Cecil Taylor S+D

cecil taylor reads a poem (this is the first time i've seen footage of him reading his poems it is way better than looking at them printed on a page) https://t.co/XyzmTHxDQ1

— roland barfs (@rolandbarfs) May 4, 2020

everything about this is great. he has a lovely voice

is it you who put it on youtube ?

There were a bunch of CT spoken word things on ubuweb bitd

Still there! I actually wasn’t sure if ubuweb was still a thing

The scene in the tweet is from a 1981 documentary called Imagine The Sound. In addition to Cecil, it features interviews with, and performances by, Bill Dixon, Archie Shepp, and Paul Bley -- not with each other, as I don't believe any were on speaking terms with one other at the time. I think the film is on a streaming service (Amazon, maybe), not positive, though.

thanks for the context !

think this was posted upthread but it's gone now

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_dfetfG6zA

live in paris 1969

the "student studies" 2xLP is a 1966 recording, but the angle / outfit of cecil at the piano in this video look just like the cover art of that release

JUst grabbed Cecil Taylor Unit cos I saw it online.

wondering what is essential by him.

GOt a couple of lps from the mid 60s and probably should have had more. Offcial stuff at least.

i found her cartoon doppelganger

https://i.imgur.com/AWj8YFB.jpg🕸

JUst grabbed Cecil Taylor Unit cos I saw it online.

wondering what is essential by him.

GOt a couple of lps from the mid 60s and probably should have had more. Offcial stuff at least.

Conquistador! is essential. As the FMPs go, you can’t go wrong with the percussion duos. And the orchestra work, Alms/Tiergarten (Spree), was called “the best thing Cecil’s ever done” by Bill Dixon. The recently-released Birdland, Neuburg 2011 (duo with Oxley) is amazing, both musicians confounding expectations at every turn.

it is in the brewing luminous is just so good, his 50's albums like jazz advance, looking ahead! have aged well ... ah too much essential. Even less celebrated albums like student studies, cell walk for celeste, the world of.. just get try the lot Stevo!

Silent Tongues is perfect

My recommended starting points:

• Everything by the 1978 Unit (Cecil Taylor Unit, 3 Phasis, Live in the Black Forest and One Too Many Salty Swift and Not Goodbye)
• Solo albums: Indent, Silent Tongues, Air Above Mountains, Garden vols. 1 & 2, The Willisau Concert
• The Feel Trio 2 Ts for a Lovely T box (10 live sets by Taylor, William Parker, and Tony Oxley)
• Conquistador! > Unit Structures, but you need both
• Cecil Taylor/Bill Dixon/Tony Oxley

Oh, and check out Momentum Space, a 1999 trio disc by Taylor, Dewey Redman, and Elvin Jones - often overlooked, but great stuff.

he's the greatest, there is no-one like him!

It might be easier to list the sub-par Cecil records:

- The Hearth, a trio with Evan Parker and Tristan Honsiger. Looks good on paper, but goes nowhere fast, and stays there.

- Algonquin, a duo with Mat Maneri. Maneri’s approach always struck me as too slick, and there’s very little tension or genuine excitement here.

- The Owner Of The Riverbank, a collaboration with the Italian Instabile Orchestra. Competent though these musicians may be, it’s 75 minutes of tentative “I don’t want to step on anyone’s toes!” mushiness.

- The Last Dance, a duo with Dominic Duval, one of the more distinguished members of the Unit in latter days. Unfortunately, this was apparently recorded on a phone from the back of the hall. A landline phone.

I remember liking both Algonquin and The Owner of the Riverbank, but I haven't listened to either one in years. There's so little of Taylor's large ensemble work available on CD that every example is valuable, I figure. I wish the 25 piece band I saw him with at the Knitting Factory in 2002 or so had been recorded.

I don’t see it mentioned much but Olu Iwa is maybe my fav - 2 longer live pieces, Peter Brötzmann on the 1st but not obvious most of the time. Winged Serpent also v good & relatively accessible from my POV. What I’ve heard of the 2 T’s box is good but it’s a lot of material

Jazz Advance & Looking Ahead were my way in as a Monk fan who was initially baffled by the later stuff

seconding Momentum Space

not recommended except for curiosity: awkward Coltrane collab floating around under both their names, feat. grumpily straight-ahead Kenny Dorham

I'm intrigued by the early stuff with standards and things being covered.
Guess I probably just need to hear it.
Have heard Fats wallewr being cited either by him or in reference to him. THink he was very aware of the early years of jazz even if it might not be immediately obvious from hearing his stuff initially.

What I’ve heard of the 2 T’s box is good but it’s a lot of material

It's a tremendous set, but for someone just getting into this group (Taylor, William Parker, Tony Oxley), Looking (Berlin Version) The Feel Trio and Celebrated Blazons might be better points of entry.

