https://socialistaction.org/2018/07/17/cecil-taylor-jazz-revolutionary-1929-2018/
Cecil Taylor: Jazz revolutionary, 1929-2018
/ 16 hours ago
July 2018 Cecil playingBy MARTY GOODMAN
“Technique is a weapon to do whatever must be done.”— Cecil Taylor
“Conquistador” was the first Cecil Taylor jazz album that I ever heard.
It astonished me, and the title piece nailed me to the wall with its
dangerous, urban sound. Taylor’s sideman, Jimmy Lyons, blew amazing sax
riffs; the coolest, hippest, New York tough style music that I’d had
ever heard. And it still sounds that way 50 years later!
Cecil Taylor passed away on April 6 of this year at age 89. He was still
playing in his maniacal way when I saw him solo about 10 years ago,
stopping short to read one of his amazing poems and then continuing to play.
Cecil Taylor’s assault on jazz tradition and Euro-centric culture was as
explosive and game-changing in jazz as the “action painting” of Jackson
Pollock on the 1950s art scene. Taylor, like Pollock, smashed the
language of art when it was no longer sufficient and invented a new one.
Taylor was a wholesale assault on the Western musical tradition. It was
bluesy, it was abstract and it was angry. Taylor was a Black artist
stuck in a Cold War cultural wasteland called America, where jazz
music—all music—was in the hands of mostly white businessmen.
Epithets such as “anti-jazz” were hurled at what was called then jazz’s
“new thing,” i.e. the avant-garde. The harshest critics were largely
white producers and critics, but even established artists like trumpet
icon Miles Davis put him down.
Club dates came slowly in Taylor’s early days. Even though in 1962 he
received Downbeat’s “new star” award, he was unable to get work for most
of the 60s. He claims he lived on welfare for at least five years during
that time. The impact of other, innovative, but strikingly different
musicians, like the more popular pianist Thelonius Monk, helped widen
the door, but just a bit.
By the early 60s, Taylor’s music became more and more abstract. The
recordings from those years were jewels, which document Taylor’s
evolution toward more and more experimentation: Jazz Advance (1956),
Looking Ahead (1958), The World of Cecil Taylor (1960), Cell Walk for
Celeste (1961), and Nefertiti the Beautiful Has Come (1962). Those
albums introduced new avant-garde heroes—soprano saxman Steve Lacy,
tenor sax player Archie Shepp, bassist Buell Neidlinger, who sadly
passed away in March, drummer Sonny Murray and alto sax man, Jimmy Lyons
(died 1986).
However, Taylor’s landmark albums, Unit Structures (May 1966) and
Conquistador (October 1966), broke all “rules” of musical order,
although, for those who listened, a deeper structure lay inside. The
albums challenged mainstream jazz to its foundations.
With those historic albums behind, Taylor slowly gained an audience as
revolutionary thought and new forms of popular music became a mass
phenomenon. Jazz musicians reflected the insurrectionary mood, heavily
influenced by the new Black consciousness and the work of Dr. Martin
Luther King, Malcolm X, and the Black Panther Party. It was arguably the
music’s most fertile period.
Sept. 2010 Malcolm
Malcolm X. The political struggle of Black people and the new Black
consciousness were heavily reflected in jazz music of the era.
Other radical Black stylists—Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler, Pharoah
Sanders, Archie Shepp, and John Coltrane—were also affected by 1960s
Black nationalism. It was reflected in their music, sometimes overtly
politically (Shepp wrote the play, “The Communist”), but mostly not.
Yet, their angry discordant musical voices were a cry for justice.
Cecil Taylor himself was not an overtly political man and no activist.
But New York poet Steve Delachinsky, Cecil’s friend of 30 years, pointed
in a phone conversation with me, “He certainly was anti-capitalist” and
hated politicians.” Steve added, “He was the most eccentric regular guy
you could talk to.”
Rebels like Cecil Taylor shattered old notions of order.
Twentieth-century modernist classical composers like Schoenberg, Webern,
Berg, and Bartok who broke down barriers of structure and tonality, but
here was a musician who took breaking down barriers to a new level—in
fact, he demolished them!
In 1952, he entered the New England Music Conservatory and said this
about Western classical forms, “Everything I’ve lived, I am. I am not
afraid of European influences. The point is to use them—as Ellington
did—as part of my life as an American Negro” (liner notes, Looking
Ahead). In A.B. Spellman’s 1966 classic “Black Music,” Taylor says, “I
never would have thought of playing the piano without thinking it out
along Ellington’s lines, and that’s the base.”
Yet, no one challenged “acceptable” music with the ferocity Taylor put
into each performance. Even when playing solo, his sets could last an
hour or more. He broke more than one piano in the process, pounding
keys, sometimes using his forearm or elbow. But for those who listened,
Taylor’s music revealed an inner structure, tone clusters, even echoes
of old-timey blues and the musical structures of jazz giant and Taylor
hero, Duke Ellington.
Cecil put it this way, “There is no music without order—music comes from
a man’s innards. But that order is not necessarily to any single
criterion of what order should be as imposed from the outside. Whether
that criterion is the song form or what some critic thinks jazz should
be. This is not a question, the, of “freedom” as opposed to
“non-freedom,” but rather it is a question of recognizing different
ideas and expressions of order.”
Said Jimmy Lyons, Cecil’s longtime alto sax frontman, whose expressive
intensity seamlessly complemented Taylor, “If you take (music) another
way than the way Cecil outlined it, then that’s cool with Cecil. That’s
the main thing I learned with Cecil, the music has to come from within
and not from any charts.” July 2018 Cecil-TaylorTaylor’s fearless
explorations revealed awesome improvising abilities and a lighting fast
mind, like with jazz giant Charlie Parker (1920-1955). “When I play the
piano I feel like my fingers are dancers on the keys,” said Taylor. In
fact, Taylor collaborated with Japanese butoh dancer Min Tanaka and
dancers Mikhail Baryshnikov and Heather Watts on a short ballet in 1979.
Taylor received artistic awards, which included money, a Guggenheim
Fellowship in 1973, a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 1991—which
enabled him to purchase his home in Brooklyn—and the Kyoto Prize in 2013.
In 2016, the Whitney Museum of American Art presented “Open Plan: Cecil
Taylor,” a dedication to his work. It was a five-part exhibition with
videos, audio, scores, photographs, and poetry with live performances by
over twenty of Taylor’s musical collaborators, as well as dancers,
playwrights, poets, filmmakers and writers.(see videos at
whitney.org/Exhibitions/OpenPlanCecilTaylor).
It’s hard to grasp Cecil Taylor’s impact. Rooted deep in African-based
musical forms (and feelings) Taylor tasted what the European classical
tradition had to offer but did not slam the door on the Western
tradition. His favorite Western composers were giants of modern
classical music—Schoenberg, Stravinsky, and others.
In an assessment of Taylor’s work from the classic “Four Lives in the
Bebop Business” (1966), poet and critic A. B. Spellman wrote, “There is
only one musician who has, by general agreement even among those who
have disliked his music, been able to incorporate all that he wants to
take from classical and modern Western composition into his own
distinctly individual kind of blues without in the least compromising
those blues, and that is Cecil Taylor, a kind of Bartok in reverse.”
Cecil Taylor once said of his music, “This music is the face of a drum.”
Cecil’s piano, a giant drum—the foundational instrument of African
American music—woke jazz up.
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July 17, 2018 in Arts & Culture, Black Liberation.
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