Occasional Jazz Conjectures

“Profound changes are impending in the ancient craft of the Beautiful. In all the arts there is a physical component which can no longer be considered or treated as it used to be, which cannot remain unaffected by our modern knowledge and power. For the last twenty years neither matter nor space nor time has been what it was from time immemorial. We must expect great innovations to transform the entire technique of the arts, thereby affecting artistic invention itself and perhaps even bringing about an amazing change in our very notion of art.”—Paul Valery

If you stopped and measured the 20th century’s considerable residue, the left-over facts and froth of modernity, the loam of cultural revolution and the flicker of the avant-garde’s ember (to wring the life out of simile and metaphor), you’d probably find that Cecil Taylor is an inevitability. 

At every turn Taylor is easily as pitch-perfect a modernist in his Cocteau-ian swallowing of a locomotive and bringing up of pipe as the next Pound, Marinetti, Mina Loy, Stravinsky, Krazy Kat, or Chaplin. Every shred of modernism’s visionary mapmaking, abstract mumbly-pegging, velocity and aesthetic violence, conceptual speculation, fear and finger-pointing— it’s all there like a futurist potboiler: the simultaneous extending, caressing, and brutalizing of Western tradition, killing the Fathers (only to revive them for a shave-and-haircut-Fats Waller-finale), mirroring the savagery of the Bomb, war, poverty, unprece-dented speed—it paints us into a corner waltzing with the fact of Cecil Taylor. And that’s a good thing.

From the first hints of his pianist combustion in the ‘50s, those Henry Cowellish clusters of tone, balled-up notes,  deliciously fibrous, chewy like a fistful of popcorn, we got a taste of the things to come. From the word “go,” listeners encountered the musical equivalent of a Poundian vortex cocktail–bursting with “patterned energy” (but never full-on chaos). Quixotic, Promethean, rich with traditions of music—a wild concatenation of jazz contours, polyphonic Western classical extensions, undulant diasporic rhythm, gamelan klang, chants, hollers and blues shrapnel— Taylor is an arch modernist in a world that has little uses for arches any more.

Early on its history, folks liked jazz because it allowed for “une certain barbarie devenue licite,” a kind of legitimized, albeit naughty primitivism–fetishized sexuality set to an exoticized soundtracks. But the mid-century appearance of Taylor— his music has antagonized in some a sense of “being dragged through a hedge backwards”—was anything but harmless to the Four Lads-and-maybe-some-Gerry Mulligan appetite of most folks.

I was walking along, minding my business

When out of an orange-colored sky

Flash! bam! alakazam!

Wonderful you came by

It was (and is) with Cecil Taylor that even the bravest of so-called jazz seekers, subterraneans, and Brooks Brothers clad finger-poppers have their HENRY ADAMS MOMENT:
“Satisfied that the sequence of men led to nothing and that the sequence of their society could lead no further, while the mere sequence of time was artificial, and the sequence of thought was chaos, he turned at last to the sequence of force; and thus it happened that, after ten years’ pursuit, he found himself lying in the Gallery of Machines at the Great Exposition of 1900, his historical neck broken by the sudden irruption of forces totally new.”

Taylor’s art suggested, in the delicious words of Clark Coolidge, an “Amphetamine of dares,” a pianistic take on the spirit of that great futurist FT Marinetti:

“We shall sing of the love of danger, the habit of energy and boldness…we shall extol aggressive movement, feverish insomnia, the double quick-step, the somersault, the box on the ear, the fisticuff.”

Revolution is a lovely thing.

Cecil Taylor is our Gertrude Stein: “A violent luck and a whole sample and even then quiet. . ..” Like Stein he’s much invoked, dismissively reviled, deeply profound and little understood. He possesses the recombinant energy of an Ezra Pound and an Ellington. He’s utopian in his adherence to truth and beauty, but with no hint of nostalgia (or stuffy, forgone pompier), none of the usual Les-sanglots-longs-des-violins d’automne banality that plagues misty-eyed avant-gardists coming in from the austere cultural cold.

“Any time there is a surface there is a surface and every time there is a suggestion there is a suggestion and every time there is silence there is silence and every time that is languid there is that there then and not oftener, not always, not particular, tender and changing and external and central and surrounded and singular and simple and the same and the surface and the circle and the shine and the succor and the white and the same and the better and the red and the same and the centre and the yellow and the tender and the better, and altogether.”

