True original
Cecil Taylor's music is often compared to musical greats, but he brings a style of his own that has stunned the jazz world and is capable of the same deed in Albuquerque this week
By Michael Halstead / Special to The Tribune
April 1, 2005
In the world of music, there are entertainers and then there are artists.
Avant-garde jazz pianist Cecil Taylor is firmly in that second camp.
"His music is comparable to the art of abstract expressionists," says Tom Guralnick, executive director of Outpost Productions Inc. "Chagall, Van Gogh but, in particular, Jackson Pollock comes to mind when trying to find a comparison."
"There is no question Taylor is a godfather of the avant-garde," he adds. "His high place in the history of jazz is cemented."
A partnership between Outpost Productions and the University of New Mexico Department of Music brings Taylor - a Guggenheim Fellow, National Endowment of the Arts Jazz Master and recipient of the MacArthur Genius Award - to Albuquerque for a five-day residency.
The residency includes a trio concert at the National Hispanic Cultural Center, a documentary screening at the Guild Theater, a spoken-word performance at the Outpost Performance Space and appearances at UNM's John D. Robb Composers Symposium.
A notoriously heavy practice schedule and a reputation for being media shy kept Taylor unavailable for an interview.
"This is a major figure in 20th-century music," says Christopher Shultis, regents professor of music at UNM. "The only Albuquerque performance I can think of that is comparable is John Cage's performance in 1988."
Comparisons to the exalted experimentalist composer Cage are apropos. Like Cage, Taylor, 72, was a classically trained musician steeped in the traditions and techniques of 20th century music, only to turn abruptly and cut his own purely original swath in modern music.
With the insistent encouragement of his mother, Taylor began his piano studies at age 5. At 23 he studied musical theory and composition at the New England Conservatory of Music, applying himself to the works of Igor Stravinsky and other modern classical composers.
Taylor's musical appetite, however, was too omnivorous to be confined to any one genre as his own compositions drew inspiration from classical traditions, Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk, and even the Tin Pan Alley pop of Cole Porter.
"He's an iconoclast," says Chris Felver, director of the Taylor documentary "All the Notes," which shows at the Guild Cinema this weekend in conjunction with Taylor's residency. "Cecil is as inventive as Stravinsky. He could play anything from rock 'n' roll to Mozart if he wanted to, but the man plays purely what's coming from his heart and his mind. He's a true original."
Taylor's skill and originality revealed themselves in the late 1950s. Fresh from the conservatory, he was already leading his own jazz combos, making his debut splash with a six-week engagement at New York City's celebrated Five Spot Cafe and pricking up critics' ears with his records "Jazz Advance" and "Looking Ahead."
Taylor and jazz saxophonist Ornette Coleman would simultaneously usher in a controversial, but nonetheless brave new era in jazz music known as "Free Jazz." By the early '60s, Taylor had ditched recording variations on jazz and pop standards, devoting himself exclusively to his own compositions.
After a six-year hiatus from the studio, Taylor stunned the jazz world with his seminal 1966 Blue Note label record "Unit Structures," a recording that, contrary to its title, abandoned all the customary structures and affectations associated with contemporary jazz. The record shattered the standard notions of melody and form, exploring a deep range of emotions with complex, impressionistic murals of atonal sound and eccentric rhythms.
Although Taylor's music sits solidly outside the mainstream, academia and the avant-garde cognoscenti widely consider him a giant among 20th-century composers. Taylor has taught at the University of Wisconsin, Antioch College, Glassboro State College and Mills College.
"Cecil Taylor has redefined the world of music using his own radical vocabulary in much the same way Pollock's work altered the definition of art with his paintings," Guralnick says.
Like Pollock's bold pouring technique of drips and splashes on the canvas, Taylor's technique of densely packed clusters of rhythm and sound are often concisely but muscularly delivered, with Taylor sometimes using open palms, elbows and forearms on the keyboard and occasionally breaking strings and keys.
Taylor's "radical vocabulary" discards traditional musical notation and scales for his own and emphasizes an egalitarian approach between improvisation and composition. While Taylor's music sounds to the untrained ear to be pure improvisation, his music is highly structured and intuitively informed by his classical training and jazz influences, delivered in his trademark physical style.
"It's not exactly improvisation, but more like spontaneous composition," Guralnick says.
Taylor's music and his personality are as elusive as they are complex as he refuses to be defined, even as a musician.
"I think he would object to being defined as belonging to the free jazz movement, or any movement," says Felver, who gained unprecedented access to the reticent, recondite musician for his documentary.
"He's amazingly erudite and diverse," Felver says, stressing that dance, architecture and literature, among other subjects, also have a significant influence on Taylor's music. "He sees himself as a poet as much as a musician."
Taylor has increasingly used spoken word and dance in his performances over the years. Regardless of labels, Taylor's solo recordings are described by the National Endowment of the Arts as "some of the most challenging and rewarding to listen to in all of jazz."
"Taylor makes me think of Artur Rubenstein," Shultis says, referring to the famed classical keyboardist whose skill is widely considered to have improved as he aged into his late '80s.
"Look at what he has done since 1955," says an incredulous Shultis, alluding to Taylor's prolific musical catalog, "and at 72, he shows absolutely no sign of letting up or slowing down."
Guralnick agrees: "I know this probably sounds obnoxious, but seeing Cecil Taylor is the difference between witnessing an artwork in progress and simply being entertained. . . . Seeing Taylor perform is not your typical passive music listening experience.
"It requires actively open ears and a whole lot of gratitude."
http://www.abqtrib.com/albq/fe_music...664918,00.html
) to my musical obsessions. When we were outside of Chicago visiting her family sometime in the 80's, CT was playing the Chicago Fest. I usually went to Grant Park by myself but I suggested that she come along for this. It was the Unit with William Parker, Jimmy Lyons and (iirc) Rashid Bakr. Needless to say she got totally snared in the whirlwind and a good time was had by all.
Linear Mode
