Having written about the anthologies of remastered recordings on Black Saint and Soul Note compiled for George Russell and Anthony Braxton, I realized that it would be downright negligent for me to overlook the fact that there is also a Cecil Taylor collection in this series. Chronologically, Taylor should be situated between Russell and Braxton, having given his first serious free jazz gig in 1957, which would be about four years after the publication of Russell’s The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization and long before the founding of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. However, Taylor has probably built up the longest running commitment to the free jazz aesthetic and is still exploring its capacity for expressiveness.
Ironically, one of the best ways to read about Taylor can be found in Robin D. G. Kelley’s Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original. Taylor is just as much an “American original” as Monk is; and he is definitely one of the most interesting auxiliary characters in the narrative of Monk’s life and works. Here is Kelley’s capsule summary of Taylor’s background:
Raised in a middle-class family on Long Island by a mother who was a classically trained pianist, Taylor was also a poet who read widely in all the arts. He grew up listening to the black dance bands of Ellington, Basie, and Jimmie Lunceford, but, as a student at the New England Conservatory, he studied the works of Schoenberg, Webern, Berg, Bartók, and Stravinsky. His role models were Duke Ellington, Horace Silver, and Thelonious Monk (he recorded “Bemsha Swing” on his first LP), as well as Dave Brubeck and Lennie Tristano. Taylor could hold his own in a conversation, but when he touched the keyboard he had the room under his spell.
The name to note in that summary is Tristano’s. Tristano is often credited with having “invented” free jazz; but this refers to a few studio recordings of improvisations that were not guided by any specific tunes or harmonic progressions (but, at least according to some sources, may well have involved some form of mild-altering substance). Whether or not Taylor ever heard any of these recordings, he probably deserves credit for taking free jazz out of the studio and onto the bandstand.
That bandstand was at the Five Spot, a jazz club that had begun as a bar run by Joe and Iggy Termini, which received its cabaret license on August 30, 1956. The story is that David Amram brought Taylor to the Five Spot the following November. Taylor started playing the piano, and it was not long before his ferocious style broke the instrument. Joe Termini immediately tried to kick him out, refusing to let him return; but, according to Amram, the patrons (most of whom were artists) said “Listen, if you don’t let him come back we’re not going to come back here anymore.”
Here is how Kelley continues the story:
He [Joe Termini] hired Taylor’s trio—bassist Buell Neidlinger and drummer Dennis Charles—to accompany multi-instrumentalist Dick Whitmore, but Whitmore quit after three nights. In turn, the Terminis gave Taylor the gig. He added soprano saxophonist Steve Lackritz (who would soon change his name to Steve Lacy) to the group and they stayed from November 29 through January 3, 1957. The music was dense, complex, dissonant, and thoroughly avant-garde. Three years before Ornette Coleman opened at the Five Spot and shook up the jazz world with his free improvisations, Cecil Taylor introduced the “New Thing” to an appreciative audience. And an appreciative management: for the first time in the sleepy little bar’s history, there were lines outside the door. Even the naysayers showed up, if only to offer a critique. And so it was in the winter of 1956 that Cecil Taylor, there only by the insistence of the artists, turned the Five Spot into the city’s leading venue for experimental jazz.
(As a punch line to this story, Monk had his first engagement at the Five Spot in July of 1957.)
Taylor is still pretty hard on any keyboard that falls under his hands; and his sessions are not particularly easy on the ears, at least at first exposure. However, there is something compelling about those attributes of density, complexity, and dissonance, all of which are just as evident in much of Arnold Schoenberg’s music but emerge with a thoroughly jazzy rhetoric in Taylor’s improvisations. All that is necessary is to approach Taylor through an accessible learning curve, and the remasterings of his five Soul Note recordings make for an excellent approach.
Unfortunately, that approach does not follow the chronology of the recordings themselves. The best way to begin with Taylor is to listen to him as a piano soloist. (For the record, this is the only way I have heard him in performance.) The last CD in the box, For Olim, was recorded at a recital Taylor gave on April 9, 1986. It begins with one relatively long piece, followed by seven shorter ones. This is an excellent approach to his approach to inventing phrases and then playing them out over extended durations, modulated by different approaches to variation of tempo and dynamics.
From there one can move to the second and third CDs in the set, which document a duo recital that Taylor gave with drummer Max Roach at Columbia University of December 15, 1979. Both musicians “warm up” with extended solos before launching into their duet work. The next step will then be Olu Iwa, whose second track offers the Cecil Taylor Quartet as it was constituted in April of 1986, coupled with a performance by the seven-man Cecil Taylor Unit. Both tracks involve free blowing on a scale that is both longer and louder, although the Cecil Taylor Unit track involves a highly disciplined crescendo-decrescendo architecture.
The last stage of this gradus ad Parnassum is the first disc in the collection, Winged Serpent. This features Taylor’s Orchestra of two Continents, an ensemble of ten musicians, half American and half European. In the four tracks on this CD one encounters free jazz in all of its unbridled wildness, and those who approach the disc along the recommended gradual path will not fail to be stunned by just how disciplined all of that freedom actually is.
When I wrote about Braxton, I discussed his innovative use of diagrams serving as both title and score of a composition; and I regretted that one of those diagrams had not been included in John Cage’s Notations. It was not until I saw Ron Mann’s documentary about Taylor, Imagine the Sound, that I discovered that Taylor, too, had invented a notation (also missing in the Cage collection). Taylor’s music may be “free” of conventional patterns, either from tunes or harmonic progressions; but it is a heady gumbo in which the cerebral and the visceral bounce off of each other with enough intensity to yield gamma radiation. Whether we’re talking jazz or chamber music (or both), it is hard to imagine a performer today who would not be significantly and productive informed by seriously listening to Taylor’s work.
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