Also, the entire 2 T's box is, inexplicably, in mono.

yes. I never actually noticed the mono thing but now I’ll always hear it

wrt Taylor’s debt to jazz tradition (ellington another major influence) it’s probably been understated by both supporters & detractors over the years, who’ve tended to attribute his style mostly or entirely to the european avant garde

(therefore a betrayal of tradition to the stanley crouches of jazz - crouch himself repeatedly dismissing taylor as a charlatan/clown whose musical style is entirely a rip off of messiaen, which is so wrongheaded idek- almost certainly motivated by extramusical issues due to crouch’s reactionary sexual politics)

the centrality of dance & poetry to his work is probably also not recognised enough by fans (like me) with little to no understanding of those things

anyone know the origin of the recently released japanese titled albums on spotify

That's an early 70s solo album recorded in Japan. It's a companion piece to a live trio or quartet (I forget which) disc that's good but dense.

cool thx

there’s another one on the cecil taylor unit page which I guess is the trio set

"I'm intrigued by the early stuff with standards and things being covered."

he does some Cole Porter tunes on the fab Love For Sale album, but not in any kind of orthodox manner.

There's a hilarious bit on At Newport, from 1957, where he says, "Since this is a jazz festival, we think it fitting that we include some of the traditional forms — not the longer ones, the shorter ones — so we're going to do now our interpretation of the blues." The piece, "Nona's Blues," is barely recognizable as such. It sounds more like Conlon Nancarrow or something.

" He was always emphasizing his roots in the jazz idiom of Ellington, Monk and Horace Silver. But there’s also some Dave Brubeck in there, and he even took a couple of lessons with Lennie Tristano. The classical influences are obviously there, although you could never think of him as Third Stream. (The one person he really hated was Bill Evans. In fact, after I told him how much I liked Bill Evans, he didn’t talk to me for a few years!)"

I love reading quotes where other musicians are talking about musicians Cecil either hated or dismissed as garbage!

When I interviewed him in 2016 he talked to me about Horace Silver.

oh yeah he loved Horace Silver.

iirc (it's probably in this thread) he had a rude nickname for Herbie Hancock and didn't think much of him!

He hated Keith Jarrett - called him "Keithypoo" - but if he disliked Hancock it may just have been by association, because he haaaaated Miles Davis.

did CT hate miles for musical reasons? i suspect it was more abt behaviour but i don't know

(richard williams and val wilmer did a talk at cafe oto a while back where val was coaxed into hinting at some of the scurrilous stories she certainly knows, tho as usual she was mostly very nobly diplomatic)

(i hope she's written them down to be published after she's gone, i suspect she knows a LOT and she has an uncanny memory)

No, it was very personal - Davis's group and Taylor's group were part of the same touring package in Europe in 1969, and Taylor overheard Davis telling his bandmates, "Don't listen to him - he's bullshittin'". Never forgave him. Also Davis apparently snubbed him on the street in Manhattan once.

What was fascinating to me, talking to Taylor, was that his go-to insult for Davis was colorist - he called him "Inky"!

“Miles Davis plays pretty well for a millionaire.”

another factor, outside of the personal acrimony, and earlier on, i think is that cecil resented the fact the mile's band was seen as an institution, and so players like coltrane and later tony williams who were doing more experimental things were given a pass and getting regular work while cecil was essentially broke and having to practice on an old out-of-tune piano

When I interviewed him in 2016 he talked to me about Horace Silver.

― but also fuck you (unperson), Thursday, August 20, 2020 3:13 PM (thirty-one minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

oh yeah he loved Horace Silver.

― calzino, Thursday, August 20, 2020 3:14 PM (thirty minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

They were friends -- whoever was playing, if the other was in town, they'd go see him.

https://www.pescarajazz.com/upload_area/photos/0/1996_Cecil_Taylor_Horace_Silver.jpg

another factor, outside of the personal acrimony, and earlier on, i think is that cecil resented the fact the mile's band was seen as an institution, and so players like coltrane and later tony williams who were doing more experimental things were given a pass and getting regular work while cecil was essentially broke and having to practice on an old out-of-tune piano

― budo jeru, Thursday, August 20, 2020 3:45 PM (two minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Possibly...but some of Cecil's contemporaries, who were in no better a situation than Cecil, loved Miles' band. Archie Shepp tried to sit in (and was rebuffed); and Bill Dixon was a massive Miles fanatic (and they had been fairly close friends in the late 1940s, at one time studying with the same trumpet teacher). Certainly, though, none of the musicians in the new music were happy with Miles shit-talking Cecil and Eric Dolphy in Down Beat, but that was part of the critical establishment's game: get an anti-new music critic (Leonard Feather) to interview someone known to be hostile towards the new music (Miles), and it bolsters the critics' position against the new music.