Beginning in 1955 with his Jazz Advance with Steve Lacy, Looking Ahead, the buoyantly raucous and groovy New York City R&B to the spring bloom of the 1962 Nefertiti, the Beautiful One Has Come (with Jimmy Lyons, Sunny Murray) and the mid-’60s masterpieces Unit Structures and Conquistador!, Taylor’s always cultivated a green thumb of the avant sort, music rigorously alive like a Pound-like “ball of light in one’s hand,” never simply an assortment of okey-doke “viable bended plants that can be put in anybody’s garden.”

As commanding, sublime and/or densely confounding as he can be [for some good reference, dip into It Is In the Brewing Luminous; Dark Unto Themselves; For Olim (especially “Living –  Dedicated to Julian Beck”); and Leaf Palm Hand with Tony Oxley], Taylor’s never above a genuflect or two, whether coyly or not, in the presence of form and melody’s monument–hence a deep abiding simultaneous love for Lena Horne and the fluid poetry of engineer Santiago Calatrava.

Born in New York in 1929, Cecil Taylor was (like the recently departed Whitney Balliett), “a child of radio and the Victrola, of the microphone and the recording, [who has] been listening most of [his] life to American popular singers.” Encouraged by his mother, he began playing piano and at the age of five—attracted to Ellington, Waller, Jimmy Lunceford and other “beacon-lights indicating a certain direction,” this influence is still deeply woven into Taylor’s essential fabric. The early to mid-’50s saw Taylor in study at the New England Conservatory with formative professional experience gigging with Hot Lips Page and Johnny Hodges among others. Despite winning the “New Star” award from Downbeat in the early ‘60s, being awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant, being named to the Downbeat Hall of Fame, and being named an NEA Jazz Master, much of the same controversy surrounding Cecil Taylor’s initial appearance persists.

Balliett writing for The New Yorker captured Taylor’s effect on late ‘50s audiences aptly, “[they] fidgeted, whispered and wandered nervously in and out of the tent, as if the ground beneath had suddenly become unbearably hot.” Critics who should probably no better, no names (well okay, Leonard Feather) have written the music off, saying “anyone working with a jackhammer could have achieved the same results.” 50 years later it’s really no different.
 
Jazz (at least in recent years) has been in danger of becoming a Mailer-esque hipster in the guise of “self-loathing square.” With the political tide embracing a nostalgia for ‘50s-era black-bag, spook-ops, secrecy and Cold War-diplomacy, it’s not surprise that our tastes and cultural models are turning as gee-whizzily fuddy-duddy. 

What we have here may be that rashy condition that Dwight Macdonald called Midcult:
“a peculiar hybrid  bred. . . this intermediate form [has] the essential qualities of Masscult—the formula, the built-in reaction, the lack of any standard except popularity—but it decently covers them with a cultural figleaf. In Masscult the trick is plain—to please the crowd by any means. But Midcult has it both ways: it pretends to respect the standards of High Culture while in fact it waters them down and vulgarizes them. . . . It is its ambiguity that makes Midcult alarming. . .the special threat of Midcult is that it exploits the discoveries of the avant-garde. . .Midcult specializes in soft impeachments.”
 
Many out there are starting to resemble pursed-lip sour-faced  bromides of the apoplectic Philip Larkin variety, muttering agog and aghast how, “Jazz had gone from Lascaux to Jackson Pollock in fifty years.” This would explain the return of the blonde chantoosies (jazz singer Nancy King calls them “charlatan-ettes”), Eisenhower-era pop formats to go with the tide of military industrial complex politics and paranoia.

This is why Cecil Taylor at this time, right here, right now, is so important: he reconnects us with the heroic impulse in art and the creative act. He allows us a new understanding of the beautiful. Like the paintings of Pollock, Mark Rothko, Franz Kline—his is music rich in gesture and voice, utopian in its primal energies, work that thrives on a coexistence of ideas and vibrations. Like Richard Serra’s monumental sculpture, you can’t help but know you’re in a room with something imposing and powerful—and an investment in the listening pays off in spades.

Jazz so often traffics in the nostalgia of the ‘50s to package experience and evocation. But here’s another take on the era.

Morton Feldman once said: “What was great about the fifties is that for one brief moment—maybe, say, a week—nobody understood art. That’s why it all happened. Because for a short while, these people were left alone. A week is all it takes to get started…the week was important…we began to listen…”

Remember the 1950s?

