Tag Archives: Cecil Taylor

The greatness of Cecil Taylor (1929-2018)

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Cecil Taylor, one of the most important musicians of our time, and one of the pioneers of what is roughly called "free" or avant-garde jazz, died on April 5, 2018, at 89 years old.  Ben Ratliff has written an obituary at the New York Times, and Ethan Iverson has written an appreciation at his blog Do The Math.

I'm not going to write extensively about his music or life here; I'm just going to give links to a few of my favorite Taylor works, mostly ones that I am intimately familiar with.  (Well, I ended up writing a fair bit about some of them.)  They're chosen primarily for their intrinsic greatness, but with the main purpose of getting people who may not be familiar with Taylor in touch with his music, so the choice may be biased a little bit towards more "accessible" pieces.  I've been toying with the idea of a post, perhaps titled "Canon and Playlist," which would include a personal canon of the music commonly referred to as "jazz".  One idea would be to include just "masterpieces of the highest order" --- you know, stuff on the level of the late Beethoven piano sonatas, Janacek's "On an Overgrown Path", etc.  (So in jazz, e.g. "Parker's Mood" (Charles Parker), the album "Saxophone Colossus" (Sonny Rollins), Lester Young's greatest performances with the Count Basie Orchestra and with smaller groups in the 1930s---that sort of thing.)  The first two or three pieces I'll link here were would be my top Cecil choices for such a list (where they definitely belong). Anyone seriously interested in music owes it to themselves to listen to these pieces, several times if you don't connect the first time. You will probably find yourself richly rewarded. "Straight masterpieces", as someone said in a different context. If it weren't for the fact that Taylor grew up in Queens and settled in Brooklyn, I'd be tempted to refer to it as real Uptown Funk as well.

1. "Bulbs" from "Into the Hot", one side of a 1962 LP issued under the name of Gil Evans, but with the "Into the Hot" side composed and performed by Taylor and his group (the other, much less consequential, side, "Out of the Cool", was by Johnny Carisi). Evans was a great arranger, known especially for his work with Miles Davis, but I think he's generally considered to have acted merely as producer for this session. By turns, and often simultaneously, funky, sardonic, spooky, transcendently beautiful. Make sure and listen all the way to the end...where some amazingly beautiful things happen involving lines made of hierarchies of ascending arpeggios, calling to or layered over each other, decelerating into some calm after the high-energy drive of the central portion of the piece, then crystallizing into a hard-to-describe, somewhat raunchy, sardonic, and joyously dancing bit of riffishness, expanding again into transcendence as the arpeggiated lines layer over the cyclic riffing, then come apart centrifugally into jagged notes and long tones relaxing toward silence as they ascend, fading, into the empyrean.  Or whatever. Just don't miss it.

Cecil Taylor, piano; Jimmy Lyons, alto sax; Archie Shepp, tenor sax; Henry Grimes, bass; Sunny Murray, drums.

Like many people, probably, I was turned on to "Bulbs" long ago by a piece collected in Amiri Baraka (then writing as Leroi Jones)'s book "Black Music" (at Barnes and Noble; at Amazon) which reviewed the whole Taylor side of "Into the Hot/Out of the Cool" and singled out "Bulbs" especially. I picked it up as a teenager as part of a three-LP Impulse sampler, "Energy Essentials", being sold as a cutout, which also featured things like a 10-15 minute sampler from the alternate take of Coltrane's "Ascension", and various pieces by Albert Ayler, Archie Shepp, and such. I also highly recommend the other "Into the Hot" pieces. Some motives or melodic moves from "Bulbs" also appear in the other pieces. Because it is more of a contrast with "Bulbs", I recommend starting with "Mixed", where the embedded video below will take you on first click, and then replaying the video from the beginning if you want to hear "Pots" as well. "Mixed" adds Ted Curson on trumpet and Roswell Rudd on trombone, and starts in a low-key, slow, out-of-tempo vein, with muted trumpet as well as Rudd's tromobone in the mix, spacious textures and much attention to varieties of timbre, slightly reminiscent of certain veins of 20th century classical music, then morphs into a very pretty ballad episode (I hear a slight suggestion of "All the Things You Are" in places, but would be interested to know if there are any more clearly recognizable standards being alluded to here), then is taken over by a repeating, somewhat sardonic riff, which alternates with a three-note ascending chromatic line (this is one reference to the "Bulbs" material, where the line is one note longer, a chromatic 1-2-3-2), develops more complexity and segues into a superbly improvised piano-and sax duet. Great stuff from Archie Shepp on tenor. And on and on... I would class "Mixed" as a masterpiece also.

