AllenLowe Posted October 18, 2020 Report Share Posted October 18, 2020 (edited) we have about 3 days left in the Fund Raiser. Remember all the small children whose prickly heat will harm their lives without your contribution. I thought the following, my entry on Cecil Taylor, might be of help: You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To Cecil Taylor 1956 Though I feel certain that, were he still alive, Cecil Taylor would scorn me for saying so, his desire and ability to stick to musical principal in his early professional years, in the face of repeated rejection and some downright nastiness, took great courage. To say he was ahead of his time is to put it way too mildly. He was just one of those artists who understood, who constructed a personal musical methodology out of an unorthodox sensibility and intense - maybe too intense - self awareness. This was, I would guess, his way of tapping into the labyrinth of his own mind for the sake of real-time translation and transference of some little-known (at least for the jazz world) musical truths. I do have a feeling that, like Thelonious Monk, he had no real personal choice but to do so, and was in some ways trapped by the kind of stubborn individuality that sometimes masquerades as principle. So he is like an example to us all, a portrait of the artist who does as he does simply because he knows of no other way to do it. At the time Taylor recorded Cole Porter’s You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To we might say he was in his ur-harmonic period, still concerned with explaining, in artistic terms, the fragmentary way the mind approaches the wholeness of certain visible yet pliant forms, from painting to language - though in Taylor’s case what he was confronting were songs and song form, the piano, and jazz soloing. James Joyce once argued that the way he wrote, the way he drew out the essence of experience and consciousness and reordered them, was much more “realistic” than than the ways of more socially “accurate” writers, much truer to the reality of life as actually lived. Taylor might have argued that the way in which he exposed song elements - their bits and bites of harmony, with pieces of their melody in harmonic relief - was much more faithful than more “ordered” ways of jazz performance, much more akin to lived, artistic experience, and so to the truest ideals of jazz improvisation. No one in jazz except, perhaps, Lennie Tristano and Bud Powell, had, in 1956, any equivalent sense of the kind of intuitive artistry that sends one down the potential rabbit hole of instinct and consciousness. Playing standards that year with “standard” harmony, Taylor seemed to be starting and finishing at the same time. He was visiting “the tradition” at the same time that he was rejecting it, not exploring it so much as trying to see how much of it might still be of musical use to him. In the long term - though here he shows a surprisingly keen grasp of the possibilities of improvised line - the answer was “not much.” He never seems bored, but instead appears restless on the edge of disdainful, for all that such songs required of him. In the year before Ornette Coleman completely revealed himself to delegates of the jazz profession Cecil Taylor chose to take the first steps toward exiting that world, preparing to go so far inside himself that succeeding performances and recordings would seem less like self-introduction than professional withdrawal (assuming, of course, in a way that Taylor would not, that the profession we are referring to was Jazz Musician). And yes, that was a brave thing for him to do in that place and at that time. No one in jazz, in 1956, on any side of the artistic fence, was near-ready for that kind of self-exposure. Edited October 18, 2020 by AllenLowe Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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