The History of Jazz (72 page)

In 1960 and 1961, Taylor had the opportunity to record for the short-lived Candid label. The Candid work finds Taylor at a new level of musical maturity and reveals a number of stylistic devices that would achieve fuller expression on his mid-1960s recordings for Blue Note: he is less constrained by chord changes and bar lines; his link with the bop tradition of Powell and Monk is less overt; his playing is more textured, more two-fisted; the demarcation between soloing and accompanying, between comping chord and melody line—vital distinctions in mainstream jazz—are now overridden by oceanic torrents of sound. Taylor still plays the occasional standard such as “Lazy Afternoon” and “This Nearly Was Mine”—performances that border on reconstructive surgery—and engages in stock devices such as trading four-bar phrases with the drummer on “Air.” But these last lingering affectations of traditional jazz playing do little to blunt the porcupine quills of this prickly music.

A second Candid session from 1961, ostensibly under the leadership of bassist Neidlinger, found Taylor refining these same techniques. “Cell Walk for Celeste,” from this date, underscores the formalist elements often hidden beneath the apparent free-form flow of the pianist’s work. This eighty-eight-bar theme captures a number of distinct moods, ranging from brooding melancholy to sardonic exultation. The piece represented Taylor’s most successful endeavor to date in blending contemporary classical elements into a distinctly African American style—“almost as though riding in on the morning train from Danbury, Charles Ives got off at 125th Street instead of Grand Central Terminal,” is how Neidlinger later described the performance.
¹⁰

Downbeat
awarded Taylor its prestigious New Star award in 1962, but this did little to improve his commercial prospects. “Gigs for me have been mostly, like a concert a year, filled in with one or two short nightclub or coffeehouse gigs,” Taylor told author A. B. Spellman around this time.
¹¹
To support himself, Taylor took jobs as a dishwasher and short-order cook. But, in 1966, Taylor burst forth with a number of important projects, including two milestone dates for the Blue Note label and a live recording made in France.
Unit Structures
, recorded for Blue Note in May, stands as a landmark performance for Taylor, a full flowering of the promise shown on “Air” and “Cell Walk for Celeste.”
Conquistador
, from this same period, is less well known, but an equally impressive statement of the pianist’s mature style.

The flow of time in Taylor’s music was, by this time, completely free of conventional jazz metrics. Taylor’s collaborations with drummer Sunny Murray during the early 1960s had assisted in this process, one furthered by the pianist’s later work with Andrew Cyrille. Cyrille played an important role on
Unit Structures
, varying his attack from the ominous reverberations and asides of “Enter Evening” to the explosive interjections of “Steps” and “Tales (8 Whisps).” Despite the absence of typical swing and bop phrasing, these pieces maintain, for most of their duration, a powerful rhythmic dynamism. The essentially physical nature of the performance comes across, even on record. Single-note runs burst from the piano sounding board; short, acidic phrases crack like a whip; inquisitive chord voicings tremble, stutter, bellow; tone clusters ripple up and down the keyboard. The horns crisscross arrhythmically on top of these layers of sound, entering into haranguing dialogues with the rhythm section and each other. In the final analysis,
Unit Structures
ranks with Coleman’s
Free Jazz
, Ayler’s
Spiritual Unity
, and Coltrane’s
Ascension
as defining statements of the free jazz movement as it matured in the early 1960s. But of these four efforts, Taylor’s is the most controlled and multidimensional. No vestiges of sentimentality, no easy resolutions or soothing cadences, deflect the sharp edges in this music. Yet it equally avoids empty emoting and unrelenting sturm-und-drang exhortation. Taylor remained a voluptuary with the heart of an ascetic: even when this music achieved paroxysms of release, an overriding austerity lingered just below the surface.

