. But the beautiful thing about all of this is that it is here, now. And that it is here and it manifests itself in quite different way that Webern because it comes from a different cultural impetus than what…It comes out of America, out of like the situations that we find ourselves in in America. The unfortunate things about all of this is that Americans don’t even know who they are or what they are. They don’t even know their own culture. [MUSIC] We are the inheritors of all the great civilizations before us – and we are just building on them, that’s all. We’re doing our job. What I’m saying is: let me do my job, but don’t shackle me with your social and your thought prejudices by saying things are semantic – when they are really socially-oriented.
Mrs. Calabro: What I mean is serious as opposed to pop music or folk music.
Man [from audience]: Why serious music?
Calabro: That happens to be the name – just like this is called a CARRIAGE BARN. Oh, for God’s sake, why make such a fuss about it?
[Confusion and shouting in the audience]
Koenig: Let’s have a discussion without shouting here or there. OK, now, let’s get back to the questions again…
TAPE ENDS HERE
http://vancouverjazz.com/bsmith/2009/05/cecil-taylor_02.html
BILL SMITH: IMAGINE THE SOUND
Unit Structures
This interview took place at the Ann Arbor Jazz & Blues Festival, Windsor, Ontario, Canada on September 7th/1974.
Bill Smith: Last night, I read in Leonard Feather’s Encyclopedia of Jazz, that you played twenty years ago or more with people like Hot Lips Page. Is that true? Did you have any idea or conception about being different to other people at that point?
Cecil Taylor: No, I don’t think you really have a conception of being different. What you have a conception of is listening to all the people that you think are very marvellous and adapting to your own language some of the more precious things that you find them doing. You don’t really get any insight into how your music is different till you hear your first tape or your first recording. And when that happened to me then I understood why certain musicians, or at one point, why most musicians really shuddered when I walked into a room. But when I was about twenty years old Mr. Page said to me one time, “Son, I’m going to teach you how to play the blues.” And one can feel honoured that this man who has known so much music would take the time to say that that’s what he was going to do. So that was certainly one of my most memorable experiences.
BS: People idolise you now, I don’t whether you realise that piano players try to play like you and so on, did you try to play like certain piano players then?
CT: There were lots of people. I would say at that time there were people like Erroll Garner, around 1953 — of course, Horace Silver was very important to me, of course Bud Powell was fantastically important. Monk was of growing importance. I heard him play in a club in Harlem, he used to play every Monday night, and I used to go there because they used to have sessions. And of course I used to watch the reaction, I’ve been aware of reaction, ‘cause sometimes… the marvellous thing about that place was that if people didn’t dig what you were doing, you’d know it. And I can remember one musician reacting to Monk at that time in that way, ‘cause he was the marvellous one, he just kept on doing what he was doing.
BS: People thought Monk was weird, most of them, didn’t they, at that point?
CT: They found it strange, I think. Or just didn’t like it.
BS: So would you have considered yourself a bebop piano player at this point?
CT: I would say no, I would not say that. See, because I was also very impressed with a number of people. Like Oscar Peterson, for instance. And you know there is a specific ordering of the musical language, and because I was never a part of any clique, the secrets always were filtered down to me rather from on high. And I didn’t mind that, because one of the things you find is made very clear at the earliest possible date in New York, is that the price for admission to a clique is, or was, a kind of subservient unquestionable behaviour that was not acceptable to me. And I think I formed an attitude or an attitude was beginning to come into my being, that would allow me to find excuses. For instance, in the same way that I would respond to Bud Powell in that the most important thing was not the duplication of phrases exactly, but what was the essence of the genius that motivated the thrust of the music, or in other words, what was the nature of the sensations which you would call maybe, or which we would respond to as feeling. And that’s more important it seems to me than the duplication of the note, because we understand more about the multitude of ways in which notes can be arrived at. Part of what this music is about of course is not to be delineated exactly, it’s about magic, and capturing spirits, and so that all of this music and all of the different types of music which are unfortunately categorised, creates artificial separation. It seems to me that music had different points of view, but at the source, the philosophy and religious source, those people really that understood it, are identical.
BS: Do you think that a lot of the critics in the late ‘50s, for example, did a lot of damage to the music by simply calling it a name like avant garde?
CT: I do not think of what you would call critics as being bad at all. I don’t find generally what they have to say pertinent to anything more than being pleased if you return a telephone call. I don’t find them, you know, really in love with the music generally. I find them, mostly as journalists who have evolved in the music to suit certain economic or career needs at the time. That’s why I asked you earlier about what happened to those journalists, because given the use-orientation, or supposed use-orientation, of certain cultures, the fact remains that if you want to be a great artist, if you want to be a mature artist, that doesn’t happen from those cards when you’re 16, 15, 20, it happens maybe when you’re 38 or 39 if you keep working. I’m really not talking about reviews in a sense, or peoples’ reaction, I’m talking about what a musician knows from his own most private investigation of the facets of his life that have determined the amount of energy and devotion that he puts into his own self divination through playing and loving and experiencing whatever poetic thing he’s doing. That has nothing to do with audience reception or what anybody says. It has to do finally with what is most meaningful to the person who is doing the creating. There is a lot of confusion, it seems to me, generated by the attitude of pleasing the people who have power; and say if you do this you’ll become successful. A group of people who are saying well, you know “We must communicate”. That, tome, is a specious position because how can you create art and not communicate, but you communicate first with yourself, on the most deeply and most profound level. Then the other thing that they don’t want to involve themselves with, is that if people want to be moved they do not only want to say they do the work, they have made their own commitment, and if they come to hear you and are moved by you, something in their lives makes you know that they, too, in some part of their being, have felt the need to reach that level of dedication. I’ve seen it in the faces of old and young people in Europe and America, so there’s nothing that some journalist can say to me or about me that in any way colours what I have perceived, because when someone walks up to you in Warsaw, a man 70-80 years old, and everybody is out yelling, screaming about what you’ve done, and this man walks up to you and says, “Aah”, that’s something you’ll remember all your life. Because you know what he’s heard. I mean, What’s a critic compared to that.
BS: That’s what I meant, when I said that about what it means to you. You change your position on stage if a lot of energy is coming off an audience, does that come back to you while you’re playing sometimes?
CT: The feeling process is primarily this thing between a musician’s playing, however, in a way, you become aware of an audience. The extent of their concentration of course immediately comes over, and then you really want to do it even more. You understand it, they’re there. They want it. And so it’s another level of the experience, not something that one says, “Now we’re going to communicate with them.” It’s really a sacred spiritual thing which you don’t talk about. The people coming there, they know.
BS: So is there a preference in what kind of situation you play, like a theatre or a club or a festival ?
CT: I would say that I don’t necessarily like large places. I don’t like large places outdoors, and I never go to hear people that I really love in large places indoors. Because you really can’t, I can’t, experience somebody that I like. It’s different in Chateauvallon or the Maeght Foundation. It seems to me that the best things that European art’s supposed to be about are that they are somehow civilised, like what Maeght has done in his foundation. In any case, to meet Moreau, and to have Moreau give you an original painting after he hears you play, is something that makes you know that if you’re asked to play in the situation for these kind of people then you’re on the right trail. So that can be a large situation, and there you try to create other interesting things to do in addition, but it’s not artificial, it grows out of the magnificences of all those artists, who have spent that lifetime creating something. Like you’re asked to come in, like wow, maybe this is one of the places you’ve been working, one of the situations you’ve been working for all those years when you’re not allowed to work in clubs.
BS: Is there a simple way of explaining why in the United States, although the music is created in it, it’s the least propagator of the music?
CT: Corbusier was not asked to build any buildings in France, he…
BS: But in the United States such a large part of the total musical heritage comes from the same source and yet the more creative parts of it don’t seem to be recognised.
CT: Hasn’t there always been a lot of confusion about what the different European countries have done with their most obvious beginnings, and didn’t the Spanish try to convince themselves at one time that they were really German? There has always been this desire in the West to be something other than what one really is. So that in New York for instance the most revered dance and drama critics are all imported from England. And in certain circles, people try to affect British accents.
BS: So the ballet and the traditional classical music and so on is more acceptable to Americans because it isn’t actually theirs?
CT: If you experience the Royal Danish Ballet dancing to Prokofiev or see the Leningrad company doing Swan Lake and see Balanchine do Swan Lake, in N.Y.C., or see the American Ballet Theater do Les Sylphides. I once had the opportunity to see Markova dance Les Sylphides in New York after she “defected”, and dancing on the other side of the leading man was Mimi Paul, who was one of Balachines’ leading dancers, from say around ‘55 - ‘58, until she left the company, and she was particularly effective, it seemed to me, in the slow movement of Bizet’s Symphony in C, she was a very striking dancer. Now when they did Sylphides, Mimi Paul was required to do the same movements in certain passages that Markova was doing. Mimi Paul who I always thought was very lovely, looked like a football player in comparison to Markova. And it was not a question of her lacking a very misunderstood concept called “technique”, because her legs were strong. I dare say, she was stronger. It was just that Markova was moving from inside of the music, being conditioned by a tradition which goes back maybe 150 years, so the music had a thing that was a part of the essence of her growing up, whereas Mimi Paul danced in New York City where those buildings are very high, the subways very rough, it’s a mechanistic society, and it’s just not there. If you want Mimi Paul to indulge in something that I think is equally fictional, what they call jazz dancing, Mimi Paul does that a lot better than Markova. But still, now we’ve got Barishnikov, and the New Yorkers are having ecstatic reviews about the “new classicism “. Meanwhile, there are movements of dance going on in the States that are just so much more important, but they’re struggling along. Their own tradition has been there, but ignored. Balanchine got a lot more money doing what he did than, say, Martha Graham, for a long time. Balanchine got $6,000,000 from the Ford Foundation.
BS: But there are people like Alvin Ailey and Martha Graham who in Europe are revered in certain circles, aren’t they as being contemporary?
CT: Well, I don’t know. I’m very interested in Alvin Ailey, to see what’s going to happen, because certainly the company commercially seems to be one of the hottest prospects in America. And because of the ethnic point of view, perhaps the idea of the ethnic — it’s very curious to me, to see what’s going to go down.
BS: In Sweden he’s even been able to have a film made of his dance.
CT: We’ve had several films made. That can be a terrifying experience when you return to America after being celebrated in Europe. See, that’s another thing that I try to impress on the people who have worked with me; forget about what American critics say about you, just forget it. I mean Mr. Maeght asked us to come to play at the lOth anniversary of his foundation. There were a lot of rich people there, but there were mostly artists there. I mean he could’ve asked any number of artists throughout the world to do that. We made a film for instance in ‘66 for the Bureau of Research, which is part of the ORTF (French Radio/TV), and there were three other people asked to make films; one was Varese, the others were Messiaen, and Stockhausen. And Pierre Schaefer, who is an eminent composer in his own right, approved it. And at the same time, you have to live in America. And the rewards from the fruits of working in one sense come from places outside.
BS: Could it be more satisfactory for you to live in Europe or Japan. Is that not something that has crossed your mind on occasion?
CT: Oh, it’s certainly crossed my mind, but… Whatever it means, to be American, I am an American of African descent. And I was born in New York. And when I go elsewhere they know me as an American. We were in Cannes and there was a discotheque place that we used to go into. I was there already, and a couple of the members of the band came in, and the Europeans looked at them, and said — they didn’t say “Oh, the blacks have arrived”, or “the Negroes” — they said, “Oh, the Americans have arrived.”
BS: That’s a whole other thing, it’s not like the American attitude.
CT: Well, that’s what you ‘re not supposed to understand about, you’re supposed to be continually fighting the small areas of American thought regarding your import into the American culture.
BS: What about things like the Guggenheim award; you’ve had grants. This acknowledgement by a foundation doesn’t attract all kinds of other interest to you?