2. The second unmissable masterpiece (well, let's count "Mixed" and call it the third) I'm going to recommend is "Indent", a solo piano performance recorded in concert at Antioch College in Ohio in 1973. It starts out with incredibly funky pentatonic motives, layered, developed, combined with a more chordal "second theme" (perhaps, and with variants), and these and other materials that are introduced are built up into an increasingly complex structure which ends up spinning into intense and dissonant flurries of note-clusters. This kind of cycle is repeated a few times in the piece, with different thematic material, and also with recurrences of earlier material. A masterful composed-and-improvised sonata. If the dissonant flurries put you off at first (which won't necessarily be the case!), just hope that they will make more sense on repeated listenings, and know that there are calmer and more consonant passages, often of great harmonic and melodic beauty, on the way.

For more solo piano of this sort, Silent Tongues (Live at Montreux) was in heavy rotation (on the sorts of stations that played this stuff at all, i.e. WEMU (Eastern Michigan University) and WUOM (University of Michigan)) when I was first getting into Taylor's music.  I recommend repeated listening to one of his solo records until it is fully appreciated, though, rather than skipping around; Indent was the one that got me into it and is still my favorite.  Once you dig it, there are many more to explore...

Now, for further listening, I'll embed a few more things that I'm familiar with and love.

3. To represent early (i.e. late 1950s) Cecil, here's a 1959 take on Cole Porter's Love for Sale with Buell Neidlinger on bass and Denis Charles on drums. I wonder if anyone bought this for the hilarious (in context) noirsploitation cover expecting some smoky late-night make-out music to play when bringing a date back to their pad...I hope so. The introduction is remarkably prescient of the kind of playing Taylor was to do in later work such as Indent that makes no reference to standards, but the fusion of this with subtly-transformed but recognizable standards-and-bebop style and material is a beautiful thing. (It is further advanced in that direction than on some of his records from a few years earlier.)

4. In the abovementioned appreciation, Ethan Iverson is of course right to cite the 1960 This Nearly Was Mine, also with the Neidlinger/Charles rhythm team, as a supreme Cecil achievement in the realm of reimagined standards.  Definitely another unmissable masterpiece.  Mosaic Records reissued most of the Candid sessions with Neidlinger, Charles, and Taylor (and often Archie Shepp on tenor and Lyons on alto), including this performance, and this set is a highly recommended collection, once you have Into the Hot and Indent, for getting further into still relatively accessible Taylor.  Unfortunately, although I bought the CD version when it came out, it is now out of print and used copies seem to be very expensive, so getting the individual Candid albums seems to be the way to go now.  The World of Cecil Taylor, Air, Cell Walk For Celeste, Jumpin' Punkins, New York City R&B.  (There also appear to be some multi-album sets but I am afraid these might be fly-by-night European ripoff editions.)