More than any of his jazz contemporaries, Taylor embodies the confluences and parallels of that midcentury revolutionary period in contemporary art. . .embracing strategies that slyly blend and blur an elevation of the everyday and the creative act —think about Rauschenberg, Cunningham/Cage. While much has been made of Taylor’s  “playing eighty-eight tuned drums,” the fingerprints and footsteps of poetry and dance permeate the work, creating a vivid dynamic full of risk, excitement, and suspense! There is as much Katherine Dunham, Martha Graham, and early Paul Taylor as there is Bob Kaufman, Robert Creeley, Charles Olson (and most notably Stein and Pound) wedged into the shards of Tatum, Teddy Wilson, Ellington, Bartók and Monk. Taylor’s full-contact approach to artmaking is exactly what the poet Allen Graubard meant when he wrote, “With the heat of music lies the capacity for an embrace of other arts. There is nothing inconsequential about this.”

“All experience rushes into this vortex,” Pound wrote in l9l4. “All the energized past, all the past that is living and worthy to live. ALL MOMENTUM …, instinct charging the PLACID, NON-ENERGIZED FUTURE. . . . All the past that is vital, all the past that is capable of living into the future, is present in the vortex, now.”

Deploying word, sound, space, gliss, movement, energy. . .seeming to echo a statement by Judson Dance great Yvonne Rainer, Taylor’s “body remains the enduring reality”—it’s central to his “opening field of question.” “I try to imitate on the piano, the leaps in space a dancer makes,” Taylor notes, “I never understood how musicians could play music for poets and not read poems. I don’t understand musicians who can play for dancers and not know how to dance.”

You can see the of-a-mind similarities between Taylor and the revolutionary masters of the Judson scene in this approach outlined by Rainer: “I am often involved with changes as they are played against one or more constants: Details executed in a context of a continuum of energy; phrases and combinations done in unison; interactive  and mutually dependent movements done in a singular floor pattern. . .and more obvious juxtapositions that involve actual separations in space and time.”

In the case of the energy and boldness of Cecil Taylor even the most skeptical nay-sayer can’t help but be moved by what Kurt Gottschalk called the sheer “enormity of his art.” Incomprehensible to many, but deeply embedded in the tradition of jazz (and it is a tradition, free jazz is now eligible for AARP membership), Taylor at his most fevered and intense will slyly evoke the tickle-and-pounce of Erroll Garner, the rhythmic displacement of Thelonious Monk, complex Ellingtonian harmonies. There’s simply no denying the jazz-ness of it even if it doesn’t “swing” in the so-called traditional sense. Coiled with Terpsichorean energy and delight, Taylor persists: “I have to make that imaginative leap,” he said. “I have to believe I’m communicating to somebody. I have to keep the contact going.”

Winston Churchill liked to quip, “Without tradition, art is a flock of sheep without a shepherd. Without innovation, it is a corpse.” Taylor continues to both pass on and fan the flame, illustrating that it’s not what jazz is, but what jazz does that matters.
 

On Ornette Coleman’s Pulitzer Prize
Life is full of surprises. Suppose I told you that the best way to understand the wild music of avant-garde saxophonist-composer Ornette Coleman begins with an appreciation of beloved French Impressionist Claude Monet. You might call me mad.

I’d be in good company. Both the painter and the free-jazz musician faced decades of sanity-questioning critical catcalls (lambasted as “jive,” “rotten anarchists,” purveyors of “garbage . . . moral decay” . . . and formless monstrosity) before ridicule was replaced by recognition.

While Monet recast the tools of color and the play of light using familiar touchstones of leisure (water, boating, picnics), Coleman’s “free jazz” made its case by tapping into the more palpable, visceral elements of jazz — an infectious sense of swing, popcorn-like rhythms and moody, evocative dynamics—as it rejected more predictable melodic or harmonic avenues.

Throughout their respective careers, they touched the hearts of many and infuriated gaggles of critics and contemporaries with fresh and original visions. Both reveled in a different way of seeing; both promoted an art of immediacy and movement that enthusiastically affirmed modern life.

For Monet and the Impressionists, the official stamp of approval came in a matter of 20 years. For Coleman, the wait has been going on 50 years.

Now, at the age of 77, he’s received this year’s Pulitzer Prize for music for his recording “Sound Grammar.”

Coleman has always had his champions: He has received a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, a Guggenheim, induction into the American Academy of Arts and Letters and, also this year, a Grammy for lifetime achievement. But the Pulitzer was an unexpected and welcome surprise, validating a half-century commitment to what jazz critic Francis Davis has called a “permanent revolution” in jazz.