CT: Well, it’s very interesting. In dealing with the Guggenheim people, I said specifically that what I was going to attempt to prove, I was going to try in a way to define the Black methodological system of composing and writing. In essence, that’s what I said. When they approved the grant, they wrote “Experimental music”. I told them what it was. They didn’t want to deal with that. So they changed it, you see. It was fun on my part, because people said, “Well, why do you say ‘Black music’?” “Why do you talk about ‘Black music’, why can’t it just be…”. But we’re just playing a game. It isn’t even necessary if you’ve had philosophers to write grand looking phrases about Beethoven or Brahms. To say that this is even European music, much less white, they’re more apt to say that this is the ‘universal blah-blah-blah’. But you see if you examine the amount of writing about music that has its original source of inspiration in Africa, you don’t find many people to be most knowledgeable and most sympathetic to the non-comparative essences of music. See, when you have a musicologist trained at UCLA, it’s frightening to think about the comparative techniques that he uses when he starts notating down what his tape machine has experienced — from hearing somebody playing a drum. When you read what they have to say it just is not too meaningful. The reason that their information is just useless is because you see they don’t want to deal with the development or continuity of that music, that they have attempted to go back 300 or 1000 years to codify, when right in the next neighbourhood, they could go, if they weren’t so diseased, they could just see the relationship, right there. But I’m not concerned about that too much. Because I understand that that disease is there. And that’s their problem.
BS: Would you object to someone promoting you on a star level?
CT: Well, I’ve always been a star.
BS: In your music you always have, but I’m talking about a level like The Rolling Stones.
CT: I have no objection to that, because I think great artists… I mean the first time I saw Carmen Amaya dance, in 1955, it was as though everything stopped for me, I mean everything stopped. When you see that. Now that, to me, is the highest kind of compliment that can be paid to another artist, to make somebody else lose all sense of time, all sense of their own existence outside, like the perception of all of their energies on that figure. That to me is the greatest. So this other thing, oh, hey that’s fun. Hey, c’mon, that’s fun. Miles Davis has great presence on stage. I think Sonny Rollins at one time had great presence on stage. I think Billie Holiday was magnificent on stage. I think Betty Carter is fantastic on stage. Lena Horne is fantastic on stage. I mean, great artists are. It just takes the business boys a long time to catch up — “Oh, hey, we could make them stars.” But by that time… perhaps I think what I’m learning now is that they can do these things, but I can say to them without being offended, well that’s not exactly in taste for me. Could you cut it a little this way? Or have somebody else say it for me in a way that they won’t be offended. I don’t necessarily want to offend anyone by it. I want to continue living and doing as best I can what I spend most of my time doing.
BS: Is this one of the reasons why you’ve got involved in producing your own music on record ?
CT: I ran into a young student, and by accident, someone showed me some photographs that he’d taken. And the photographs just knocked me out. Young black man — I think at that time he was 18 or 19 — and I said wow, I think I should have that, I would like to have that picture on the cover of an album. And that’s the picture, the two pictures that are on Indent. And among other things, that guy played Fender bass and was studying to be some kind of sociologist. I saw there was homebody’s work that really excited me to the point that I really would love to give people who might be interested in the music an additional delight just to see that visually.
BS: Have your experiences with record companies been unfavourable in general, where record companies have put out records by you ?
CT: There are usually a lot of things that are unfortunate about those things. Especially when you don’t understand that they’re not necessarily devoted to aesthetic standards outside of making a buck. When you’re younger, you spend a lot of time being morally indignant over issues that are not meaningful or apparent to the system.
BS: Have you found dedicated people, though, in any of those situations?
CT: Well you see, most recently, dealing with some people that are in their mid-20’s, who say that they’d like to do this or that, what I found is that they’re really not equipped to do it. I don’t want to get into the business aspect of it at all, but at the same time, I do, just through having certain experiences. So I assume that for instance if you say that you want exclusive rights to distribute my record, you better know certain things, because that’s what you say is your business. And I’ve found them goofing. And then they say, “Well, we’re not in this for the business”. I said “well then, don’t be in it, because I’m not putting up the money necessarily with a complete business orientation, but I’m making a product available to your expertise. So I want you to cut it. If that’s what you do, do that, and do it as well as I play”. And so they say, “Well, we’re not…” And I find this curious ambivalence, when I say to them “Hey, you’re not doing something”, “well you know, we’re human beings”. I say “Hey, look, I would assume that that’s given, I think you’re using it to evade the fact that you ‘re not taking care of business”. People get very upset. But fortunately in the situation I’m in now, these people are older, and sometimes they get carried away and make these long speeches, and I just sit there and I listen and I say, “Well, that’s it, then”. And I’m going to the door, and they say, “Mr. Taylor, do you have a minute?” And I say, “Well, yes”. Now. Well the business point that we were talking about, could we just clear it up? What I realised was that they were clever enough to absorb that long speech that I made, then it might be more beneficial to me to pay attention to things that they were running down. In other words there’s a kind of equalness in input, and I think it ‘s much easier to thoroughly respect whatever a man is doing if you make a commitment to say, I want to get into this, if you find that guy really good doing it, that’s groovy. I think the other thing is that there are all kinds of ways to live a life. There are all kinds of attitudes that people could have. I mean I think that Herbie Hancock is a very clever guy. I think that James Brown, in the specific areas that his music covers, is absolutely incredible. Perfect, for that form, for what that is, and gee, I sit there, and it just knocks me out. I’m talking about essences. I love Billie Holiday and I love the way Stevie Wonder sang five years ago. I don’t any more. But I love Aretha Franklin, I love Sarah Vaughan. Can you get to all those places. And if you can, then you’re just really enriched. And you want to bring in a piece of that, because that to me is what living music is, the ongoing nature of life, the different manifestations of ethics as they are perceived in the special creations of individuals from different times.
BS: But a lot of the reason that all those people are reaching out to a large number of people is because the record companies are taking care of a commercial situation. Isn’t it possible that it would be an advantage for you; financially, I mean?
CT: Of course. But you see I’m not concerned about that, because l think that’s going to happen anyway. I think that the situation has sort of been set up that if that’s going to happen, you know… see, the thing is, I don’t want that to happen. See, that could have happened to me for instance eighteen years ago, after the first Transition record was made, when a lot of people were very interested. But that isn’t as exciting as being able to gracefully accept all the love and adoration that people have for you, rather than the money that the industry might want to give you, then get involved in it, and then die, because you can’t handle it. Like Joplin, Hendrix. Or have all that sugar make you a diabetic. Or be like Oscar Peterson who starts playing because Norman Granz says “Do this”. Play all those tunes, destroy what was such a promising genius. And to be able to say graciously if it really comes to it, “Well, I don’t think I can do the Rodgers and Hart tune”, as well as say, “So-and-so could, why don’t you get him.” lam going to sit back, and just prepare myself to be very happy, and maybe very rich. But I hope no less beautiful. In a way that is most important to me. I mean Ellington was magnificent. He was just magnificent, he was not only a genius in music but he knew so much about life, he’ s beautiful.
BS: That’s why I’m trying to find out if there are ways that you could direct not how you play, that’s got nothing to do with it, but if there are ways to make it come out on a larger scale.
CT: A lot of musicians adored a very typical sort of figure in the ‘50’s and the ‘60’s and when that figure began to make, from my point of view, questionable choices musically he passed on that information to a number of very gifted young musicians. Those musicians who accepted that form of geniuses’ advice have really not developed. There are no Milford Graves among them, there are no Sonny Murrays, there are no McCoy Tyners. There are other people, and they are very accessible, but I think time will show that at best it will be music of a period.
BS: Do you think that they will return?
CT: Anything’s possible. But if you want to write scores for movies, on the basis of the energy that you have generated, and bring that energy to a movie like “Death Wish”, then from my point of view once again, although there may be one or two interesting musical passages, I think that a whole area of possibility of creative thought has been shelved. I would like to write for movies and I would like to write for theatre, mostly because I love theatre and I love the movies, and what’s so nice about it, ain’t nobody in Hollywood going to ask me to do a movie. But when they do, it’s because they know something about what I’ve done. Hopefully. And they’ll say “Hey, we’d like you to do this, and we can go at it as a team, and do something that can maybe be really fun”. And I think it should be fun. I don’t even think it should necessarily be work, it should be a kind of activity that when you ‘re finished, you know that you’ve really expended a lot of the life that’s in you. But then you’ve regenerated it. It shouldn’t be a task. After all, the Puritans were the lower classes, and they carried a particular kind of burden, but that had nothing to do with spiritual essences. That’s what I think. It’s so easy to adopt a socio-political idea when you talk about music, which is a nice way of avoiding what the artist does.
BS: Two people have been with you a long-time, both Andrew Cyrille and Jimmy Lyons. Is there a specific reason why you have been associated with them for such a long period of time?
CT: Well, you know, they’re awfully good.
BS: I’m assuming that everybody already realises that.
CT: Well, I wonder about that sometimes. Lyons interprets the music that is given him — which has been given to me, really — in a way that I don’t think anyone else can. And you see it’s not really understood about what composition is. Or what I think composition that stems from an African beginning is. It’s about community thought. It seems to me, it’s about you have maybe three or four different levels of musical activity going on. The alto saxophone has a whole tradition in this music of great men who, given three notes, interpret these notes in a certain way. It isn’t about how Cecil Taylor writes music. But Cecil Taylor is a vehicle for certain ancestral forces that this body has been fortunate enough to hear and pass on to people, and together in a community situation we exercise certain conversations, you see. And these men understand this. There are some. There are other groups of musicians who do the same thing. That’s what the tradition of this music is. It’s not understood essentially because in the drive to become successful, and there are so many pressures on musicians of this ethnic persuasion, there is no support for this particular kind of view anywhere, in any of the responsible areas that could make this point of view economically feasible. Because there is no cultural knowledge acting in those communities in America who, it would seem from a superficial level, would be the most interested in seeing this point of view being made.
BS: The Layers of Indent for example, apart from being music that I’ve heard, does it have some other meaning as well? People write tunes, but you have layers of indent, lots of them. How do all those conceptions arrive ?
CT: I’m writing a book about that. Hopefully. I ‘m not worried about when it’ s going to be finished. I don’t think it will be finished. I hope maybe sometime to put out the first volume. ‘Cause I like to write. I like to think about what are some of the possibilities, what are some of the things that you’re really working with. And what is musical sound, what does that really mean, you know. And I’ve been working on that for a number of years. Fortunately I’ve had a lot of years playing music and grew to a certain level of understanding, so that I had a chance to be more than a person who just played, I had a chance to be something spiritual who had been touched by forces that defy actual description. And it had nothing to do with any academy. It had something to do with traditions.
BS: Not spiritual and religious beliefs, you don’t feel spiritual that way?
CT: Well, I think that music is of course natural and spiritual. I think that the conception that gave birth to Jelly Roll Morton or Fats Waller or Charlie Parker or John Coltrane was among other things a religious one. But then I don’t know that religious means you know… I think that it has to do with recognising the greater creative forces and understanding that every living thing is a part of that garden of nature’s activities. To celebrate life means that you recognise the beauty of life as it exists in all things that hopefully you can see the life in.
BS: Do you think that it’s possible to teach people enough musical knowledge to bring out a possible creative force in someone else. Among all the students that you had at Antioch and Madison, were there some that had special qualities which came out while you were teaching?
CT: I think everyone has a special quality.
BS: Were there some musical creators amongst those people who are going to be very special people ?
CT: You’ll hear them.
BS: Do you think it’s possible to teach your art to someone else ?
CT: Oh, I don’t think that at all. The exciting thing about being in that situation was really I had a chance to learn so much. I had a chance to make a lot of mistakes, and live through them, and to really learn. When I was at Glassboro State College, this past year, I began to really understand what it was that I was doing, that was I think very good. A lot of brilliant people I think are just generally stomped, crushed because of the nature of the way the music is taught. I was very fortunate that the people who, for instance, made up the ensembles that I had, were really gifted people. And what you try to do is to create a situation in which the nature of their gift is allowed to flower. What you try to do is to create a situation in which they realise the beauty of all the other things that those traditional concepts have attempted to hammer out. The most beautiful situation would be when young people begin to be led in on the beginning of their own awareness of their own uniqueness and their own music talent. Almost like watching a birth, being part of giving birth to something. And I had two people in Glassboro who were really gifted. To see them get into it, to get into that especially when you’re young and when you’re very vulnerable. In all of the places I’ve been in I’ve seen most of the teachers kill them, quite deliberately. “Hey, you’ve got to practice your exercises! You’ve gotta do this, you gotta do that!” I think it’s a reflection of the political climate in one sense.