5. For more great ensemble Taylor, still relatively accessible, I recommend as the next step after Into the Hot, the 1966 Blue Note album Conquistador, specifically the title piece. A long form, well-structured and full of variety, with lots of beautiful episodes and material, and great improvisation. Early in the piece there is one of my favorite Jimmy Lyons alto solos. Lyons often brings beboppish lines into Cecil's free framework, often to great effect, but sometimes (not in anything I've linked above, I think!) I can find them a bit repetitive or unimaginative (as standard bebop lines can also become on occasion). I love the transition from an episode of long, pretty trumpet (or is it fluegelhorn?) lines by Bill Dixon (at 5'37 he seems to begin to quote Miles Davis on the Davis/Gil Evans Sketches of Spain, but takes the line elsewhere!), to funky vamps beginning at 7'20 or so, behind an appealing rising melody, aimed at gradually bringing the energy back up, and ultimately taking it into a top-notch Taylor solo. This solo is pretty intense, with a lot of the lines that sound like flurries of note-clusters, but interspersed on fairly short time-scales with short bits of other material...and the control and variety of structure in the intense fast lines is great. The beautiful rising melody-over-vamp recurs momentarily to mark the end of this solo, and things go on from there.

The other long track, With(Exit) is also superb. I have had this on LP, again since teenage years, but this remastered version sounds pretty great even on Youtube... I may have to buy the CD.

The other ensemble Blue Note recording of the era, Unit Structures, is also excellent.  It seems to have gotten more attention for a while.  For instance, Martin Williams included Enter Evening (Soft Line Structure) to represent Taylor in the Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz that he edited, a sort of gesture toward establishing a jazz canon, back in 1973.  That piece (the second track on Unit Structures) is mostly slow-paced and out of strict tempo, mellower and more reminiscent of European-rooted avant-garde classical music and atonality, than much of what Taylor was doing at the time (though I don't mean to suggest that avant-garde "classical" music was its primary inspiration or that that whiff of it is very strong, or that it is strictly atonal).  The first piece, "Steps", on the other hand, gets into an intense alto improvisation (I am not sure at the moment whether it is Lyons or Ken McIntyre) that might remind one at places of Albert Ayler, and reminds me of Joseph Jarman's intense sax work on the Art Ensemble of Chicago's masterpiece Fanfare for the Warriors (also the name of the album, which as a whole is also a masterpiece).  The solo on "Steps" is somewhat in the "screaming" vein of free jazz...not really something I would recommend as accessible to someone new to Taylor and avant-garde jazz although you never know.  (Ditto for the sax work on Fanfare.)  I am enjoying Unit Structures a lot and will put it into heavier listening rotation if I find time to.  (As I write this, around the 30 minute mark of the whole-LP Youtube video of Unit Strucures, Jimmy Lyons is combining is free boppish lines with more avant-garde stuff in a great, melodically inventive vein.)  But for those new to Taylor I recommend sticking to Conquistador at first.

6.  Finally, if you really want to sample a full-bore, hour-long exorcism and communal communion with the spirit world, Streams and Chorus of Seed, the only track on the live album Dark To Themselves (recorded at the Ljublana Jazz Festival on June 18, 1976) is your ticket. If you are just trying to learn to dig Taylor for the first time, you might want to skip this, but not to go here or somewhere similar is not to give a full picture of Taylor. Besides Taylor on piano it features most prominently the tenor sax of David S. Ware, as well as Jimmy Lyons on alto, Raphe Malik on trumpet, and Marc Edwards on drums. You will probably want headphones for this one---use good ones, as I doubt cheap earbuds will be up to reproducing these sounds accurately enough. Watch the volume, though. The screaming sax of David Ware, especially, on this can be a bit hard to take particularly since it goes on for a long time---but it is a powerful statement (or at any rate, powerful--I am not sure "statement" is the right word) and there is simultaneously often a lot of interest going on in Cecil's piano to focus on. The LP that was the initially-issued version was a heavily cut version of this---the whole thing could have been issued on a two-LP set but perhaps it was thought it would be too much for people. Indeed I am having to take a break from this at the 37 minute mark or so. The CD edition I'm linking to the Youtube upload of includes, I think, the whole performance and has much better sound than the LP. I am still not quite sure what to make of this performance overall, but it has much to offer and is definitely pure, uncompromising Taylor. But I'm sure what to make of Taylor overall: a first-rank master whose creations will be with us, I hope, for as long as humans exist and love music.