Taylor’s efforts during the 1960s solidified his reputation as the most uncompromising exponent of the jazz avant-garde. With the jazz revival of the early 1970s, Taylor emerged as a respected elder statesman of the music—a surprising twist for this erstwhile revolutionary. But this was an uneasy process at best, and Taylor often found ways of subverting the established institutions that now tried to embrace him. Taylor was invited to teach at a major university—then caused an uproar by failing a large number of students and defying administration pressures to change the grades. Taylor played at the White House but scampered away from the bandstand after his performance—with the President of the United States, who simply wanted to give the pianist a compliment, forced to hustle after him. Taylor agreed to perform in tandem with the swing-to-bop modernist Mary Lou Williams—but rather than meeting Williams halfway, Taylor all but overpowered her playing with an explosive accompaniment of avant-garde piano technique. Yet by the close of the decade Taylor—for all his aloof exterior—had developed an unmatched skill in “working the system.” On the back cover of his release
3 Phasis
, Taylor’s record company boasts about its many sources of funding: “This disc was made possible through grants from American Broadcast Companies; Armco Inc.; Capital Cities Communication; Dow Jones; Mr. Francis Goelet; Gilman Foundation, Inc.; Occidental Petroleum Corporation; the Rockefeller Foundation; Sony Corporation; Union Pacific Corporation; and the National Endowment for the Arts.” In time, Taylor would possess a curriculum vitae that few mainstream jazz players could dream of, with his Guggenheim fellowship, NEA grants, MacArthur “genius grant,” and even an honorary doctorate from the New England Conservatory of Music, of which he had been a fierce critic in earlier years. He was voted into the
Downbeat
Jazz Hall of Fame by the critics in 1975, while McCoy Tyner, Keith Jarrett, Herbie Hancock, and others, perhaps more popular but less iconoclastic, had to wait another quarter of a century to join him. The militant outsider, it seems, had become the consummate inside man.

Yet Taylor’s music stayed at the outer fringe despite his growing eminence. The 1970s were especially fertile years for Taylor’s solo piano work.
Silent Tongues
, from 1974, was a major statement, with Taylor moving deftly from subtle quasi-classical moods to erupting volcanoes of dissonance. Other solo outings—
Air Above Mountains (Buildings Within)
,
Fly, Fly, Fly, Fly, Fly
,
Indent
—rounded out this picture of the keyboardist as human howitzer. At such times, Taylor almost succeeded in making solo jazz piano into an athletic exhibition: no one in jazz—or any other music—had ever attacked the keyboard so aggressively, had created such
big
sounds, had so overpowered the instrument. One expected strings to break, and bits of ivory and ebony to chip off the keys. The experience of seeing Taylor in such a vein could be riveting, convincing even free jazz nonbelievers of the persuasive power of his muse.

Although Taylor found that he was in most demand now as a solo performer, he resisted pigeonholing, continuing to broaden the range of his activities. His efforts increasingly went beyond the confines of instrumental performance, expanding to include chalk-screeching-on-the-blackboard vocals, ritualistic chanting, stylized body movements, poetry—the oddest fragments of cultural bric-a-brac. But even when seated at the keyboard, Taylor broke new ground. He was commissioned to write and perform a piece for ballet artists Mikhail Baryshnikov and Heather Watts. He composed and played for the Alvin Ailey Dance Company. He wrote for larger ensembles. He also continued to work in smaller combos, sometimes joined by longtime sideman Jimmy Lyons—an associate from the early 1960s until shortly before Lyons’s death in 1986—whose full-toned alto work served as a firm anchor in the midst of Taylor’s aural tidal wave. Taylor’s massive recording project,
Cecil Taylor Berlin ’88
, was perhaps his most panoramic venture of the period. This multidisc project—some twelve hours of music—found the pianist in collaboration with a wide range of players, many of them European, in settings spanning solo piano, duos, combos, and large bands.

The pioneering efforts of Taylor and Coleman had blossomed, by the mid-1960s, into a full-fledged movement. Former sidemen of these pioneers now emerged as major performers in their own right. Archie Shepp, who had worked with Taylor in the early 1960s, formed a quartet with Bill Dixon and later participated in the New York Contemporary Five with Don Cherry and John Tchicai. Shepp would also stand out as one of the most articulate publicists for the music, speaking frequently on its links to progressive political movements. Cherry went on to enjoy a successful career following his departure from Coleman’s band, initiating a relationship with the Blue Note label that resulted in major works
Complete Communion
and
Symphony for Improvisers
. A series of six concerts at the Cellar Cafe, organized by Bill Dixon, presented under the rubric of the “October Revolution in Jazz,” further legitimized the movement and featured Tchicai, Roswell Rudd, Paul Bley, Milford Graves, and Sun Ra, among others—in total, some forty groups graced the bandstand, playing mostly to capacity crowds. The success of this venture led to the formation of the Jazz Composers Guild, an umbrella organization for sponsoring the music of the avant-garde.