BS: Is a situation like Berklee part of that?
CT: I think so.
BS: Doing it right, making it fit in, is that one of the reasons?
CT: Well, I don’t know, I don’t want to make a generalisation. We gave, you might say, a brief seminar one afternoon at Berklee when we worked there, it turned out to be from a certain point of view one of the instructors said they had never seen anything like it before. Oh, they got very upset. But I thought it was very interesting, I thought it was sort of a plus. I mean there are a lot of presumptions that are going down there. People got really upset. A lot of “Did you think that they were right there… “
BS: But at Antioch you got quite a few musicians with you that you liked. Didn’t you perform in fact with some of those young musicians at one point? Wasn’t there a New York concert?
CT: I had a relationship with musicians. A lot of the musicians at Antioch came from Wisconsin, I met some others at Antioch. As a matter of fact Arthur Williams, the trumpet player, is going to play with us tomorrow. He came out to Antioch. Fantastic.
BS: Were most of the students at Antioch technically competent in the traditional kind of way when you arrived there, were they already top musicians?
CT: What do you mean by technically competent?
BS: Well, in the traditional sense of the word that they did all of the things they were supposed to, like sight-read and all of those things you’re supposed to learn.
CT: Why should they sight-read? I mean we could go on talking about things like this for a long time. I have some ideas about music that are extremely painful to the academies that I’ve been in. They’ve been rather painfully received.
BS: Would this be true of the European situation too, if you went into a European university ?
CT: I’d hate to think what would happen if I went into a European university. Part of the novelty of going to Europe is that there aren’t too many Negroes that are committed to make a lasting statement in Europe in terms of being incorporated into the European situation.
BS: So it’s not very different in reality to the United States.
CT: It’s because the United States attitude was nourished and fed by the Europeans. And the United States became more powerful, there were certain things the United States gave back.
BS: I happen to have a record by Andre Watts; one of him playing Chopin.
CT: Oh, yeah. That must be lovely. Well you know, he’s a man who’s furthering what I would assume at least to be right, it’s a European methodological camouflage. So that doesn’t threaten anybody.
BS: But you’ve been accused by so many people of being a European-influenced piano player.
CT: Oh, I know. It’s easy to do that, because at the same time what they’re really saying is that absolutely there is only one kind of musical order that we recognise, so if you do such-and-such, it must be European.
BS: Could it make a difference if improvisational musicians were made more aware of people like Harry Partch and Edgar Varese. Could that develop another kind of situation. Do you take anything from those people sometimes?
CT: I’m still involved with the conception of a particular tradition. And it must be in terms of getting the world history in its more proper perspective. We have to understand that what is considered the dark continent and all the not too subtle uses of the word “black”, “dark”, you know meaning some kind of ignominy, you must begin to understand that the word “arab” as applied to Europeans meant “place of darkness” at the time when Africans had a very great civilisation. And that comparatively speaking, the European ascendancy is the most recent in the evolution of man. But don’t tell that to any American. Don’t tell it to any American. And I can understand why. Why? Because in America, great country that it is, you understand, we’ve only had our consideration of art for under lOO years. It’s a most recent phenomenon. Give us time.
BS: But jazz music comes with all the stigmas, doesn’t it, for the white audience? And yet its audience is mostly white, why is that?
CT: You see, if you ‘re going to call it jazz… I understand what you mean, but dig what I’m saying. I’m saying that James Brown is Jazz. What we‘re talking about is the methodology that determines how musical architectures are set up. Hey, the bulk of the black population loves James Brown or Aretha Franklin or whatever, now if you separate it and say hey, that’s soul, everybody needs soul. Milford Graves! What is that? But that’s something we have to live with, and understand that’s part of the division that is perhaps desirable from those people that control. They’re not interested in Milford Graves and Cecil Taylor. They write stories that will sell a million copies of Ebony and, from the business point of view, perhaps they’re right. After all, they’re involved in business. But you know, it’s fun once again, if you make a commitment to art, beauty. You can watch that as you grow older and say that is the way it goes down, but it doesn’t have to affect any personal choice that I might have. And maybe that’s a sign of fast approaching old age. I feel that I can understand even a man like Sammy Davis.
BS: That’s a long way from Andre Watts, though, isn’t it ?
CT: Not really, all the same thing, just a different view of different style of accomplishment.
BS: Andre Watts never made all those rash public statements, though, did he, like…
CT: He makes it every time he touches the piano.
BS: But most people are insensitive to that, they wouldn’t know it anyway.
CT: We ‘re not talking about most people we’re just talking about at most three of us here. For instance, this guy is going to play in New York, the opening concert at the Lincoln Center, and Pierre Boulez is going to conduct, and they’re going to play Liszt, and they’re going to play somebody else. I wouldn’t go, I’d like to say I’d like to go, ‘cause I’ve never heard him play, and I’d like to go see it, but you know I’ve heard certain people play that way of playing and I always said, there’s nothing about Mozart and Bach, to me, the answer is that all these children play it. I was playing Mozart when I was ten or eleven years old. When I saw Emil Gilels play Mozart, at Carnegie Hall, I had the same kind of sensation. I went to that concert, and then went down and heard Coltrane who was appearing at the Half Note. And I have to say after just about 30 minutes of Coltrane that they had expended more energy, played more notes, created more music, in maybe two minutes than Gilels spent in an hour and a half. You realise that these cats have always said in jazz there’s that beat, beat, beat… well, even at the same level of perception, I could say that Bach inventions and Mozart’s piano, had the same kind of thing. After you’ve heard one of them, you’ve heard them all in terms of structure, in terms of more subtle things like timbre, what happens in different registers. The same thing happens from piece to piece. It took me 40 years of life and 25 years of involvement to understand the lies that have been perpetrated culturally to deny first, black America, not because it’s dealing with black America but simply because they cannot face Africa, what Africa was, that Africa resulted in the wealth of the British Empire, that the slaves made the British and the Dutch wealthy, created the concept, afforded them the money that allowed manufacturing, mechanisation. So I’m saying that’s ok, that’s your problem, because if I live through the thing where they said I’m European, I don’t have anything to deny, I was only a product of the European nation, I went to the conservatory, and I must admit that when I first — and I’m not ashamed of this — when I heard Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring at Symphony Hall in Boston it was a devastating experience to me. And you know it’s very cool, see? I admit I’m rather hard on European musicians, I wouldn’t walk across the street to hear most of them, right? But that’s ‘cause I’m a musician.
Cecil Taylor @ the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) on March 14, 1978
https://vimeo.com/127676601
Cecil Taylor In Conversation
Cecil Taylor Interview part one
from The Snapshots Foundation Plus
Cecil Taylor in conversation. Part one.
Cecil Taylor remains one of the most remarkable figures in music. His place in music now solidified, Cecil seems content to watch life unfold through the people who come to him, and the artists who revere him. Over the course of a 6-hr evening, Cecil retained a focus and energy that was remarkable. It seemed there was no limit to his stories and insights, or the amount of cigarettes he smoked. Cecil Taylor exemplifies the American success story.
Artist bio:
Cecil Taylor (born in March 25, 1929, in New York City) is an American pianist and poet. Classically trained, Taylor is generally acknowledged as one of the pioneers of free jazz. His music is characterized by an extremely energetic, physical approach, producing complex improvised sounds, frequently involving tone clusters and intricate polyrhythms. His piano technique has been likened to percussion, for example described as "eighty-eight tuned drums" (referring to the number of keys on a standard piano).He has also been described as "like Art Tatum with contemporary-classical leanings".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cecil_Taylor
Cecil Taylor
Cecil Percival Taylor (March 25, 1929 – April 5, 2018)[1][2][3] was an American pianist and poet.[4][5]
Taylor was classically trained and was one of the pioneers of free jazz. His music is characterized by an energetic, physical approach, resulting in complex improvisation often involving tone clusters and intricate polyrhythms. His technique has been compared to percussion. Referring to the number of keys on a standard piano, Val Wilmer used the phrase "eighty-eight tuned drums" to describe Taylor's style.[6] He has been referred to as being "like Art Tatum with contemporary-classical leanings".[7]
Early life and education
Cecil Percival Taylor was born on March 25, 1929, in Long Island City, Queens,[8] and raised in Corona, Queens.[9] As an only child to a middle-class family, Taylor's mother Almeda Ragland Taylor encouraged him to play music at an early age. He began playing piano at age six and went on to study at the New York College of Music and New England Conservatory in Boston. At the New England Conservatory, Taylor majored in popular music arrangement. During his time there, he also became familiar with contemporary European art music. Bela Bartók and Karlheinz Stockhausen notably influenced his music.[10]
In 1955, Taylor moved back to New York City from Boston. He formed a quartet with soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy, bassist Buell Neidlinger, and drummer Dennis Charles.[10] Taylor's first recording, Jazz Advance, featured Lacy and was released in 1956.[11] The recording is described by Richard Cook and Brian Morton in the Penguin Guide to Jazz: "While there are still many nods to conventional post-bop form in this set, it already points to the freedoms in which the pianist would later immerse himself."[12] Taylor's quartet featuring Lacy also appeared at the 1957 Newport Jazz Festival, which was made into the album At Newport.[13] Taylor collaborated with saxophonist John Coltrane in 1958 on Stereo Drive, now available as Coltrane Time.[14]
1950s and early 1960s
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Taylor's music grew more complex and moved away from existing jazz styles. Gigs were often hard to come by, and club owners found that Taylor's approach of playing long pieces tended to impede business.[15] His 1959 LP record Looking Ahead! showcased his innovation as a creator as compared to the jazz mainstream. Unlike others at the time, Taylor utilized virtuosic techniques and made swift stylistic shifts from phrase to phrase. These qualities, among others, still remained notable distinctions of his music for the rest of his life.[16]
Landmark recordings, such as Unit Structures (1966), also appeared. Within the Cecil Taylor Unit (a distinction that was often used at performances and recordings between 1962 and 2006 for a shifting group of sidemen), musicians were able to develop new forms of conversational interplay. In the early 1960s, an uncredited Albert Ayler worked with Taylor, jamming and appearing on at least one recording, Four, which was unreleased until appearing on the 2004 Ayler box set Holy Ghost: Rare & Unissued Recordings (1962–70).[17]
By 1961, Taylor was working regularly with alto saxophonist Jimmy Lyons, who would become one of his most important and consistent collaborators. Taylor, Lyons, and drummer Sunny Murray (and later Andrew Cyrille) formed the core personnel of the Cecil Taylor Unit, Taylor's primary ensemble until Lyons' death in 1986. Lyons' playing, strongly influenced by jazz icon Charlie Parker, retained a strong blues sensibility and helped keep Taylor's increasingly avant garde music tethered to the jazz tradition.[18]
Late 1960s and 1970s
Taylor began to perform solo concerts in the latter half of the 1960s. The first known recorded solo performance was "Carmen With Rings" (59 minutes) in De Doelen concert hall in Rotterdam on July 1, 1967. Two days earlier, Taylor had played the same composition in the Amsterdam Concertgebouw. Many of his later concerts were released on album and include Indent (1973), side one of Spring of Two Blue-J's (1973), Silent Tongues (1974), Garden (1982), For Olim (1987), Erzulie Maketh Scent (1989), and The Tree of Life (1998).[19] He began to garner critical and popular acclaim, playing for Jimmy Carter on the White House Lawn,[20] lecturing as an artist-in-residence at universities, and eventually being awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1973[21] and a MacArthur Fellowship in 1991.[22][23]
In 1976, Taylor directed a production of Adrienne Kennedy's A Rat's Mass at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club in the East Village of Manhattan. His production combined the original script with a chorus of orchestrated voices used as instruments. Jimmy Lyons, Rashid Bakr, Andy Bey, Karen Borca, David S. Ware, and Raphe Malik performed in the production as the Cecil Taylor Unit, among other musicians and actors.[24]
1980s, 1990s, and the Feel Trio
Following Lyons' death in 1986, Taylor formed the Feel Trio in the late 1980s with William Parker on bass and Tony Oxley on drums. The group can be heard on Celebrated Blazons, Looking (Berlin Version) The Feel Trio and the 10-disc set 2 Ts for a Lovely T.[25][26][27] Compared to his prior groups with Lyons, the Feel Trio had a more abstract approach, tethered less to jazz tradition and more aligned with the ethos of European free improvisation. He also performed with larger ensembles and big band projects.
