The Brooklyn Rail

There is no such thing as difficult music, but there are difficult ideas, paths, disciplines. In a materialist, consumerist society that on both the political right and left sees the dollar as the fundamental avatar of all human activity, valuing things like human relationships, love, creativity, process (not goals), and questions (not answers) is inherently difficult for the general public and mainstream critics to grasp. Look no further than arts coverage in our prestige publications for the proof. Against that was Cecil Taylor, the monumental improvising performer of the twentieth and early twenty-first century. As he told Philip Freeman in their first conversation, “I’m difficult because I don’t want anything else except absolute art, that’s why I exist.”

Freeman writes about music—this is his fourth nonfiction book after Running the Voodoo Down: The Electric Music of Miles Davis and Ugly Beauty: Jazz in the 21st Century—he previously published the Burning Ambulance magazine and now has a record label and newsletter under that imprint, and has recently started administering the back catalogue of the Leo Records label on Bandcamp (Taylor’s beguiling spoken word album, Chinampas, was released on Leo in 1987 and will eventually be back in print digitally). This biography came out of Freeman’s coverage of the Whitney Museum’s Open Plan: Cecil Taylor retrospective and performances in the spring of 2016, two years before Taylor’s death.

Titled after a 1980 live album on Hat Hut, this is a first full telling of Taylor’s personal and artistic story. It’s no negative criticism to see this as an introduction, it’s not just worthwhile because it is the first Taylor biography; it’s an informed and informative look at the artist. Taylor was an extraordinary and unique musician, there are myriad ways to look at his work, and his art is so deep that it will never have an ultimate explanation, a last word, a single comprehensive look. We have dozens of books on Beethoven, we deserve dozens on Taylor. And Taylor’s stature is equal to Beethoven’s. They are similar in a fundamental way in that their music expresses a striving to break out of temporal and material states into something more eternal, and that comes through in both their most violent and peaceful moments.

Beethoven was a composer who was also a phenomenal improviser, he directed himself toward notating his musical ideas to be played by other musicians and ensembles. Taylor was a phenomenal improviser who was a composer, he notated his work so that musicians he worked with had some structural guidance to stay with the great man’s piano playing. He played the piano like no one else (in the booklet to The Complete Candid Recordings of Cecil Taylor and Buell Neidlinger on Mosaic Records, bassist Neidlinger wrote about playing an acetate of a Taylor recording for Glenn Gould. He recalled Gould saying, “This is perhaps the most formidable pianism these ears have heard: this is the Great Divide of American piano playing.”), but he was an overall performer, reciting his poetry and dancing in performances. These weren’t elements he integrated from the outside in, but three physical manifestations of the drive within him (one of the books we deserve is a collection of Taylor’s poetry, though as this book makes clear he often dashed it off on loose paper and then left it for anyone who might want to take it, or even to be discarded).

The question that artists’ biographies wrestle with is, what exactly is that drive, and how did it come to be? How did the life of the child lead to the work of the artist? Sometimes that’s clear and direct, others the details of the life are evocative but there’s no obvious causation. With Taylor, it’s more than just growing up playing the piano and getting extensive professional training in a musician’s toolkit because he wanted to, as he did at the New England Conservatory of Music, it’s why as a public performer he wasn’t playing Chopin, or standards, but exploring from his very first recordings.

The answer is not quite there in this book (again, much more remains to be written about Taylor), but the rest is. Freeman’s narration brings in the larger contexts of mid-twentieth-century America and places Taylor within the vibrant power and unsettled (and at times dangerous for a Black American) politics of the era. This will be engrossing for anyone just learning about Taylor, and for the experienced listener it adds substantial weight to his music to discover things like how Taylor was at the Peekskill riots in 1949, when a Paul Robeson performance brought out racist reactionary thugs—this one date in time weaves together Taylor, the civil rights movement, Communist and labor politics, and one of the single greatest American artists in this country’s history. It’s not hard to feel these elements combusting into a need to surpass standard forms of expression.

Taylor’s time in New York City in the late-fifties–early-sixties also comes across as an essential piece of the enormous and complex whole. This was when he was making his first recordings, playing in the on-stage band for Jack Gelber’s important play The Connection, hounded by musical controversies, working as a dishwasher. Taylor’s social world was made up less of musicians than artists and poets, especially Bob Kaufman, living examples of ways outside of music.

It is also immensely rewarding to read the details of Taylor’s performance and recording collaborations with other musicians, most prominently the wonderful alto saxophonist Jimmy Lyons, and bassist William Parker and drummer Tony Oxley, with whom he formed the Feel Trio, in my mind Taylor’s finest ensemble. Freeman is enthusiastic about and skillfully descriptive of the music, but leaves most deeper analysis to other critics whom he quotes throughout the book (including my own review of Taylor’s first Brooklyn performance, “Cecil Taylor, Home at Last,” in the July-August 2012 issue of this journal).

Freeman outlines the circumstances but doesn’t find, or demonstrate, any explicit keys. But with Taylor, he doesn’t have to. There is bountiful material for transcription and musicological analysis, but sensitive listening, the kind where you put aside expectations and concentrate on the music and hear how it starts and where it goes, shows how Taylor builds a structure of musical events through time. After several years of playing that sounded like he was exploding song forms from the inside out, by the mid-sixties he had found his voice, using a reduced number of small musical structures as building blocks for massive expression and experiences (the 1962 live album Nefertiti, the Beautiful One Has Come is a key document). Although of an entirely different style, he wasn’t unlike his contemporaries in Steve Reich and Philip Glass and Morton Feldman in using minimal means to create maximal ends.

The endless freshness of his music is beyond belief, everything sounds like it was made yesterday, and that he could spend decades playing the same rising and falling arpeggiated figure and making it sound renewed each time boggles the mind. How to explain that could likely be beyond words, but Freeman’s book is an essential start in essaying it.