Passionate Taylor Grooves

On Monday, January 23rd at one o'clock in the afternoon, Harvard's own radio station WHRB 95.3 FM will broadcast a special thirty-hour feature on the music and life of contemporary pianist Cecil Taylor.

One of WHRB's traditional reading period Orgies, this program will cover Taylor's 40-year career in depth through recordings from 1955 to the present, as well as a series of interviews with Taylor and other musicians associated with him.

Perhaps the most virtuosic American musician alive, Taylor has achieved recognition within the musical world for his immense technical skill combined with an aggressive, passionate approach to improvisation.

Emerging from two very separate traditions, Cecil Taylor's music is difficult to classify, beyond calling it sui generis. A graduate of the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, Taylor draws deeply upon the twentieth-century European art music school of composers such as Bela Bartok, Arnold Schoenberg, and Igor Stravinsky. However, his professional experience from an early age came in the jazz world, the network of bars and nightclubs where the African-American musical idiom was being developed.

A musical rebel from the start, Cecil Taylor was either ignored or actively denounced by much of the jazz world when he first started performing in the mid-1950's.

Soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy, who visited and performed at Harvard last spring, remembers how difficult it was to gain critical and social acceptance for Taylor's musical innovations. "We had almost the whole world against us," said Lacy, "we had more rehearsals than gigs, and there were about two, or three, or four people that would follow us around from gig to gig. That was our public, really...There were musicians who would walk off the bandstand when Cecil would walk in a club."

Just what was so radical about Taylor's music? In essence, Cecil Taylor broke every rule, and smashed every convention that had been held sacred by the jazz world. His all-out assault on the hapless, half-tuned pianos that sat on the bandstands of most clubs meant that he not only broke the accepted standards of melody, harmony, and song structure, but also countless pianos themselves.

In performance, Taylor attacks the keys with astonishing speed and strength in an unrelenting, jagged dance that races up and down the instrument. Through his incredible volume and energy, Taylor pushes and prods the musicians he plays with to the limits of their own technique and creativity.

Unfortunately, as with most truly artistic music, in order to listen to any Cecil Taylor at all, let alone thirty straight hours of it, one has to really want to. Taylor's music is both emotionally draining and almost physically demanding. There is simply no way to listen to it passively, as the listener is constantly bombarded with screaming sheets of note-clusters, unexpected exclamations, and a frenetic rhythmic pulse that makes sitting still virtually impossible.

The chaotic energy of much of Taylor's music is periodically interrupted by periods of intense calm, but even the calmer moments require concentration to grasp the tantalizing hints of romantic melodies that flit from underneath his fingertips.

Acceptance of Taylor's music is a somewhat embarassing process. What makes it so is the emotional extremes that it insistently conveys. Yet the result of acceptance is revelation, plain and simple. Cecil Taylor's music is not ugliness made art; rather, it is the essence of beauty revealed.

Like that of Miles Davis or Thelonious Monk, Cecil Taylor's music is the result of a very intense, powerful individual personality. As a man, Taylor dominates the people around him, whether in conversation or musical interaction. In an interview, he will inevitably take control of the proceedings out of the reporter's hands, as this reporter recently found out.

When asked about a specific album recorded in 1969, Taylor somehow managed to turn the conversation into an expose on the insidious linkage between Ronald Reagan's presidency and the fame of trumpeter Wynton Marsalis. Asked about his practice regimen, Taylor simply answered, "Trance."

The challenges of interacting with such a complex, larger-than-life personality are magnified in a musical setting. The WHRB orgy will feature interviews with six of Taylor's former sidemen, including such well-known saxophonists as Steve Lacy, Archie Shepp, and David Murray, who discuss their experiences and struggles working with Taylor. When asked whether it was difficult to play with Taylor, Lacy answered simply, "It was impossible. He was so fast, and so way beyond everybody that I had heard." The piece de resistance of the orgy will be the taped interview with The Maestro, as Taylor is often called.

In the earliest recordings that will be broadcast during the orgy, those from the period 1955-1960, Cecil Taylor sounds approximately like a jazz pianist on acid. He performs with the standard format of a jazz combo: piano, bass, drums, and a hornman, in this case, soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy. The group records several versions of tunes from the standard jazz repertoire. Hearing Taylor perform the Duke Ellington-Billy Strayhorn composition "Johnny Come Lately" has almost the shock value that hearing Jimi Hendrix's version of "The Star Spangled Banner" must have had ten years later. The familiar jazzman's repertoire turns into a nightmare version of itself on Taylor's earliest recordings.