Taylor's extended residence in Berlin in 1988 was documented by the German label FMP, resulting in a box set of performances in duet and trio with a large number of European free improvisors, including Oxley, Derek Bailey, Evan Parker, Han Bennink, Tristan Honsinger, Louis Moholo, and Paul Lovens. Most of his later recordings have been released on European labels, with the exception of Momentum Space (a meeting with Dewey Redman and Elvin Jones) on Verve/Gitanes. The classical label Bridge released his 1998 Library of Congress performance Algonquin, a duet with violinist Mat Maneri.[28]
Taylor continued to perform for capacity audiences around the world with live concerts, usually playing his favored instrument, a Bösendorfer piano featuring nine extra lower-register keys. In 1987, he toured England with Australian pianist Roger Woodward, presenting recitals on which Woodward played solo works by Xenakis, Takemitsu, and Feldman, followed by Taylor, also playing solo.[29] A documentary on Taylor, entitled All the Notes, was released on DVD in 2006 by director Chris Felver. Taylor was also featured in a 1981 documentary film entitled Imagine the Sound, in which he discusses and performs his music, poetry, and dance.[30]
2000s
Taylor recorded sparingly in the 2000s, but continued to perform with his own ensembles (the Cecil Taylor Ensemble and the Cecil Taylor Big Band) and with other musicians such as Joe Locke, Max Roach, and Amiri Baraka.[31] In 2004, the Cecil Taylor Big Band at the Iridium Jazz Club was nominated a best performance of 2004 by All About Jazz.[32] The Cecil Taylor Trio was nominated for the same at the Highline Ballroom in 2009.[33] The trio consisted of Taylor, Albey Balgochian, and Jackson Krall. In 2010, Triple Point Records released a deluxe limited-edition double LP titled Ailanthus/Altissima: Bilateral Dimensions of 2 Root Songs, a set of duos with Taylor's longtime collaborator Tony Oxley that was recorded live at the Village Vanguard.[34]
In 2013, he was awarded the Kyoto Prize for Music.[35] He was described as "An Innovative Jazz Musician Who Has Fully Explored the Possibilities of Piano Improvisation".[36] In 2014, his career and 85th birthday were honored at the Painted Bride Art Center in Philadelphia with the tribute concert event "Celebrating Cecil".[37] In 2016, Taylor received a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art entitled "Open Plan: Cecil Taylor".[38]
In 2008, Taylor performed with Pauline Oliveros at the Curtis R Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. The concert was recorded and is available on a DVD which also features a 75-minute video of a Taylor poetry recital entitled Floating Gardens: The Poetry Of Cecil Taylor.[39][40] Taylor, along with dancer Min Tanaka, was the subject of Amiel Courtin-Wilson's 2016 documentary film The Silent Eye.[41]
Ballet and dance
In addition to piano, Taylor was always interested in ballet and dance. His mother, who died while he was young, was a dancer and played the piano and violin. Taylor once said: "I try to imitate on the piano the leaps in space a dancer makes."[42] He collaborated with dancer Dianne McIntyre from the mid 1970s to the early 1980s.[43] In 1979, he composed and played the music for a 12-minute ballet, "Tetra Stomp: Eatin' Rain in Space", featuring Mikhail Baryshnikov and Heather Watts.[44]
Poetry
Taylor was a poet, and cited Robert Duncan, Charles Olson, and Amiri Baraka as major influences.[45] He often integrated his poems into his musical performances, and they frequently appear in the liner notes of his albums. The album Chinampas, released by Leo Records in 1987, is a recording of Taylor reciting several of his poems while accompanying himself on percussion.[46]
Musical style and legacy
According to Steven Block, free jazz originated with Taylor's performances at the Five Spot Cafe in 1957 and with Ornette Coleman in 1959.[47] In 1964, Taylor co-founded the Jazz Composers Guild to enhance opportunities for avant-garde jazz musicians.[48]
Taylor's style and methods have been described as "constructivist".[49] Despite Scott Yanow's warning regarding Taylor's "forbidding music" ("Suffice it to say that Cecil Taylor's music is not for everyone"), he praises Taylor's "remarkable technique and endurance", and his "advanced", "radical", "original", and uncompromising "musical vision".[5]
This musical vision is a large part of Taylor's legacy:
Playing with Taylor I began to be liberated from thinking about chords. I'd been imitating John Coltrane unsuccessfully and because of that I was really chord conscious.
— Archie Shepp, quoted in LeRoi Jones, album liner notes for Four for Trane (Impulse A-71, 1964)
Personal life and death
In 1982, jazz critic Stanley Crouch wrote that Taylor was gay, prompting an angry response[by whom?].[50] In 1991, Taylor told a New York Times reporter "[s]omeone once asked me if I was gay. I said, 'Do you think a three-letter word defines the complexity of my humanity?' I avoid the trap of easy definition."[51]
Taylor moved to Fort Greene, Brooklyn, in 1983.[9] He died at his Brooklyn residence on April 5, 2018, at the age of 89.[52][53] At the time of his death, Taylor was working on an autobiography and future concerts, among other projects.[54]
Discography
Jazz Advance, 1956
At Newport (one side of LP), 1958
Looking Ahead!, 1958
Stereo Drive (also released as Hard Driving Jazz and Coltrane Time), 1958
Love for Sale, 1959
The World of Cecil Taylor 1960
Air 1960
Cell Walk for Celeste, 1961
Jumpin' Punkins, 1961
New York City R&B (with Buell Neidlinger), 1961
Into the Hot, 1961 (features tracks also released on Mixed)
Nefertiti the Beautiful One Has Come, 1962
Unit Structures, 1966
Conquistador!, 1966
Student Studies (also released as The Great Paris Concert), 1966
Praxis, 1968
The Great Concert of Cecil Taylor (also released as Nuits de la Fondation Maeght), 1969
Indent, 1973
Akisakila, 1973
Solo, 1973
Spring of Two Blue J's, 1973
Silent Tongues, 1974
Dark to Themselves, 1976
Air Above Mountains, 1976
Cecil Taylor Unit, 1978
3 Phasis, 1978
Live in the Black Forest, 1978
One Too Many Salty Swift and Not Goodbye, 1978
It is in the Brewing Luminous, 1980
Fly! Fly! Fly! Fly! Fly!, 1980
The Eighth, 1981
Garden, 1981
Winged Serpent (Sliding Quadrants), 1984
Iwontunwonsi, 1986
Amewa, 1986
For Olim, 1986
Olu Iwa, 1986
Live in Bologna, 1987
Live in Vienna, 1987
Tzotzil/Mummers/Tzotzil, 1987
Chinampas, 1987
Riobec - Cecil Taylor & Günter Sommer, 1988
In East Berlin, 1988
Regalia - Cecil Taylor & Paul Lovens, 1988
The Hearth, 1988
Alms/Tiergarten (Spree), 1988
Remembrance, 1988
Pleistozaen Mit Wasser, 1988
Spots, Circles, and Fantasy, 1988
Legba Crossing, 1988
Erzulie Maketh Scent, 1988
Leaf Palm Hand, 1988
In Florescence, 1989
Looking (Berlin Version) Solo, 1989
Looking (Berlin Version) The Feel Trio, 1989
Looking (Berlin Version) Corona, 1989
Celebrated Blazons, 1990
2Ts for a Lovely T, 1990
Double Holy House, 1990
Nailed, 1990
Melancholy - Cecil Taylor, Harri Sjöström, Evan Parker, Barry Guy, Wolfgang Fuchs
The Tree of Life, 1991
Always a Pleasure, 1993
Almeda- Cecil Taylor, Harri Sjöström 1996
The Light of Corona- Cecil Taylor, Harri Sjöström 1996
Qu'a: Live at the Iridium, vol. 1 & 2 - Cecil Taylor, Harri Sjöström 1998
Algonquin, 1998
Incarnation, 1999
The Willisau Concert, 2000
Complicité, 2001
Taylor/Dixon/Oxley, 2002
Two T's for a Lovely T, 2003
The Owner of the River Bank, 2004
As sideman:
Jazz Composer's Orchestra: Communications, 1968 (Taylor featured on 2 tracks)
Friedrich Gulda: Nachricht vom Lande, 1976 (Taylor featured on 3 tracks)
Mary Lou Williams: Embraced, 1977
Tony Williams: Joy of Flying, 1978
Historic Concerts (with Max Roach), 1979
Art Ensemble of Chicago: Thelonious Sphere Monk, 1990 (Taylor featured on 3 tracks)
https://openvault.wgbh.org/catalog/V_94D4AA652404427DA4E63D6A7D09FB9B
Cecil Taylor interview
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/04/arts/music/cecil-taylors-keyboard-legacy.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
Critic’s Notebook
Lessons From the Dean of the School of Improv
The pianist Cecil Taylor, focus of a coming concert series.
by Ben Ratliff
May 3, 2012
New York Times
I recently spoke with the 83-year-old improvising pianist Cecil Taylor for about five hours over two days. One day was at his three-story home in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, where he has lived since 1983. Two female friends worked as his assistants, lighting his cigarettes and bringing him Champagne as he held forth volcanically behind a semicircular desk in his study. The other was at his favorite neighborhood restaurant, where he walked in, looked at the bartender, reacted as if stunned by her beauty for the first time, and kissed her hand. She seemed used to it.
“He’s
so committed to the moment and its infinite potential of possibilities”
said Bobby Zankel, the saxophonist, who has studied with Mr. Taylor and
played in his ensembles off and on since the early 1970s. “Like, what
happened in the last moment is the past, and this present moment is all
we got. That’s how he feels about his music too. I’ve been with the guy a
million times, and I’ve never even known him to listen to a tape of his
own music. He just says, ‘I know what happened.’ ”
It seemed a
necessary experiment for me to ask Mr. Taylor aesthetic-legacy
questions. In the forthcoming concert series built around him — “Cecil
Taylor: A Celebration of the Maestro,” presented through mid-May by
Issue Project Room and Harlem Stage — Mr. Taylor will perform two of his
solo piano concerts: more than partly improvised, percussive,
rhapsodic, alert, full of his ringing keyboard sound, body language and
poetry recitation, and totally invested in the present. (They are
increasingly rare, and if you haven’t seen one, do now.) But his past
and his future will be represented too, in a slate of films at Anthology
Film Archives and in concerts conceived as tributes to him, involving
pianists who have built on his foundations: Craig Taborn, Vijay Iyer,
Amina Claudine Myers and Thollem McDonas.
Mr. Taylor is his own
entity: one of the most enriching and confusing boundary crossers
between composition and improvisation. His art can be hard to reduce. He
seems to think of his music as a kinetic act, a ritual of place and
ancestry, something that lives in bodies but less so in notation and
documents. And this is why his records go only so far in explaining him.
His performances are the key to understanding not just his playing but
also the poetry he reads in and around the music, and even his physical
actions — the way he walks to and away from, and sometimes around, the
piano.
But he comes from the jazz tradition. Raised in Corona,
Queens, he started out as a Harlem jam-session musician in the early
1950s and talks with intense loyalty about a line of particularly New
York-identified piano players: Fats Waller, Teddy Wilson, Thelonious
Monk, Mary Lou Williams, Mal Waldron, John Hicks. Always there has been
Ellington in his sound, driving and emphatic. (Mr. Taborn likes to
imagine Mr. Taylor’s style as scrambled Ellington — “almost as if you
took a Duke Ellington solo piano record,” he said in an interview last
week, “and dropped the needle in different places.”)
Often Mr.
Taylor didn’t answer my questions directly or with much detail but
instead told stories that embodied the answer. Which of his own
recordings is he proudest of? “I’m happy with them all,” he said,
peacefully. He has written lots of music, but generally for specific
occasions — a concert or a recording — and seldom to be revisited. Is he
concerned about how his own compositions will be played in the future,
since so few of them have been published or even transcribed? “Oh,
that’ll probably happen,” he shrugged. “But I’m not worried about that.”
Then
he swerved into a mixture of details about gigs, gossip, innuendo,
pre-Columbian history, intense emotional memory and moralism. Frequently
he interrupted his own stories with dire chuckling — a sort of “the
things I could tell you” sound.
