1964 Panel Discussion w/Cecil Taylor

[Mark Stryker]

Don't think this has been posted here before. Showed up in my Twitter feed today and thought I'd pass it along. An incomplete transcription of what must have been a fascinating discussion to witness live.

http://www.mattweston.com/cecilpanel.html

[JSngry]

Bold added

Taylor: Granted? You grant so easily…[MUSIC and general confusion]…You grant so easily but you feel nothing except like the plight of the six million Jews. When I stand here and say that there are certain things I want clarified, the first reaction is hostility, the first reaction is a feeling of guilt. And why is it guilt, what’s bothering you? I’m not going to lynch you, I’m not going to kill you and I’m not going to brainwash you. I’m going to ask you to accept me on MY TERMS, on my terms. I’m asking you to accept me on my terms because I am standing and I have experienced certain things that I want to be evaluated on historical facts, and I say as long as history books in America don’t give us that historical fact…You use the word theoretical – and it is not a matter of theory. My life is a matter of being of really, of, of, of, existence. I have to put up with your magnanimous nature. Why can’t I grant you what you are granting me? Nothing is granted me, nothing is granted me. The only thing is granted me is that which I work for – and they don’t grant me, I take it, I make it. That’s the whole point: the jazz musician has taken Western music and made of it what he wanted to make of it.

Game over, CT FTW.

[paul secor]

Cecil was on a different level back then and he still is.

Edited December 4, 2012 by paul secor

[Chuck Nessa]

I regret the positions of the white folks at that point. They had no clue.

Go Cecil.

[Quasimado]

Lennie was impolite to Cecil? Seems hard to imagine ...

Q

[robertoart]

I regret the positions of the white folks at that point. They had no clue.

Go Cecil.

How could you not be with Cecil?

Overton: I want to get back to Lennie Tristano..........

Edited December 4, 2012 by freelancer

[Mark Stryker]

At the heart of this discussion, at least where it starts, is the conflict over the value of improvisation vs. composition, with the classically minded composers, including jazz savvy Overton, insisting on a hierarchy that places notated music above improvisation, even as he and Calabro try to agree with Cecil that improvisation does have value. It's the bias in favor of Western (European-derived) classical music rearing its head in their inability to acknowledge that improvised music can be as emotionally and intellectually profound as Western notated music and their inability to fully grasp the cultural meaning and message of music that comes out of the African-American experience. But the conversation really turns when Cecil is accused by Calabro of being angry -- that's when he lets them have it. Unbelievable that later in the discussion Calabro can't seem to understand the inbred bias of using the term "serious music" in oposition to jazz. "You just can't help it," says CT.

Coda: Cecil says at one point: "I don't talk to Lennie Tristano -- who reads the Journal American." This appears to be a dig at Tristano but I'm not sure I totally understand the reference. The Journal American was a New York daily that grew out of the Hearst empire. So, I'm guessing perhaps it had a reputation for tabloid sensationalism or political conservatism? Can anyone shed light on that particular aside by Cecil?he only thing, I don’t talk to Lennie Tristano – who reads the Journal American. The only thing, I don’t talk to Lennie Tristano – who reads the Journal American

Edited December 4, 2012 by Mark Stryker

[robertoart]

Calabro: The idea that in Western culture we are concerned with developmental music...

There is implied in this comment, that Western (notational) music is 'a part of history', while 'improvisation' is a lesser, in the moment 'expression', somehow outside of it. It seems inevitable that in the next sentence Calabro rehearses the accusations of 'the angry Black man'.

Taylor then digs in, about 'George Washington', and his (Taylor's) Indigenous heritage, Taylor equating improvisation with 'oral history' and socialisation, as opposed to 'history' as written, or metaphorically 'notated'.

Taylor: I agree with you. You don’t want to spend that time. You have that prerogative, you know, and also that license, but, unfortunately, me, you know, in my entirety, living in America, I don't have the same kind of licenses that you have so I have to know, like, as much as the history books allow…and they don’t allow me to know too much. Fortunately, there is a thing – folklore – so there are certain things I know about my historical predecessors, if you will, that is not written in history books. Like um gee – I can’t exactly say that my great great great great grandfather was George Washington…

[AllenLowe]

I actually posted that at least 5 years ago - it's the Bennington thing, I think - what I found fun was that, at one point, Bernard Malamud makes a comment from the audience.

Edited December 4, 2012 by AllenLowe

[AllenLowe]

Mark- I don't remember the Journal American as being particularly one way or the other - just a mainstream, boring/respectable newspaper; which may be Cecil's point.

and re-reading that whole debate, I gotta say, in line with Chuck, that Cecil is so far ahead of them Whiteys as to really make them sound like Whiteys. Such Liberal self-delusion and naivete is a little embarassing to read after all these years.

