Cecil Taylor and Marilyn Crispell: Running mates you can count on

October 23, 4:11 PMSF Music ExaminerDerk Richardson

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Cecil Taylor returns to the SF Jazz Festival

Cecil Taylor, the most important "jazz" pianist of the past 50 years, has also been the most problematic for some listeners. Branford Marsalis sparked much animosity when, in the avant-deficient Jazz series by Ken Burns, responding to a Taylor quote about audiences needing to prepare for his concerts, he deemed that statement "total self-indulgent bulls--- as far as I'm concerned."

The San Francisco Jazz Festival audience can judge for itself when the 79-year-old master performs solo in the legendarily reverberant space of Grace Cathedral on Friday, Oct. 24.

Jazz critic Gary Giddins once wrote of Taylor's music: "For most people, it was hate at first blush, but often the hate turned to intrigue and then to love."

That was certainly the experience of my wife, Robin. Her first exposure to Taylor was on a solo piano double bill with the powerfully elegant and often-rhapsodic Randy Weston many years ago at the old Keystone Korner in North Beach. Her reaction to Taylor's nonstop fractured runs and crashing chords (sometimes generated with elbows, forearms and rolling fists) was to put her head down on her folded arms and try, in vain, to go to sleep.

Several years later, at the urging of Berkeley pianist Greg Goodman, whose artistic life was altered eternally by his exposure to Taylor, Robin joined Greg and me at a stage-side table at the old Yoshi's on Claremont Avenue in North Oakland. Robin's epiphany was so dramatic and complete that she had a photographer take a picture of the "Cecil Taylor" stamp on the back of her hand.

"Taylor is almost like a tabula rasa in the sense that listeners read into him whatever they happen to know about music," Giddins said in an interview on the Web site Jerry Jazz Musician. "People with a classical background will hear everything from Ravel to Messiaen or Mozart to Brahms, and those with a jazz background tend to talk about Bud Powell, Lennie Tristano, Horace Silver or Dave Brubeck, and so forth. While people always seem to hear references to the music that they know, at the same time, whether you love Taylor or not, he doesn't really sound like anybody else. That is the great paradox, that he is so much an original, yet he calls to mind so much of western music and so much of piano music."

Somewhat less of a paradox, but no less complex and musically enriching is Marilyn Crispell. The Taylor- and John Coltrane-influenced pianist, an alumna of Anthony Braxton's great quartet, has been recording one brilliant album after another for ECM records over the past 11 years, moving into contemplative territory with breathtakingly beautiful results. Read more about her here, watch videos here, and then check her out in concert, solo, in the gorgeous Florence Gould Theatre on Sunday, Oct. 26.