Since the early 1960s Mr. Taylor
has approached his music in a way that he does not take part in a
consensual language of standards, common-practice harmony or steady
rhythm. He is probably the only truly major bandleader of the jazz
tradition whose tunes are almost never covered by anyone else. It’s not
that he doesn’t have some worth playing — “Conquistador,” “Pots,”
“Lena,” “Steps.” Perhaps it comes down to a case of his being understood
too well. Mr. Taylor doesn’t treat his own work like repertory, so
musicians don’t either.
He has taught a lot over the years,
particularly at the University of Wisconsin and Antioch College; but his
big lesson was never his past work or any set ensemble sound. (“I try
to set it up so that the other students teach me,” he explained.) He has
been absorbed, if only sometimes as an uncodified presence — an energy,
a general strategy or a quality of bravery regarding free-rhythm
playing — into much of the last 50 years of jazz, but in some sense he’s
alone.
If ever there was a time to start considering Mr. Taylor not as a trickster but as an academy, it is now. Where does one start?
Obviously
there are the recordings, dozens of them, going back to “Jazz Advance”
in 1956. Mr. Taborn, whose profile shot up recently with a strong
solo-piano record (“Avenging Angel”) and his first week at the Village
Vanguard with his trio, considers Mr. Taylor one of his “early and
constant influences.” At one point in our interview he started reciting
one of Mr. Taylor’s poems, part of the 1990 album “In Florescence,” from
memory.
So Mr. Taborn spoke with specificity about Mr. Taylor’s
musical style, particularly the quality of “elasticity” that he hears
all the way back to the earliest records. “By elasticity, I don’t just
mean in terms of time, but also dynamics,” he said. “He was
hyperextending that world, doing these really rapid loud-soft dynamics,
even within one phrase. His music always dances, that’s the thing.” But
then again, he allowed, Mr. Taylor’s music doesn’t tell the whole story.
“To separate his music from his movement is sort of ludicrous,” Mr.
Taborn said. “You can’t really do it and be really dealing with the
entirety of his process.”
Mr. Iyer, like Mr. Taborn, is in his
early 40s and widely considered essential to understanding contemporary
jazz. “He’s always generating energy from the piano,” he said of Mr.
Taylor. “If you look at some of my music, like the arpeggiative motifs
that generate momentum within the ensemble, that’s coming straight out
of him, actually.”
But like Mr. Taborn he thinks about Mr.
Taylor’s process as his essence. “It’s so much about orature,” Mr. Iyer
said, using the word that scholars in African Studies departments use to
describe the oral analogue of literature. “It’s not so much a written
tradition. There’s always going to be a degree of mystery around it.
That’s maybe something we should just accept, but that’s not to say we
shouldn’t study it.”
How do you pay respect to Cecil Taylor? Do
you play his music? Mr. Iyer has transcribed some of it — particularly
“Pemmican,” from the 1982 record “Garden,” a relatively orderly piece
containing a single chord that, as Mr. Iyer wrote in an article for Wire
magazine a few years ago, changed his life. But he probably won’t play
it in the concerts this month. He’s been having trouble, he said,
figuring out how to identify and represent what has meant most to him
about Mr. Taylor: his compositional strategy, his melodies, his quality
of “buoyancy.”
Mr. Taborn said something similar about his coming
performance. “Cecil’s thing is so suitelike and vast, so I don’t know,”
he said. “But it’ll be about the invocation of certain influences —
what I hear in him, what it means to me and how I process it.”
Mr.
McDonas, 45 and originally from San Francisco, has often been compared
to Mr. Taylor because of the physicality of his improvising. In an
e-mail from Michigan he wrote about how he’s approaching his homage to
Mr. Taylor: “I believe that it is not necessary to try to emulate him in
order to pay tribute to him.”
Ms. Myers, 70, who first saw Mr.
Taylor in 1977 when he played at Carnegie Hall with Mary Lou Williams,
answered the question most evenly. “I’ll play what I always do,” she
said, “which is a combination of things I’ve experienced through the
years: jazz, blues, gospel, and extended forms of music.” That seems
about right. You honor Cecil Taylor by being yourself.
http://www.villagevoice.com/2012-05-09/music/saluting-pianist-cecil-taylor/full/
Saluting Pianist Cecil Taylor
by Aidan Levy
May 9, 2012
Village Voice
Free
jazz forefather Cecil Taylor has lived in a three-story brownstone in
Fort Greene for nearly 30 years, but the 83-year-old reclusive
avant-garde iconoclast is finally coming home to Brooklyn.
Produced
by Harlem Stage and ISSUE Project Room, "Cecil Taylor: A Celebration of
the Maestro" will take Taylor's acolytes, devotees, and the musically
soon-to-be-liberated down the rabbit hole for two nights of his dizzying
solo piano work, including a home-borough performance he has
effectively been planning since the Reagan era; a program featuring
pianists Vijay Iyer, Craig Taborn, and Amina Claudine Myers and poet
Amiri Baraka; a tribute featuring pianist Thollem McDonas, bass
clarinetist Arrington de Dionyso, and drummer William Hooker; and a
retrospective of video footage from his storied career.
Catching
Taylor in person is highly unlikely—this writer's attempts to contact
him included an impromptu trek out to his ivy-lined residence and
extended correspondence with insect pathologist and jazz advocate Ana
Isabel Ordonez over the course of a year. As it turns out, though,
despite his status as a free-jazz innovator, Taylor is unable to define
what it means to be "free." "I have no idea," he says with a bellowing
laugh. "Freedom is mostly a written illusion."
''A compositional form that leads to an improvisational form."
By
turns laughing Buddha, Angel of Death, and mercurial court jester,
Taylor is the indomitable burning bush of the jazz
avant-garde—inscrutable yet inescapable, pounding the keys with a fire
that burns up the piano but doesn't consume it. Famously compared to "88
tuned drums," his celestial constellations of atonal chords have
mystified audiences since he exploded onto the scene in the '50s, a
vertiginous rush that sounds like a baby grand falling down a spiral
staircase and hitting all the right notes.
Pianist Taborn had his
first close encounter with Taylor's nebulous brand of ostensibly
formless form as a preteen, borrowing it from the library. Like the
awestruck protagonist in H.P. Lovecraft's "The Music of Erich Zann"—who
discovers the titular character creating haunting walls of sound to keep
demons from another dimension at bay—after hearing Taylor, Taborn was
never the same again. "The catalyst for it might have been Frank Zappa,"
Taborn says, referring to the antiestablishment rock icon's 1967 "best
of" list in Hit Parader. "Zappa [said], 'If you want to learn how to
play piano, listen to Cecil Taylor.' It sort of made sense."
Taylor
fundamentally altered jazz vocabulary and revolutionized the function
of the piano in an ensemble, a role that had been whittled down during
the bebop era. "That influence is so hard to evade in the history of
improvised music," Taborn says. "To some extent, still, it's like you're
playing Cecil whenever you do a lot of things, no matter how hard you
try."
Baraka first felt Taylor's influence after his
groundbreaking 1957 performances at the Five Spot Café in the East
Village, and the two eventually connected on the underground loft jazz
scene in the '70s. "Cecil brought the feeling of avant-garde concert
music into what's called jazz," Baraka says. "He really forced the
boundaries of people's hearing. And if you've heard Cecil's music, you
can estimate how it is to work with him." The two have a history of
performing duets, sometimes with Taylor contributing his own poetry.
"Cecil's certainly got a flair for language, but I told him, 'Next time
you do that, I'm going to play the piano.'"
Myers insists that
despite how Taylor's boundary-shattering note clusters might sound to an
untrained ear, the emperor is indeed fully clothed. "He's so open, but
the music is constructed. He's not just playing randomly. It definitely
has a focus," she says.
Taylor, for his part, says that he has spent his whole life honing this accidentally-on-purpose aesthetic.
"It's
a compositional form that leads to an improvisational form," he says.
"I've only been doing it for about 79 years. Practice, practice,
practice."
"Cecil
Taylor: A Celebration of the Maestro" continues at Harlem Stage
Gatehouse, ISSUE Project Room, and Anthology Film Archives through May
22. Taylor will perform at Harlem Stage Gatehouse on May 17 and at ISSUE
Project Room on May 19.
http://www.nndb.com/people/962/000044830/
Cecil Taylor
Cecil Taylor AKA Cecil Percival Taylor
Born: 25-Mar-1929 [1]
Birthplace: Long Island City, NY
Gender: Male
Race or Ethnicity: Black
Occupation: Jazz Musician
Nationality: United States
Executive summary: Avant-garde jazz pianist
One
of the most enduring and uncompromising figures of the jazz
avant-garde, Cecil Taylor is one few musicians that has managed to
largely move beyond his influences and create a new style unique to
himself. From the very early years of his childhood, he began his study
of music, beginning with piano at the age of five and moving from there
to classical percussion. As a young adult he attended both the New York
College of Music and the New England Conservatory, although in later
years he would minimize the value of his academic training in comparison
to the inspiration gained from the music of Duke Ellington and other
Jazz pioneers.
By 1956 Taylor was living as a professional
musician in New York, releasing his first recording Jazz Advance in the
summer of that year. His earliest work was with more conventional swing
and bop bands, but small groups he assembled himself during this period
were used to begin his exploration into new, untouched territory. The
further into this territory that Taylor went, the harder it was for him
to find work: for mainstream jazz fans (and critics) it simply proved
far too obtuse. Even few of his contemporaries acknowledged the
revolutionary character of his music -- notable exceptions being Albert
Ayler and Gil Evans. During the early 60s, Taylor was forced to find
work overseas (particularly in Scandinavia) just to survive, and most of
his early career was spent in poverty.
In time, the influence of
his music -- which had abandoned most conventional notions of rhythm
and melody -- began to permeate the growing free-jazz scene, aided in
part by a pair of recordings released by the Blue Note label in 1966:
Unit Structures and Conquistador. Regardless, by the close of the 60s he
had managed to release only two more recordings, including an album
made with The Jazz Composers Orchestra, and by the early 1970s he was
primarily making his living as an educator at various colleges and
universities.
The 1980s at last saw the music scene catching up
with Cecil Taylor's innovative style, and a steady outflow of recorded
work has continued since. With avenues for his creative work finally
made available to him, Taylor expanded his approach into various fields
and contexts, ranging from entirely solo piano, duos with other
performers (such as drummer Max Roach), ensembles of various sizes
(always including his long-standing collaborator Jimmy Lyons, until
Lyons' death in 1986), and frequently incorporating dance and spoken
word.
[1] David Glen Such, Avant-Garde Jazz Musicians (1993).
Leonard Lyons, The Great Jazz Pianists (1989), gives March 15, 1933 as
his date of birth, as does Current Biography Yearbook (1986). Other less
reliable printed sources stipulate March 25, 1929. In any event there
is great uncertainty regarding this date.
University: New England Conservatory of Music
Teacher: University of Wisconsin (1970-72)
MacArthur Fellowship
Guggenheim Fellowship 1973
NEA Jazz Master 1990
Copyright ©2014 Soylent Communications
https://www.billboard.com/music/music-news/cecil-taylor-prize-money-stolen-6214437/
April 6, 2018
Cecil Taylor (1929–2018)
(Photo: Carol Friedman/DownBeat Archives)Avant-garde pianist Cecil Taylor has died at the age of 89, according to NPR.
Taylor, a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master, who was described by the organization as “one of the most uncompromisingly gifted pianists in jazz history, utilizing a nearly overwhelming orchestral facility on the piano,” reportedly died at his home in Brooklyn on Thursday. He was inducted into the DownBeat Hall of Fame via the 1975 DownBeat Critics Poll.
Leading groups beginning in the late 1950s—and frequently accompanied by bassist Buell Neidlinger, who died March 16—he slashed through the established language of jazz, pushing the music to a tipping point with albums like 1966’s Unit Structures. He continued playing and recording into the 2010s, and inarguably influenced a raft of top-tier contemporary pianists.