[AllenLowe]

though beyond that I think there is a great deal of after-the-fact rationalization in Cecil's arguments, which weakens them. Meaning:1) after having praised musicians like Tristano, he is smarting from feeling the boot of rejection, as those guys had absolutely no regard for his music. Of course his response to that rejection is dishonest if understandable; 2) that he feels doubly rejected when he has praised certain white musicians who then rejected him (as with Tristano); which leads him to cite the cliché that whites, vis a ve jazz, can only imitate the feeling, which is of course nonsense (Albert Murray said something very similar to me years ago); the bitter truth is that imagination is a reasonable and sufficient substitution for experience, which is one thing that has leveled out the jazz playing field. Like it or not.

Edited December 5, 2012 by AllenLowe

[JSngry]

I just imagined a weeklong three-way with Beyonce & J-Lo.

My playing field has been more than leveled.

[Teasing the Korean]

Amazing that more than 50 years after the advent of recorded sound, academics could not understand that interpretation was as valid and lasting an artform as composition. I guess some of them still haven't gotten that.

[AllenLowe]

well, I think Cecil is right and wrong about composition; it is a form of improvisation, but there are other levels.

[robertoart]

Interesting how the debate of the times - and the one Cecil Taylor is fighting here - that Jazz was not a legitimate Canonical music - has now made way for another kind of debate. The one these days driven by embittered 'reverse racist' bemoaners.

[JSngry]

Interesting how the debate of the times - and the one Cecil Taylor is fighting here - that Jazz was not a legitimate Canonical music - has now made way for another kind of debate. The one these days driven by embittered 'reverse racist' bemoaners.

The real debate of the times - and these times, still - is that there really is a "black experience" that is uniquely black and deserves to be respected and reacted to as such. Not exclusively black, not omni-black, but uniquely black. Attempts to deny or equivocate that to what me is an obvious truth, that white folk will never fully/completely understand or experience that uniquely black experience (despite at times and places and ways overlapping into it, even being able to see into it, like Sarah Palin seeing Russia), and that attempts to claim or equivocate otherwise cannot help but be made from some conscious/subconscious/subliminal perception that one has the power to confer or deny "truth" on somebody else's claimed uniqueness of experience, i.e. - that one has claimed a "god"-like power to create and define another person's reality for them, and in spite of them.

To put it more simply, white folk invented the Venn Diagram, but they don't seem to be able to objectively apply it to themselves.

I mean, what part of "some - a lot, even - but not all" is so hard to accept?

[AllenLowe]

I agree that there is a "black experience" - but I think that music is much more than experience.

[AllenLowe]

otherwise half the planet would play like Charlie Parker.

[Teasing the Korean]

otherwise half the planet would play like Charlie Parker.

Half the jazz musicians still try to.

[Quasimado]

otherwise half the planet would play like Charlie Parker.

Half the jazz musicians still try to.

Which says so much for Bird, the great musician.

Q

[paul secor]

otherwise half the planet would play like Charlie Parker.

Half the jazz musicians still try to.

Which says so much for Bird, the great musician.

Q

Or much about a lot of jazz musicians.

[robertoart]

I agree that there is a "black experience" - but I think that music is much more than experience.

Yes, so there is also sound and notes. But those sounds and notes are reflective of an intersubjective experience. What White tenor players in the late Fifties and Sixties had a sound to compare to the multitudes of great Black tenor players of the time?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=xyvdXUixo2o

[JSngry]

Cecil's talking about face-to-face every second of every day real life and using music to make his point (and his music). The people he's trying to make his point to can't handle/get to that whatsoever, so they keep trying to turn it back into just a music thing. "We've suffered too, so we can relate, therefore we can play, just like you! Yes we CAN has jazz!!!! Why you so ANGRY?!?!?!?!" That is so not the point.

Branford seems to have taken the bait (and chased it down with the Kool-Aid) and is making it more or less just about the music. Fail, Marsailis. (and considering where the discussion has devolved to everywhere, Fail, humans).

Take care of life, and the music will take care of itself. Otherwise, no.

[robertoart]

Well no actually. The point Marsailis is making re-Coltrane and Brecker is exactly as the point you make about Cecil in the first paragraph. Just trade White panelists circa 1964 for the Brecker audience.

Marsailis is saying the feeling of the music as produced by the lived experience of Coltrane - and the band - can't be distilled down to an essence of skilled notes and sound. It was too confrontational for that, (and correspondingly more sublime).

[Noj]

Odd. I like some Brecker, but comparing him to Trane is...well, no contest.

I'll never understand why some seem to only appreciate music if it's played by those with whom they share their cultural/racial heritage. That doesn't have shit to do with how I hear and feel music. I just listen, and I like it when it sounds good. I don't interject my whiteness into my listening or need my whiteness reflected by the ones making the sounds.

Edited December 8, 2012 by Noj