Also in this period, namely in 1958, Taylor recorded an album with tenor saxophonist John Coltrane. It is difficult to find a more bizarre record anywhere. With Coltrane struggling mightily to cling to his own advanced harmonic world against Taylor's barrage of atonal clusters, jarring rhythmic patterns, and jackhammer assaults on the piano, a profound tug-of-war between two musical camps ensues. Nobody wins, and the tension produced is exhausting both for the musicians and listeners. Still, this has to be one of the most interesting recordings of American music ever made. It has the curiosity value that one might experience hearing Frank Zappa conduct Beethoven.

Just hearing these early recordings, one takes pleasure from Taylor's sheer audacity. He does what all musicians at some point dream of doing: going on stage and banging on the piano with hands and fists, like a film technician simply searching for the neat sound effect. But as Taylor's recordings from the 1960s show, his music is much more profound than that.

The level of telepathic musical interaction in Taylor's groups starting around 1963 with the addition of drummer Steve Murray and saxophonist Jimmy Lyons is startling. These musicians are thinking so fast! On a recording such as the 1966 album Conquistador (airing on WHRB around 11:00 p.m.), the group produces music as a seamless whole. It is for this reason that Taylor chose to name his groups "The Cecil Taylor Unit," which he takes to mean, "a community of men feeding each other, relating to each other, and speaking to each other in musical, architectural sounds which have been passed on to them." The music on an album like Conquistador is not a partnership of equals, however, as Taylor clearly dominates the music. He is, as Steve Lacy says, "the engine, the energy source" for these volcanic recordings.

Not only Taylor's piano technique, but his stamina itself is astonishing by the 1960s. The mental stamina needed to keep a group together in a period when he couldn't possibly make a living playing his music is matched by the physical stamina of a true athlete: Taylor's all-out assaults on the piano have both arms moving at a rate of hundreds and hundreds of machinegun rounds per minute; and he solos for up to thirty minutes on a stretch. The volume and intensity level of these performances is not merely the result of turning an amplifier up to eleven. It is the result of a fervent commitment to the music, and a truly grand passion for self-expression.

Perhaps the ultimate example of the nuclear energy of Taylor's playing is the 1969 album The Great Concert of Cecil Taylor (airing on WHRB at around 2:00 a.m.), where one composition lasts for over two hours, taking up six sides of an LP box set. Not recommended for the faint of heart.

Cecil Taylor always felt the injustice of his financial situation. While a chamber musician recording the standard repertoire of classical music over and over again could support himself and his family quite nicely in the postwar years, a true innovator like Taylor had to support himself by odd jobs--he sold everything from records to deli sandwiches. However, he had predicted early on that he would eventually earn the salary of a decent chamber musician. By the 1970s, with growing recognition in Europe and Japan, this prediction finally came true.

Taylor's innovations rest upon the foundations of awe-inspiring piano technique, as arpeggios spiral off effortlessly in opposite directions, while in other passages, glowing chords are teased from the piano with the light touch of a Bill Evans or a John Lewis. This technique creates an ongoing well-spring of creativity which cannot possibly dry up.

Taylor's unusual longevity in the jazz world (he is still performing today--and how!) has led to two and a half decades of high-level work since the ground-breaking years in the 1960s.

The WHRB Orgy will conclude with some of the highlights of recent years, including such gems as a duet with legendary drummer Max Roach and a performance from 1987 in Bologna, Italy, which ranks as one of the most passionate, even romantic recordings of Taylor's career.

In the midst of the primordial chaos of much of his playing, Taylor quiets his Units with a nod of the head and spontaneously composes slow, lyrical movements which, taken off of the record and written down, would stand up to Chopin, Rachmaninoff, or Stravinksy.

Often, after over an hour of his "energy-music," Taylor will end a concert with one of his shimmering slow movements and the audience will sit stunned as he calmly walks off stage.

WHRB's Cecil Taylor Orgy* is a chance to experience almost the effect of hearing a full live performances. It will leave you not merely breathless, but just plain screwed up for a long time.Photo Courtesy of WHRB

Like that of Miles Davis or Thelonious Monk, Cecil Taylor's music is the result of a very intense, powerful individual personality. As a man, Taylor dominates the people around him, whether in conversation or musical interaction. In an interview, he will inevitably take control of the proceedings out of the reporter's hands, as this reporter recently found out.

When asked about a specific album recorded in 1969, Taylor somehow managed to turn the conversation into an expose on the insidious linkage between Ronald Reagan's presidency and the fame of trumpeter Wynton Marsalis. Asked about his practice regimen, Taylor simply answered, "Trance."

The challenges of interacting with such a complex, larger-than-life personality are magnified in a musical setting. The WHRB orgy will feature interviews with six of Taylor's former sidemen, including such well-known saxophonists as Steve Lacy, Archie Shepp, and David Murray, who discuss their experiences and struggles working with Taylor. When asked whether it was difficult to play with Taylor, Lacy answered simply, "It was impossible. He was so fast, and so way beyond everybody that I had heard." The piece de resistance of the orgy will be the taped interview with The Maestro, as Taylor is often called.