A full obituary will be posted to the DownBeat website in the coming days
SOME LEGENDARY RECORDINGS BY CECIL TAYLOR:
Cecil Taylor - The World Of Cecil Taylor (1960)
Cecil Taylor - Dark to Themselves (1976): Parts 1-3
Cecil Taylor--Indent (1973):
Cecil Taylor, Solo Piano, INDENT-- Part 1 of 2:
Cecil Taylor, Solo Piano, INDENT Part 2 of 2:
Cecil Taylor - Silent Tongues (Montreux Live):
Solo performance of the following compositions by Cecil Taylor:
Abyss (1st Movement),Petals & Filaments (2nd Movement),
Jitney (3rd Movement)"
Cecil Taylor & Max Roach Duo at Columbia University - June 4, 2000:
Cecil Taylor Unit - "Serdab" (composition by Cecil Taylor)
New World Records, 1978
Cecil Taylor--Piano, Jimmy Lyons--Alto Saxophone, Raphé Malik--Trumpet, Ramsey Ameen--Violin, Sirone--Bass, Ronald Shannon Jackson--Drums:
Cecil Taylor: "Spring of Two Blue J's" [1 of 2]
Solo piano. Recorded at New York City Town Hall on
Cecil Taylor - "Spring of Two Blue J's" (Part 2):
Return Concert, Town Hall, November 4, 1973:
CECIL TAYLOR QUARTET:
Cecil Taylor: piano
Jimmy Lyons: alto saxophone
Sirone: bass
Andrew Cyrille: drums
Setlist:
All compositions by Cecil Taylor.
1 Autumn / Parade - 00:00
2 Spring Of Two Blue-J's (part 1, solo) - 1:28:03
3 Spring Of Two Blue-J's (part 2, quartet) - 1:44:20
Cecil Taylor--Air Above Mountains, (Buildings Within):
1 Air Above Mountains (Buildings Within)
Cecil Taylor - 3 Phasis (1978):
Prepare yourself for a mesmerizing journey into the realm of avant-garde jazz with Cecil Taylor's groundbreaking album, "3 Phasis." Recorded in April 1978, this remarkable work stands as a testament to Taylor's unwavering pursuit of musical perfection and his ability to unleash torrents of energy through his exceptional collaborators. "3 Phasis" serves as the companion disc to the Cecil Taylor Unit, capturing the essence of their four miraculous days in the studio. Taylor, the masterful pianist, acts as the instigator and barometer, leading the ensemble through a sonic landscape of fierce and uncompromising beauty. With his impeccable sense of timing and relentless pursuit of innovation, Taylor becomes the catalyst for the electrifying energy that permeates this album. Joining Taylor on this sonic adventure are a stellar lineup of musicians including Raphe Malik on trumpet, Jimmy Lyons on alto saxophone, Ramsey Ameen on violin, Sirone on bass, and Ronald Shannon Jackson on drums. Together, they form an ensemble that is both able and sympathetic, responding to Taylor's cues with unwavering intensity and creative prowess. "3 Phasis" consists of five mesmerizing tracks, each showcasing the group's ability to channel their individual voices into a collective force of expression. From the explosive opening of "Track One" to the intricate interplay of "Track Four," the music presented on this album is a testament to the raw power and artistic vision of these exceptional musicians. This album defies categorization, pushing the boundaries of conventional jazz and embracing the spirit of experimentation. It is music that sweeps all before it, immersing the listener in a world of sonic exploration. Prepare to be captivated by the relentless energy, intricate improvisations, and fierce beauty that define Cecil Taylor's "3 Phasis." Step into the realm of uncompromising artistry with Cecil Taylor and his extraordinary collaborators. "3 Phasis" is a sonic adventure that will leave you breathless and craving more. Embark on this musical journey and discover the untamed spirit of avant-garde jazz, where innovation knows no bounds and beauty resides in the most unexpected places. Get ready to be swept away by the relentless power and unpredictable beauty of "3 Phasis." This album stands as a testament to Cecil Taylor's pioneering spirit and his unwavering commitment to pushing the boundaries of musical expression. Brace yourself for an extraordinary experience that will challenge your perceptions and ignite your imagination. Cecil Taylor and his ensemble invite you to embrace the unknown and join them on a sonic exploration that defies conventions and captivates the soul. So, sit back, turn up the volume, and let the waves of "3 Phasis" wash over you, immersing you in a world of uncompromising artistry and sonic innovation. Open your ears and your mind to the boundless possibilities of avant-garde jazz. This is music that will leave an indelible mark on your soul and remind you of the power of unbridled creativity.
Track List:
Cecil Taylor Unit
Paris 1969 (2nd Set):
Cecil Taylor - piano
Jimmy Lyons - alto
Sam Rivers - tenor, flute
Andrew Cyrille - drums
Cecil Taylor: Solo Piano (1984):
From the Munich Piano Summer in 1984
Cecil Taylor - Solo Piano Performance
1:08 Free Improvisation I
51:13 Free Improvisation II
https://burningambulance.com/2012/07/02/the-unit-cecil-taylor-in-1978/
Written by burning ambulance
[This essay appears in Issue Six of Burning Ambulance, available physically and digitally from Lulu.com and for Kindle from Amazon.com.]
In the 1960s, pianist Cecil Taylor formed and recorded a variety of groups—trios, quartets and expanded ensembles were heard on albums like Nefertiti, The Beautiful One Has Come, Unit Structures, Conquistador! and Student Studies, as well as the early sessions for the Candid label later released as The World of Cecil Taylor, Air, Jumpin’ Punkins, New York City R&B and Cell Walk for Celeste. The blare of horns against the thunder of his piano and various rhythm sections’ lurching, sprinting attempts to keep up was wildly exciting. But in the decade that followed, Taylor seemed less interested in organizing bands than in hitting as hard and at as great a length as possible. The early 1970s found him recording and performing solo much more often than as the leader of a group—Indent, Solo, Silent Tongues and Air Above Mountains (all among his greatest works) are all unaccompanied piano performances, while Akisakila, Spring of Two Blue J’s, and Dark to Themselves each feature bands of varying size (a trio, a quartet and a quintet, respectively). These groups were undoubtedly assembled with care and rigorously rehearsed prior to the gigs documented on the albums, but it seems clear Taylor wasn’t interested in leading an ensemble at that time.
In 1978, though, he not only formed a band, he took it into the recording studio (something he hadn’t done since Conquistador!, a dozen years earlier) and on a European tour. The Cecil Taylor Unit of spring and summer 1978 is not only one of the pianist’s most vital ensembles, it’s also unique in its instrumentation, and its development of a collective identity makes it a rarity among his groups. The four releases by this sextet—its self-titled debut; 3 Phasis; and the live albums Live in the Black Forest and One Too Many Salty Swift and Not Goodbye—are among my favorite Cecil Taylor albums, and the subject of this essay.
The group consisted of Taylor; alto saxophonist Jimmy Lyons, his creative foil from 1962 to his death in 1986; trumpeter Raphé Malik; violinist Ramsey Ameen; bassist Sirone; and drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson. Malik, originally from Massachusetts, had played with Frank Wright and the Art Ensemble of Chicago in Paris in the late 1960s, during the great free jazz migration from the US to France that gave the BYG label the majority of its catalog. He met Taylor in the early 1970s, and first appeared on 1976’s Dark to Themselves, alongside Lyons, tenor saxophonist David S. Ware and drummer Marc Edwards. Sirone, born Norris Jones, was from Atlanta, and arrived in New York just in time for the first flowering of the free jazz scene; he recorded with many major players within that milieu, including Albert Ayler, Pharoah Sanders and Marion Brown, for sessions on ESP-Disk and Impulse!, and was one of the three co-founders, along with Leroy Jenkins and Jerome Cooper, of the violin-bass-drums trio the Revolutionary Ensemble. Jackson, a transplanted Texan, was another highly regarded player on the New York out-jazz scene; prior to joining Taylor’s group, he had backed Albert Ayler and been the original drummer for Ornette Coleman’s Prime Time—he can be heard on Dancing in Your Head and Body Meta. Ramsey Ameen is the odd man out in the band. He made his recorded debut with the group’s April 1978 studio sessions, which yielded both the self-titled album and 3 Phasis, and seems to have retired from music sometime in the 1980s. And yet his contributions to this group are crucial, serving as a bridge between avant-garde jazz and 20th Century chamber music. Indeed, if you choose to view bridging that distance as the ultimate purpose and greatest success of this band, as I do, then Ameen is the indispensable man, the one without whom the whole project would collapse.
This can be heard from the opening notes of the group’s debut recording, the self-titled album The Cecil Taylor Unit, taped in April 1978 and released on New World Records later that year. The band was in the studio for four days, from April 3 to 6; in addition to the three pieces heard on The Cecil Taylor Unit they recorded the nearly hour-long piece 3 Phasis, released the following year.
The Cecil Taylor Unit (band and album) announces itself with “Idut,” a piece running just under 15 minutes. The first sound we hear is Ameen’s violin, bolstered by Sirone’s bowed bass. The two men attack the strings in sharp and jagged fashion, reminiscent of an Elliott Carter string quartet. After a few seconds, Malik’s trumpet enters, a fountain of rich, full notes like a fanfare announcing a king. Lyons, for his part, offers boppish phrases full of life and joy. This is an erupting music.
Behind everything else, Taylor is there, striking the keyboard with great force, rumbling at the low end of a ninety-six key Bösendorfer, similar to the instrument he plays on the solo albums Air Above Mountains and The Willisau Concert, from 1975 and 2000 respectively. This is an imposing instrument, the ideal vehicle for a player of Taylor’s intensity and rigor. But it’s best heard by itself; surrounded by other sounds, its strength is diminished slightly. At the 90-second mark, when all the other instruments drop away, leaving only the piano, the purpose of all that hurtling exposition becomes clear—the band was setting the stage for Taylor, whose high-speed runs and teeth-rattling rumbles are accented by thunderous rolls from Ronald Shannon Jackson. The piece shifts again and again in this manner, offering solo piano passages, duos between Taylor and various other bandmembers, duos and trios, and explosive sections involving the entire band.
The album’s second track, “Serdab,” is much quieter. There are still moments of thrilling fire and fury, but Taylor’s solo passages are longer and more frequent, with Jackson pitter-patting behind him, creating rhythm (he’s a totally unique jazz drummer in that he plays marching-band and militaristic rhythms as often as he swings or grooves) without imposing it. It’s an interlude of gentle beauty, a bridge between the opening fanfare and thunder of “Idut” and the cataclysm that is the album’s second half.
“Holiday en Masque” is a half-hour, album-side-long avalanche of sound. The liner notes to the album, written by Spencer Richards, describe it as a “masterful achievement in ensemble playing,” and it truly is that and more. The dominant voices are Taylor’s and Ameen’s, with Jackson rattling and crashing in the back. At times the horns and strings and piano are so loud the drums can barely be discerned, even though they’re being played with as much energy as any other instrument in the studio. At other times, Jackson’s rhythms are quite clearly audible, his kit sounding more like one belonging to a hard rock drummer than a jazz player. He’s got a massive kick drum sound going on, and his toms slam like heavy wooden doors battered by a hurricane. Unison passages, arising out of the overall storm of sound like rainbows arcing between thunderclouds, reveal the scored nature of this music and the intense, focused rehearsals Taylor called before the recording began. As Ameen, who also contributed liner notes to The Cecil Taylor Unit (and was the only member of the band to do so), points out, “Because in fact he has continued to make music of overwhelming originality, Cecil Taylor has been increasingly successful in exercising his right to determine the working conditions such music requires—in particular, pianos of the best quality, and extensive practice and rehearsal…This record was prepared under Taylor’s artistic direction and is a document not only of his power of musical expression but also of the success of the comprehensive working methods and the fierce independence he has developed and maintained during the past quarter of a century.”
The second album by this group, 3 Phasis, was recorded on the final day of the sessions, and the issued take is the final one (of six), a performance that ran beyond the scheduled time and into overtime. According to the album notes by jazz critic Gary Giddins, the earlier versions all ran in the 20-30 minute range. The issued performance is a marathon, even an endurance test, at 57:17, but not a moment of that is wasted on vamping, casting about for inspiration, or anything but the most intense playing of which the group members are capable.