Ornette Coleman was born in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1930 and came of age during the late 1940s, at the crossroads of high modernist bebop (exemplified by Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk and Dizzy Gillespie, among others) and the saxophone-drenched R&B popularized by Bull Moose Jackson, Big Jay McNeely and others.

Never truly comfortable in either idiom, Coleman gravitated to Los Angeles in the 1950s, then created waves of controversy when he stormed Manhattan in 1959. Like the Parisian Impressionist insurgency, Coleman’s two-month-long Salon des Refuses at the Five Spot polarized both artists and audiences — and attracted a laundry list of Manhattan art-world and cafe society jazz mavens as diverse as painters Larry Rivers and Robert Rauschenberg, columnist Dorothy Kilgallen and composer/conductor Leonard Bernstein (who “sat in” on piano).

Hailed as “the only really new thing in jazz since Charlie Parker in the mid-40s” by the Modern Jazz Quartet’s John Lewis, Coleman was seen as either a genius or a snake-oil salesman.

Coleman’s taking of Manhattan in 1959 wasn’t the twilight or jazz apocalypse that many feared, but a much-needed fireworks display that distracted and refigured our expectations of this thing called jazz. He offered a buoyantly swinging vision of the music that was shot through with celebration, drop-kicked joy and exuberance.

On an album of the same name released that year, Coleman’s “Shape of Jazz to Come” revealed an artistry bursting at the seams. Self-effacing and gentle of spirit, his music embraced kernels of the blues (a primal cry and wail, the poetry of call-and-response that evoked qualities of the human voice), bebop’s keening swing and space-traveling sense of velocity, and a collective improvisation that recalled the conversational all-at-once-ness of Dixieland. But it declined, with a firm I-would-prefer-not-to, conventional ideas of form or harmony.

From the get-go, the enigmatic Coleman has been interested in “removing the caste system from sound.” The result is a body of work that mirrors the accelerated pace of midcentury big-city whirl and bustle.

As with seminal jazz artists such as Louis Armstrong and Charlie Parker, you hear in Coleman’s work life’s celebration, pain, sorrow, uplift, beauty and humor — gaining a vital, rich understanding of the past while embracing its future possibilities. Critic Howard Mandel notes that the music “seems jaunty and penetrating, but seldom chaotic or raucous. Yet (nearly 50) years ago, some jazz veterans were outraged.”

For well on a half-century, Coleman has been reconfiguring jazz travel, with standard harmony, melody and rhythm becoming peripheral points along the median instead of the pavement. From Cubist jazz in the 1950s to symphonies, string quartets and fractured, electric funk in the 1970s and ’80s, Coleman continues to expand on his reflexive musical language with each project. While it may never take hold as jazz’s lingua franca, his vivid “sound grammar” contributes to a subversive dialect and infectiously swinging, hipster patois that’s been embraced by artists as far afield as Jerry Garcia, Pat Metheny, Joe Henry, Yoko Ono, Lou Reed, and Kurt Masur and the New York Philharmonic.

The timing of this year’s award (the first for a strictly jazz recording—Wynton Marsalis won in 1997 for his epic oratorio, “Blood on the Fields”) — signals a brave new turn for the once mustily conservative awards panel. The Pulitzer for music was established in 1943 and generally has been skewed toward more Eurocentric classical composition. With a mandate to take a more “broad view of serious music,” the Pulitzer (which infamously refused the prize to Duke Ellington in 1965) is coming to grips with the richness of American musical tradition in all its grit and glory.

The music on Coleman’s “Sound Grammar” reminds us that jazz is indeed a “tradition,” but one that doesn’t sit still and won’t be contained under glass or in a suspended state. While it might recall the blues of a Sippie Wallace or Ethel Waters in high lament, or the humor and rapid-fire curveball logic of a Mack Sennett Chaplin short, it also has a fierce Modernism that is streamlined ’50s in its curves and velocity but uncomfortably daring with its unbridled, flinty bits of melody. It is music that is as uniquely American and as boldly independent as the art of Walt Whitman, Jackson Pollock or Merce Cunningham.

“There are as many unisons as there are stars in the sky,” Coleman once said, and in a way the Pulitzer is one step toward acknowledging that wide compass. Ornette Coleman continues to produce a body of work that makes a deep, lasting impression—the kind of impression that would have made Claude Monet proud.

Published originally in The Oregonian