John Coltrane’s conversion to the free style, around this same time, reinforced the expanding power and scope of the revolution. Only a short time before, Coltrane had been the leading light of mainstream tenor playing. Now in a series of recordings—above all with his orgiastic 1965 release
Ascension
—he emerged as one of the most radical of the new school. This formidable forty-minute performance found Coltrane and his rhythm section supplemented by a half-dozen horn players in a wild free-for-all—a superheated encounter that, for many listeners, served as the fitting, logical, and anarchistic end point of this quest for freedom. Follow-up projects—
Om
,
Kulu Se Mama
,
Meditation
—featured Coltrane in different settings, but equally intent on pushing to the outer limits of tonality and structure. A host of free players gathered around Coltrane, including tenorists Shepp and Pharoah Sanders, joining him on record and in concert.

Audiences reacted with mixed emotions to these demonstrations. When Coltrane performed a duet with Shepp at the Downbeat Jazz Festival in Chicago, the crowd split into factions, half cheering and urging on the musicians, the remainder shuffling restlessly, booing, many leaving. A similar divide was evident among jazz critics. Yet the true believers and caustic dissenters had, perhaps, more in common than they realized. Some listeners no doubt found a soothing catharsis in Coltrane’s
Ascension
or Albert Ayler’s
Spiritual Unity
, yet it is clear that many delighted precisely in the music’s foreboding exterior. This latter group never pretended that shrill overtone squeals and distorted quarter-tone barks sounded mellifluous: it may not be going too far to suggest that the
worse
the music sounded, the better it suited their needs. Herbert Marcuse, the Marxist philosopher whose writings were widely read during this period, had built a theory of aesthetics on such grounds, celebrating art that refused to follow the strict ordering, the bureaucratic control, the confining rules of modern capitalist society. Jacques Attali, in his influential 1977 manifesto
Noise
, proclaimed that music—defined as “the organization of noise”—“symbolically signifies the channeling of violence.”
¹²

Such views marked a stunning reversal from the ancients—who sought for the sublime, for harmony and beauty, in works of art—instead substituting a fascination with disorder and discord. In practice, these attitudes could lead to surprising end points. One jazz critic, exulting in precisely this harsh exterior of the most progressive music, went so far as to brag that the records he recommended were precisely those that people were
least
likely to enjoy. It is impossible, in the final instance, to understand the full impact of the free movement without gauging this ethos, very much representative of the mid-1960s. Free jazz snubbed its nose at the established order, and in an era in which the “establishment” was increasingly under assault, this alone was a powerful rallying point. As such, the freedom movement shared in the same zeitgeist that gave birth to acid rock, campus demonstrations, and the 1960s counterculture. Both the advocates and detractors of the avant-garde sensed this, to greater and lesser degrees, and though their debates often seemed to focus on the music, a deeper strain of discourse, politicized and ideologically charged, almost always underscored these interchanges. Simply put: what one thought about this body of work had much to do with what one felt about the prevailing state of affairs in society.

Yet alongside this celebration of the anarchic elements in the music, a vague utopianism also emerged. Fans of free jazz hardly blinked when critic John Litweiler predicted that avant-garde music would be “philosophically crucial to humanity as a whole” and “lead to a new consciousness that will deter mankind from its present catastrophic course.” In a similar vein, David Such announced, in his book
Avant-Garde Jazz Musicians: Performing “Out There”
, that free jazz helps life “achieve purposefulness” and points the way toward “solving at least a portion of the problems and misunderstandings in the world.”
¹³
This profusion of grand claims and counter-claims was very much part and parcel of the progressive wing of the jazz world. One could probably determine this merely by looking at the album covers, which announced “the shape of jazz to come” or the “change of the century”—claims no jazz player in any other style would dare to make. Even after it became clear that atonality was not the end point of jazz, merely a stopping point in a constantly fluctuating scene, this sharply ideological component in free jazz, and even more in discussions about it, has persisted, almost as if the ways critics conceptualize jazz got frozen sometime around the late 1950s and early 1960s. With the passing years, free jazz has become just another style—but the very ethos of the music hardly allows its fans to settle for anything less than a preeminent position as the Hegelian end point in the history of jazz.