The piece begins with solo piano, but again the strings are the first instruments to join the fray. Ameen and Sirone come in bowing, with Lyons’ alto saxophone keening romantic ballad melodies, Malik’s trumpet squalling in a less florid, more sardonic way than on the previous album…and Jackson announcing his arrival with tremendous, rolling-thunder assertiveness.
The horns keep dropping out, though, and the piece becomes chamber music with drums. Passages of violin and piano, or violin and bass, Ameen jabbing sharply into the airspace between himself and Taylor with shrieks of the bow not unlike Bernard Herrmann’s famous score for Alfred Hitchcock’s movie Psycho. Ameen adds more than classical filigree to this music, though. He’s also prepared to be a hillbilly fiddler when the occasion calls for it, conjuring the spirit of African-American string bands (violin, banjo, upright bass) with a single raucous phrase behind the horns.
Giddins was present at the recording, and wrote the liner notes to the album. He describes the recording engineer’s panic as the take that was eventually released runs longer and longer, finally coming to a halt just shy of the one-hour mark (and consequently nudging the limits of 33 1/3 rpm vinyl’s storage capacity).
“Previous takes had averaged twenty to thirty minutes and seemed to get tighter each time,” Giddins writes. “The fifth take produced a splendid array of dynamics and a rollicking dance exuberance, but saxophonist Jimmy Lyons was dissatisfied with his solo, and there was a general feeling that an earlier take had been more successful. Taylor decided to work on some of the other pieces, and it wasn’t until midnight that they returned to the suite. From the first notes, there was an excitement in the studio, an electricity, and after about twenty minutes producer Sam Parkins said, ‘This is the best yet by far. If Jimmy Lyons holds up in the shuffle, I don’t care how long it goes.’ Later Parkins noted, ‘This is more of a piano concerto than the others.’ A significant difference between this and earlier versions was that Sirone, the bassist, who had previously played mostly against the rhythm, now fell into a steady 4/4 shuffle meter (heard in the second half). Taylor conducted the music from the piano without eye contact, as the others stood poised. Lyons, awaiting his entrance, lit a cigarette. Then the shuffle started: Taylor instigated a rocking stomp with chords in both hands; Sirone bore down on the time; drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson alternated between mallets and sticks; Lyons steamed through like a train. After about forty minutes, Parkins exulted, ‘We’ve got a record now!’—but ten minutes later he was worried about whether Taylor would stop in time: ‘I hope he stops pretty soon, because I’d hate to cut this. I’ve never been to anything like this before, have you?’ Taylor punched out a riff, his hands leaping as fast and deft as a cheetah, his arms almost akimbo. Everyone was eyeing the clock nervously and with giddy excitement. And then, nearing fifty-seven minutes, just short of the maximum playing time for a long-playing album, Taylor began to wind down for a dramatic finish. Observers burst into the studio with excited praise, and the laconic Taylor was heard to say, ‘Well, you know we knew it was good, too.’”
Taylor didn’t typically go on the road with the same bands he recorded with. Throughout his career, studio sessions have been relatively rare; live recordings make up the bulk of his discography. But in 1978, he took this Unit on the road for several weeks of shows in Europe, at least three of which were documented, two of them on albums that are among his greatest work.
Live in the Black Forest was the first to appear, on the unjustly obscure MPS label. Featuring two 25-minute pieces recorded on June 3 for broadcast on German radio, it’s a somewhat more “crowd-pleasing” and less abstruse set of music than the Unit’s self-titled debut or the crushing 3 Phasis. The first piece, “The Eel Pot,” begins with solo piano, followed quickly by the entry of Malik and Lyons (playing unison phrases) and then Ameen. Jackson hits huge thunderous tom rolls, and the band has become fully present. Then things can truly get started. Piano and trumpet exchanges, violin and alto saxophone tinkering at the margins. Martial drumming. There’s bass work, but it’s not particularly high in the mix at first; only later does Sirone’s forceful plucking assert itself, when the group becomes, of all things, a piano trio, albeit the most aggressive one I’ve ever heard. Jackson is playing something close to a death metal blast beat, as Taylor dances across the keyboard like a maniac and Sirone throbs between them. The next player to re-enter after this thunderous passage is Ameen, offering almost Bela Bartók-like stabs as though to pay tribute to the concert’s central European location. He and Taylor duet passionately, with Sirone still lingering in the background. Eventually, the full ensemble returns to roaring life, and the piece comes to a raucous close, celebrated by wild applause from what sounds like a large audience.
The disc’s second half, “Sperichill On Calling,” is more or less in the same spirit as its predecessor, but it’s less aggressive, a midtempo marathon with occasional eruptions. Around the 11-minute mark, Jackson bursts into a particularly aggressive drum solo, smashing the cymbals and battering the snare, as Malik’s trumpet unleashes a repeated, fanfare-like figure. Malik gets a lot of solo space during “Sperichill,” his rippling upper-register lines extraordinarily full and vibrant. When Taylor takes the lead, his playing is often quite delicate; during one quiet passage, he and Ameen duet totally unaccompanied, and it’s possibly the album’s high point. Again and again throughout this group’s discography, it becomes unmistakable that the violin is the most important instrument, besides the piano, to the whole project. Two decades later, on Algonquin (recorded 1999, released 2004), Taylor would explore this combination of sounds again, in a live duet with violinist Mat Maneri at the Library of Congress.
Eleven days after the recording of Live in the Black Forest, the Cecil Taylor Unit made its most expansive and passionate (and final) statement. On June 14, they performed at the Liederhalle/Mozartsaal in Stuttgart, Germany, an event which was recorded for the mammoth One Too Many Salty Swift and Not Goodbye. It was the final night of a six-week tour, and not all venues and not all presenters were as respectful of the musicians as they should have been. On this night, there was a well-tuned grand piano in the hall that was covered and locked up backstage; the people in charge said it was reserved for classical pianists, and provided Taylor with a less ideal instrument. Similar disrespect was afforded Ramsey Ameen, with the result that he played the show in his undershirt as a form of silent protest. Still, it’s an astonishing musical event, running nearly two and a half hours in total and originally broken up into three vinyl LPs, later reorganized into two 70-plus minute CDs.
Taylor is not even present onstage for the first twenty minutes of music. He allows the other members of the band to begin without him, in a series of duos and solos, steadily building tension and energy so that when he does finally sit at the keyboard, the resulting explosion will be that much greater. First up are Raphé Malik and Jimmy Lyons, offering a four-minute passage of rippling interplay more conventionally melodic than what they’d play as part of the full Unit, yet still exciting; they sound like yelping puppies, cavorting around the stage. Ameen and Sirone follow them, the violinist building from short, tentative tugs at his strings with the bow to longer, more haunted-house phrases. The bassist, meanwhile, plays with a bow as well, at first, though eventually he moves back to plucking the strings by the end of this over 11-minute passage. The last member of the group to make an individual statement is Jackson, whose solo is as crushing and explosive as anything he’d do eight years later with the jazz-metal improvising quartet Last Exit.
Once Taylor strikes the keys, the music becomes overwhelming. I mean that; One Too Many Salty Swift and Not Goodbye is almost too much to take. The performance is continuous; though the untitled piece, simply labeled “Cecil Taylor Unit” is divided into five sections (two on the first disc, following the duets and drum solo, and three on the second), the back cover makes it plain:
“The track points are provided for the listener’s convenience and do not indicate divisions of the work.”
If you can manage to stagger away to a safe distance and gain some perspective, it becomes apparent that Taylor’s methodology at this concert was the same as in the studio or on Live in the Black Forest. The group fractures into subsets again and again—trumpet/violin, violin/piano, a piano trio, piano trio plus Lyons, even an extended solo piano section to launch the concert’s final half hour. But the ultimate impression is of standing in the path of an avalanche. Every player involved is hitting so hard, emitting so much raw energy, that to listen to the entire performance in one sitting is the kind of thing that should earn a person a trophy or a plaque. One Too Many is a fitting capper to this band’s short life, because when it finally ends, you can be forgiven for believing you’ve heard all the music your brain will ever be able to store, by Cecil Taylor or anyone else, for the rest of your life.
Should you want more, though, there’s one more document of this band out there, and to my mind it’s maybe the most important one of all. On June 10, seven days after Live in the Black Forest and four days before One Too Many, the group performed in the Grosser Sendesaal (main hall) of the Funkhaus in Köln. This performance (an hour of it, at any rate) must have been recorded for German radio, because a pristine tape has been circulating in bootleg form for decades. Naturally, it’s readily available on the Internet.
The bootleg recording isn’t ideal. The sound quality is pristine, mind you—every instrument is clear and isolated in the mix, allowing as careful an analysis of each member’s contribution as is possible with the studio recordings. But the music cuts off after an hour, and it’s obvious from what was going on when it ends that there was much more heard that night. Also, the version I have splits the second of the two pieces performed (“Third Part of One” and “Third Worlds Making”) into two chunks, with nearly 10 seconds of silence in the middle. But once you get past those two flaws, the Funkhaus performance is genuinely revelatory, for one huge reason: Cecil Taylor plays the blues.
Not for the whole hour, of course. For the majority of the time, the ensemble conducts themselves as they do on each of their other recordings, thundering along together or splitting into factions. But about ten minutes into “Third Part of One,” right in the middle of a powerful burst of Jimmy Garrison-esque strumming from Sirone, Ronald Shannon Jackson begins to smash the hi-hat in a forceful, swinging pattern, and all of a sudden Taylor begins comping like he hasn’t (on record, anyway) since about 1960! Lyons and Malik come in, blowing the blues, and Ameen plucks his strings like a high-pitched guitar, as Sirone walks the whole thing forward and the drums clatter out an even more emphatic beat, one almost recalling Art Blakey. The whole band continues like this for an astonishingly long time, Taylor finally returning to his usual cascades of notes somewhere around the 14-minute mark. But Lyons continues to solo in a lyrical, even somewhat romantic manner, and Sirone and Jackson keep the groove going, until nearly 15 minutes into the piece. And when the drummer does abandon swing, it’s only so that he can take a jackhammering solo of his own. Of all the things this sextet did on record and in concert, this patch of (almost) straight-up hard bop may be the most shocking, and in some ways it puts everything else into an entirely different light.
The 1978 Cecil Taylor Unit was about connecting the dots—about joining blues and swing to modern classical and free jazz, about making it all sing as one. Where the studio albums could be bombastic and crisp at the same time, the live albums had a stark beauty born of subdividing the ensemble into its component parts, the better to reveal the power of the whole. This band’s short lifespan kept its music from stagnating; they never had time to develop rote bits of business, or clichés to endlessly re-work. They burned like a white-hot flame, and then they dissipated. Ameen remained with Taylor through 1979; Lyons through his death in 1986. The others went on to long, productive careers—Malik and Sirone are dead now, but Jackson’s still out there, hitting as hard as ever. And of course, Taylor continues to perform, taking listeners on epic journeys every time he sits down at the piano. I’ve seen him perform four times with ensembles of varying sizes, and own dozens of his albums. But for me, this band might be his ultimate achievement.
—Phil Freeman
https://themorningnews.org/article/cecil-taylor-explains-it-all
Cecil Taylor Explains It All
by Patrick Ambrose
April 10, 2007
The Morning News
PATRICK AMBROSE has a cup of tea with the master.
The Morning News Contributing Writer Patrick Ambrose is a journalist who lives in Brooklyn. His fiction has appeared in Timber Creek Review and Mysterical-e.
As the lights of Rose Theater dim, a drummer unleashes a series of brooding pulsations, buffeting the tom-toms in time with the entrance of the elusive Henry Grimes, a preeminent bassist who until recently had been away from the music scene for more than three decades. Impeccably dressed and with a shock of white hair, Grimes strides on stage with a violin to thunderous applause and scratches out a gritty sequence of notes, scraping against the placid resonance of the soothing beat. Pheeroan akLaff’s palpitations have put the audience in a trance.