Ethan Iverson plays Hall Overton's Polarities #1

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Via Ethan Iverson's blog Do the Math, a panel discussion at The Jazz Loft Project, of jazz and classical composer, arranger and pianist Hall Overton. Iverson kicks it off with a superb performance of Overton's classical piece "Polarities #1" (begins around 2'00 in the video).  A performance that should not be missed. Some more of my thoughts follow the video.

The Jazz Loft Project presents "Hall Overton: Out of the Shadows" from Center for Documentary Studies on Vimeo.

This is a wonderful piece of music and a superb performance of it. To my ear there are hints of jazz, especially at the beginning. The first two measures definitely sound like they could be the opening of a jazz ballad with relatively "advanced" harmonies, and the descending figure in the bass in the third measure sounds very Monkish.  [Update: this figure reminded me of a specific phrase in a Monk composition, which I suspected was "Nutty".  Sure enough, it's the first part of the falloff that Monk sometimes adds to the end of one of the first phrases in "Nutty".  Not only that, but the opening of Polarities seems related to the phrase to which Monk adds this falling line.  Though very different harmonically, there's some similarity in melodic profile and rhythm.]  A few other spots have that "advanced jazz ballad" feel.  While Overton was on the faculty at Juillard and apparently also taught at Yale and the New School, most of us jazz fans know Overton primarily as the arranger for the Town Hall big band concert featuring Monk, so a Monk reference is hardly a farfetched supposition.  The piece is roughly atonal or at least in very unstable tonality, but not twelve-tone, and very expressively balances atonal features with what seem to me passages with stronger harmonic implications.  The musical language often seems to me poised between Debussy and Schoenberg.  The sequence of chords around 3'19 to 3'33 in the video remind me of Debussy in his more declamatory frame of mind, while some of the passages preceding and following it remind me of his lyrical side.  I was quite surprised to be strongly reminded, around 3'39-4'00,  especially in the chord alternation at 3'44, 3'50 and 3'56 and melodic line connecting these bits, of Cecil Taylor's fantastic 1973 solo piano performance "Indent".  To my mind, Indent is some of the most important and enjoyable music to come out of the twentieth century, and if you don't know Taylor or have listened to other pieces and not "gotten" him, I'd say Indent or the early-60's band-as-jazz-orchestra side "Into the Hot" (the other side of the Impulse LP is Gil Evans' "Out of the Cool"), are the places to start.  Accessible but building in intensity and complexity.  I recall reading that Taylor intensely studied twentieth-century classical scores early in his career, so I guess it's not impossible that there was some direct influence of Overton's classical work on Taylor's composition or vice versa, especially since Overton was active in jazz circles in New York at just this time (mid to late 50s), but accidental convergence is just as likely.  (Though Indent is from 1973, the "vice versa" possibility is because Taylor might have developed some of these ideas very early even though they may not have been appearing in his performances at the time, which in the late 50s were still often based on jazz standards.)  Iverson recently linked the transcipt of a 1964 panel discussion between Overton, Taylor, and others that grows somewhat contentious, making this perceived momentary connection between their musics even more startling to me.

Iverson also points out that this piece appears, played by Robert Help, on a collection from the 1960s, "New Music for the Piano", available from New World Records, and he suspects this is the only appearance of Overton's classical music on CD.  Based on this performance of Polarities, that is a real shame and I hope it is rectified soon.  Also based on this performance, Iverson would be a fantastic pianist to do it.  He's not just playing the notes here, he has gotten inside the music and it's gotten inside him: each phrase is expressed as if he composed the music himself.  He gets a fantastic, bright and ringing but not harsh tone out of this piano, and can give it nuances to bring out or contrast different lines. The clarity and control are astonishing too.  Really beautiful music-making from both Overton and Iverson.  I hope we can hear more of this combination sometime.