Tony Williams used to come to Cecil's and Bill's rehearsals at the Cellar Club in 1964, and asked to join. Bill and Cecil told him, "We're not working; Miles is working. Stick with Miles." And when Miles' band was at the Village Vanguard in early 1965, the Jazz Composers Guild Orchestra was rehearsing and performing two floors above. This irritated Miles, because his whole band spent their set breaks listening to (and sometimes sitting in with) the Orchestra, and Miles hated having to send for them when his sets were about to start.

right, tony williams undoubtedly admired cecil.

cecil himself i think is on record citing miles's influence, i don't think there's any question there.

i was just trying to point out how the loneliness and frustration of having to forge a path on one's own with essentially no infrastructure or financial support might have factored into cecil's resentment of miles as a person / personality (hence the "plays pretty well for a millionaire" quote above).

Yeah, I can definitely see how some personal resentment could stem from Miles simultaneously shitting on the new music in interviews while allowing (a certain degree of) it in his band, and never having to deal with any of the vitriol and lack of opportunities that the new musicians faced.

I've never known many likeable heroin addicts in my life, and that includes old school friends who I've known since I was 4 years old and family. They knick your wallet and then spend all night long slagging you off to anyone to will listen whilst high as fuck! That is probably a gross simplification there of course, sometimes I think Miles was an appalling person, even beyond the levels of appallingness you might gauge from reading books and gossip on him.

miles seemed to be at least as much of a prick after kicking heroin. idk how much sobriety there was between then & his coke habit but his dickheadery seems to be the rule with or without drugs. amazing the musicians he still managed to keep in his orbit

idk if coltrane really was the saint I want to think he was but he def seems to have handled his own addiction in a v different way

As well as heroin, I think the sheer difficulty of trying to lead/run a jazz group has always made for a certain amount of arsehole behaviour - definitely a streak of ruthlessness required just to survive - I'd never heard about Art Blakey deliberately getting various Jazz Messengers hooked on heroin as a way of controlling them, before I watched that recent Lee Morgan documentary

shit that’s sad. I knew that happened but not names

Leading a jazz band as a business back then was probably at least a 1000 times more difficult than being a low level electrical/plumbing contractor, especially when you are surrounded all sorts of competing egos/drug problems (including yr own) and dealing with racist cops and Amerikkka to boot, record companies skullfucking you, it must have been very stressful and some levels of ruthlessness would be normal practise and feel necessary to survive.

https://www.thewire.co.uk/in-writing/essays/cecil-taylor-his-mendota-players-snapshots-by-paul-ruppa

"During lectures, Taylor would sometimes read his highly personalised and often abstract poetry with dramatic pronunciation, clipped sounds and an occasional angry attack at or a hint of haughty disdain for fools in general."

memories and pics of early 70's Cecil when he was teaching a black music history course at Wisconsin uni

https://www.thewire.co.uk/in-writing/essays/cecil-taylor-his-mendota-players-snapshots-by-paul-ruppa🕸

"During lectures, Taylor would sometimes read his highly personalised and often abstract poetry with dramatic pronunciation, clipped sounds and an occasional angry attack at or a hint of haughty disdain for fools in general."

memories and pics of early 70's Cecil when he was teaching a black music history course at Wisconsin uni

Taylor did a trio gig at Jazz at Lincoln Center (w/Henry Grimes and Pheeoran aklaff I think); John Zorn's Masada opened. House was packed for Zorn, then Taylor cleared half the house and he barely started his poetry. I'm like, when did John Zorn become embraced by the mainstream? Masada was dull to me it all sounded like an Ornette Coleman tribute band. And in the 21st century Taylor blew the pseuds away.

NB Zorn's music and persona rubs me the wrong way, and the contrast in crowd reception between him.and Taylor reinforced my dislike but all respect for the stone and Tzadik.

Glad I didn't go to that. I saw Taylor at Avery Fisher Hall once; the set was half solo, half trio, and he started out reading/reciting poetry from backstage, gradually emerging, dancing all around the stage in his socks. He had that famous quote, "You don't simply walk to the piano."

Here's a puzzling quote from Ian Carr in the Cecil Taylor entry in Jazz: The Rough Guide, published 2000:

The whole jazz scene in the late 1950s was ripe for a shake-up, which happened with the advent of free jazz, and Taylor should have played a very prominent role as one of the trailblazers of abstraction, but the arrival in New York of Ornette Coleman, in the autumn of 1959, put Taylor completely in the shade, blighting his career for several years.

I can see how Ornette would be seen as more potentially accessible than Taylor, but surely the "free jazz" scene would have opened the jazz world up to more potential artists, not just expecting a flood of mini-Ornettes? And surely he wasn't well-known enough for an anti-Cecil Taylor backlash to "blight" his career? I'm curious what people here might have to say.

(Incidentally, I did a search on the words "arrival in New york of ornette" and found two very similar quotes in different sources saying similar things about Cecil Taylor being "eclipsed" or "consigned to the outside berth"; either this is common knowledge or someone is cribbing from someone else.)