Offstage, someone howls and there’s a sound like fluttering sheets of corrugated steel. Suddenly, a dancer whirls into the scene, whacking a cymbal with a mallet and spewing guttural utterances as he spins toward a grand piano at center stage. He reaches into the case and plucks the strings. A faint ray of light illuminates the face of pianist and NEA Jazz Master Cecil Taylor, wearing a black skullcap. He reads something in an unfamiliar language, and then begins to play, his agile fingers sprinting furiously across the keys as he stitches together a complex assortment of rhythms. His energy is stunning, and at one point, he’s banging the keys with his forearms and elbows, while Grimes, now on bass, threads akLaff’s beats with simmering serpentine runs. The trio is tight throughout the performance, and the crashing polyrhythmic waves of sustained intensity eventually taper into a palliative high-end melody—an ebb and flow in the two-part score. When the piece ends, the audience is drained, but ecstatic. Hoots and hollers fill the auditorium. Adoring fans give Taylor a bouquet of red roses. The maestro receives two curtain calls for his unprecedented performance.
A couple of days after that March 10 concert, an essential event in the Jazz at Lincoln Center Music of the Masters Series, I call Taylor at his Brooklyn home. “Did that composition you performed on Saturday have a name?” I ask. “I’ll tell you what,” he says. “Call me back with a title and I’ll tell you if it’s the right one.”
* * *
In mid-February I visited Taylor a few days before he was scheduled to fly to Japan to perform a concert with pianist Yosuke Yamashita. Taylor’s residence is a testament to his importance and longevity as a fixture in modern music. As we made our way up the stairs to the second floor of his three-story brownstone, I felt as if I had wandered into a museum—jazz memorabilia, historical artifacts, artwork, and tapestries covered the walls.
“Would you like some tea?” Taylor asks. “It’s organic green tea and I could add a few shards of apple if you’d like?” That sounded great to me. We passed through a room filled with stacks of books and CDs with several tables supporting wood and ceramic sculptures. In the middle of the den floor, a wisp of fragrant smoke curled from a stick of burning incense. Once in the kitchen, my host boiled water on the stove.
“Isn’t it interesting?” he says. “This afternoon I turn on CNN and there’s this handsome guy, the weather reporter, and he’s surrounded by snow and they’re all laughing, talking about it. And then you see Baghdad. What does that say about our sensibilities? And did you see el Presidente’s press conference this afternoon? Oh, he’s something. But, you know, when I listen to these people now, I’m only interested in their thought processes. I’m saying, ‘Oh, really? I see. OK.’ But I don’t believe any of it.”
Taylor squeezes half a lemon into our tea, then adds honey and apple slivers—a perfect elixir for the raging blizzard outside. We depart for the den and settle into two chairs.
“I’ve been living in this house since May 3, 1983, which is interesting because my mother died on May 3, 1943,” he says. “Mother was a force to be reckoned with. When I was five years old, I asked her for piano lessons. And she said to me—God, it was more than 70 years ago and I remember it so clearly—’You will be one of three things: You will be a dentist, a lawyer, or a doctor.’ And then she pointed at the piano and said, ‘You will practice for six days a week and I will supervise. You will get the basics, and on Sunday, you may do what you want.’ And so isn’t it interesting? I started to invent musical sounds on Sunday when I was five or six years old.”
Taylor’s percussive style was so unusual—so far beyond the comprehension of his musical peers—that his early work was often ridiculed or dismissed entirely.
Taylor, an only child, had his mother’s undivided attention. Almeida Ragland Taylor taught her son French and German and had him reading Schopenhauer while most other kids struggled with juvenile fiction.
“Mother’s first cousin was the first black man to play European music on a radio station,” Taylor explains. “And she entered me into all kinds of European piano festivals. Of course, I never won, but it was marvelous because she sat there through it all. She also took me to the Apollo to see Chick Webb, whose new singing star was Ella Fitzgerald. Her hit song at that time was ‘A Tisket, A Tasket.’ The next year she took me to the Paramount to see that extraordinary Lionel Hampton. It was a most marvelous education. She knew exactly what she was doing.”
As it turns out, Taylor did not pursue law or medicine. He studied piano and music theory at the New England Conservatory from 1951 to 1955. And his affinity for generating incomparable sounds—that gift he’d been cultivating since childhood—worked its way into his repertoire. Taylor’s percussive style was so unusual—so far beyond the comprehension of his musical peers—that his early work was often ridiculed or dismissed entirely by listeners when he began performing in New York City jazz clubs.
“My working experience began at a place called Club Harlem,” he says. “And the piano had seven keys that didn’t work. You started at 9, took 15 minutes off each hour, worked until 4 a.m., and got $7. I also played at the Apollo Bar with a very tall alto player. We used to groove on ‘Dark Eyes.’ I would gig on Friday and Saturday, and I recall walking in there one night, and the bartender saying, ‘Oh shit. It’s going to be a weird weekend.’“
“When I listen to Jazz Advance, I understand why it was an anathema to many musicians and to the academy that was in vogue at the time,” he says. “And I also understand why I like it. You know, one doesn’t decide to become a musician. The forces of nature decide that for you. You don’t have any choice in the matter and once you make a commitment to music, everything else that you do affects your playing.”
In 1958, Taylor recorded four pieces with saxophonist John Coltrane that are now available on a CD entitled Hard Driving Jazz. In a single studio session, these two visionaries laid down material that carried jazz into completely new directions during the ‘60s. The material contains traces of swing and bop, but Coltrane’s and Taylor’s solos display their commitment to playing beyond the songs’ melodic parameters. [Listen to “Just Friends”]
By the late ‘60s, Taylor and saxophonist Ornette Coleman had become known as the co-founders of free jazz—a controversial movement in which the artists abandon the rhythmic, harmonic, and melodic structures normally associated with improvised music to create impromptu sketches based on the musicians’ instinctual choices. Taylor has always had a disdain for labels, and those who pigeonhole him as a free-jazz improviser with no regard for form aren’t listening carefully. Two of his most revered works of the ‘60s, Unit Structures and Conquistador!, are provocative, labyrinthine journeys into alternative aural dimensions, and yet the music is meticulously detailed, with rhythmic statements that surface, disappear, and reemerge as elements of new patterns. On these two albums, Taylor makes a radical break with convention, completely doing away with the traditional notion of the rhythm section. The drums, bass and piano are no longer relegated to supporting grandstanding soloists. All of the musicians are soloists with independent voices, engaged in an intimate musical dialogue for the duration of every song. The title track of Conquistador! even has moments where all of the artists join together in choruses of spellbinding melodic expression.
Taylor has always had a disdain for labels, and those who pigeonhole him as a free-jazz improviser with no regard for form aren’t listening carefully.
Though they led the free jazz revolution together, Taylor and Coleman never actually collaborated. But they shared a rare combination of attributes—a mastery of their instruments and an absolute fearlessness when it came to pursuing and adhering to their artistic ideals. Throughout the ‘60s Taylor had difficulty finding work, and at one point he received public assistance. But things turned around in the early ‘70s. In 1971 he obtained a teaching position at the University of Wisconsin and the next year he served as an artist-in-residence at Antioch College. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1973, and in 1979, Taylor played at the White House for President Carter. In the late ‘70s and on into the ‘80s, he worked with choreographer Diane McIntyre and her New York – based company Sound in Motion, blending jazz and spoken-word performance into dance productions. It was during this period that one can observe another shift in Taylor’s approach to composition. Rather than having the musicians converse through note sequences, Taylor’s new ensemble, the Cecil Taylor Unit, generates dense syntheses of sound textures with varying degrees of resonance and granularity. The inclusion of violinists like Ramsey Ameen and Leroy Jenkins has produced a style notably different from his more jazz-orientated combos of the ‘60s. Taylor’s work with violinist Mat Maneri on Algonquin, a 1999 release commissioned by the Library of Congress, is an unusual and yet lovely take on chamber music.
It took nearly 40 years for Taylor to be recognized by the academy. In 1990, he was named a Jazz Master by the National Endowment for the Arts, and in 1991 he received a MacArthur Fellowship, otherwise known as “the genius grant.” Taylor shrugs when I mention these accomplishments.
“On March 3, I have to go to the Kennedy Center, a gathering for the so-called NEA Jazz Masters,” he says. “But I got over being around crowds of people when I was 11 years old in Yankee Stadium and somebody yelled, ‘N., sit down!’“ Taylor laughs heartily. “And you know what? I can tell you all about the New York Yankees.”
* * *
I come up with a title for Taylor’s Rose Theater performance and give him a call. Fortunately, he is in a jubilant mood. “How about ‘Obliquity’?” I ask.
“Oh, what a wonderful word,” he says. “You know, I’m sitting here with my champagne and apricot juice and all I need is a cigarette. Pardon me while I find one. I want to read you some material I hope to publish. It’s from a larger work entitled ‘Maturity Returned To.’ It’s my conception of when a sound begins.”
The poem is a meditation on the reciprocity between art and science. Taylor’s unwavering control over language clarifies connections among physics, music, geometry and genetics that I wouldn’t have made otherwise. By the time he’s finished reading, I’m thinking, “Absolutely. Of course, that’s the way it is.”
I just needed Cecil Taylor to explain it all to me.
—Published April 10, 2007
As leader
Jazz Advance, 1956
At Newport (one side of LP), 1958
Looking Ahead!, 1958
Stereo Drive (also released as Hard Driving Jazz and Coltrane Time), 1958
Love for Sale, 1959
The World of Cecil Taylor 1960
Air 1960
Cell Walk for Celeste, 1961
Jumpin' Punkins, 1961
New York City R&B (with Buell Neidlinger), 1961
Into the Hot, 1961 (features tracks also released on Mixed)
Nefertiti the Beautiful One Has Come, 1962
Unit Structures, 1966
Conquistador!, 1966
Student Studies (also released as The Great Paris Concert), 1966
Praxis, 1968
The Great Concert of Cecil Taylor (also released as Nuits de la Fondation Maeght), 1969
Indent, 1973
Akisakila, 1973
Solo, 1973
Spring of Two Blue J's, 1973
Silent Tongues, 1974
Dark to Themselves, 1976
Air Above Mountains, 1976
Cecil Taylor Unit, 1978
3 Phasis, 1978
Live in the Black Forest, 1978
One Too Many Salty Swift and Not Goodbye, 1978
It is in the Brewing Luminous, 1980
Fly! Fly! Fly! Fly! Fly!, 1980
The Eighth, 1981
Garden, 1981
Winged Serpent (Sliding Quadrants), 1984
Iwontunwonsi, 1986
Amewa, 1986
For Olim, 1986
Olu Iwa, 1986
Live in Bologna, 1987
Live in Vienna, 1987
Tzotzil/Mummers/Tzotzil, 1987
Chinampas, 1987
Riobec - Cecil Taylor & Günter Sommer, 1988
In East Berlin, 1988
Regalia - Cecil Taylor & Paul Lovens, 1988
The Hearth, 1988
Alms/Tiergarten (Spree), 1988
Remembrance, 1988
Pleistozaen Mit Wasser, 1988
Spots, Circles, and Fantasy, 1988
Legba Crossing, 1988
Erzulie Maketh Scent, 1988
Leaf Palm Hand, 1988
In Florescence, 1989
Looking (Berlin Version) Solo, 1989
Looking (Berlin Version) The Feel Trio, 1989
Looking (Berlin Version) Corona, 1989
Celebrated Blazons, 1990
2Ts for a Lovely T, 1990
Double Holy House, 1990
Nailed, 1990
Melancholy - Cecil Taylor, Harri Sjöström, Evan Parker, Barry Guy, Wolfgang Fuchs
The Tree of Life, 1991
Always a Pleasure, 1993
Almeda- Cecil Taylor, Harri Sjöström 1996
The Light of Corona- Cecil Taylor, Harri Sjöström 1996
Qu'a: Live at the Iridium, vol. 1 & 2 - Cecil Taylor, Harri Sjöström 1998
Algonquin, 1998
Incarnation, 1999
The Willisau Concert, 2000
Complicité, 2001
Taylor/Dixon/Oxley, 2002
Two T's for a Lovely T, 2003
The Owner of the River Bank, 2004
As sideman
Jazz Composer's Orchestra: Communications, 1968 (Taylor featured on 2 tracks)
Friedrich Gulda: Nachricht vom Lande, 1976 (Taylor featured on 3 tracks)
Mary Lou Williams: Embraced, 1977
Tony Williams: Joy of Flying, 1978
Historic Concerts (with Max Roach), 1979
Art Ensemble of Chicago: Thelonious Sphere Monk, 1990 (Taylor featured on 3 tracks)