In the earliest recordings that will be broadcast during the orgy, those from the period 1955-1960, Cecil Taylor sounds approximately like a jazz pianist on acid. He performs with the standard format of a jazz combo: piano, bass, drums, and a hornman, in this case, soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy. The group records several versions of tunes from the standard jazz repertoire. Hearing Taylor perform the Duke Ellington-Billy Strayhorn composition "Johnny Come Lately" has almost the shock value that hearing Jimi Hendrix's version of "The Star Spangled Banner" must have had ten years later. The familiar jazzman's repertoire turns into a nightmare version of itself on Taylor's earliest recordings.

Also in this period, namely in 1958, Taylor recorded an album with tenor saxophonist John Coltrane. It is difficult to find a more bizarre record anywhere. With Coltrane struggling mightily to cling to his own advanced harmonic world against Taylor's barrage of atonal clusters, jarring rhythmic patterns, and jackhammer assaults on the piano, a profound tug-of-war between two musical camps ensues. Nobody wins, and the tension produced is exhausting both for the musicians and listeners. Still, this has to be one of the most interesting recordings of American music ever made. It has the curiosity value that one might experience hearing Frank Zappa conduct Beethoven.

Just hearing these early recordings, one takes pleasure from Taylor's sheer audacity. He does what all musicians at some point dream of doing: going on stage and banging on the piano with hands and fists, like a film technician simply searching for the neat sound effect. But as Taylor's recordings from the 1960s show, his music is much more profound than that.

The level of telepathic musical interaction in Taylor's groups starting around 1963 with the addition of drummer Steve Murray and saxophonist Jimmy Lyons is startling. These musicians are thinking so fast! On a recording such as the 1966 album Conquistador (airing on WHRB around 11:00 p.m.), the group produces music as a seamless whole. It is for this reason that Taylor chose to name his groups "The Cecil Taylor Unit," which he takes to mean, "a community of men feeding each other, relating to each other, and speaking to each other in musical, architectural sounds which have been passed on to them." The music on an album like Conquistador is not a partnership of equals, however, as Taylor clearly dominates the music. He is, as Steve Lacy says, "the engine, the energy source" for these volcanic recordings.

Not only Taylor's piano technique, but his stamina itself is astonishing by the 1960s. The mental stamina needed to keep a group together in a period when he couldn't possibly make a living playing his music is matched by the physical stamina of a true athlete: Taylor's all-out assaults on the piano have both arms moving at a rate of hundreds and hundreds of machinegun rounds per minute; and he solos for up to thirty minutes on a stretch. The volume and intensity level of these performances is not merely the result of turning an amplifier up to eleven. It is the result of a fervent commitment to the music, and a truly grand passion for self-expression.

Perhaps the ultimate example of the nuclear energy of Taylor's playing is the 1969 album The Great Concert of Cecil Taylor (airing on WHRB at around 2:00 a.m.), where one composition lasts for over two hours, taking up six sides of an LP box set. Not recommended for the faint of heart.

Cecil Taylor always felt the injustice of his financial situation. While a chamber musician recording the standard repertoire of classical music over and over again could support himself and his family quite nicely in the postwar years, a true innovator like Taylor had to support himself by odd jobs--he sold everything from records to deli sandwiches. However, he had predicted early on that he would eventually earn the salary of a decent chamber musician. By the 1970s, with growing recognition in Europe and Japan, this prediction finally came true.

Taylor's innovations rest upon the foundations of awe-inspiring piano technique, as arpeggios spiral off effortlessly in opposite directions, while in other passages, glowing chords are teased from the piano with the light touch of a Bill Evans or a John Lewis. This technique creates an ongoing well-spring of creativity which cannot possibly dry up.

Taylor's unusual longevity in the jazz world (he is still performing today--and how!) has led to two and a half decades of high-level work since the ground-breaking years in the 1960s.

The WHRB Orgy will conclude with some of the highlights of recent years, including such gems as a duet with legendary drummer Max Roach and a performance from 1987 in Bologna, Italy, which ranks as one of the most passionate, even romantic recordings of Taylor's career.

In the midst of the primordial chaos of much of his playing, Taylor quiets his Units with a nod of the head and spontaneously composes slow, lyrical movements which, taken off of the record and written down, would stand up to Chopin, Rachmaninoff, or Stravinksy.

Often, after over an hour of his "energy-music," Taylor will end a concert with one of his shimmering slow movements and the audience will sit stunned as he calmly walks off stage.

WHRB's Cecil Taylor Orgy* is a chance to experience almost the effect of hearing a full live performances. It will leave you not merely breathless, but just plain screwed up for a long time.Photo Courtesy of WHRB