April 8, 2018
ALL THAT JAZZ #51
Cecil Taylor (1929-2018)As this website's jazz observer, I wish I had something wise to say about Cecil Taylor, the revolutionary pianist who died the other day at the age of 89. Something that would help those of you who have never listened to him gain entry to his dense, percussive and raucous music; or, perhaps provide some new insight or perspective to someone who has. But I've got nothing. So many critics and musicians who I admire have sung Taylor's praises that I tried for years to listen to his recordings (large bands, small groups and solo) in the hope that I, too, would become enlightened. It never happened. I could never understand (or even enjoy) his recordings, something I chalked up to my own failures as a listener, specifically, my own need for familiar "handles" to grab on to as his torrents of sound washed over me...a recognizable melody, a fixed beat, a home key, anything. Of course, I'm guessing if it had any of those things, then it wouldn't have been Cecil's music.
In any event, about 20 years ago, Taylor was playing in my city, and more out of duty than enthusiasm, I bought a ticket to go hear him. (By myself...I didn't want to subject any of my friends to what I was sure would be an hour or so of incomprehensible sound.) Well, what happened that night astounded me. In his tribute to Taylor this week, The New Yorker critic Richard Brody, describes his own night at a concert in the mid-80's that almost perfectly captures my experience...except that (1) Brody was already a fan; and (2) I've seen Sonny Rollins present some "musical exertions" that were equally mighty and generous:
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.
When Taylor finished, I was somehow emotionally elated and drained at the same time, physically energized and exhausted, burning to hear more yet feeling that I'd never again experience music as powerful and meaningful. After the concert, I went back to Taylor's recordings...and nothing,...the same inability to connect that I had always had. After a few weeks of trying, I gave up for good and hadn't listened to Cecil Taylor again until I started writing this entry.
So, as I said at the top, I wish I had something wise or helpful to say about the great Cecil Taylor...but I don't (except that I still think it's my fault, not his).
Posted by Foos at April 8, 2018 7:32 AM