Cecil Taylor S+D

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.)

Yeah, that's bullshit. Taylor released Love For Sale in 1959, which was his fifth album, and he made two more albums after that, The World of Cecil Taylor and New York City R&B. Then he went to Europe, made Live at the Café Montmartre (later expanded as Nefertiti, the Beautiful One Has Come) which was released in 1963, and then a dry spell hit; he didn't record again until 1966. But when he did, he was on Blue Note!

Cecil’s first recordings predated Ornette’s by at least two years, but more to the point, Ornette dug Cecil and Cecil dug Ornette. Ornette had a larger profile, it’s true, but it wasn’t at the expense of Cecil’s visibility. To suggest that that was the case is pretty simplistic and one-dimensional.

Exactly. You know whose career Ornette killed? The Benny Golson-Art Farmer Jazztet. They were on the same bill at the Five Spot, also making their debut, and after Ornette's band hit, the Jazztet might as well have been playing Dixieland.

The most puzzling implication is that it was only the distraction of Ornette that prevented Cecil Taylor from having greater mass appeal!
The book seems to have a grudge against certain elements of the free jazz scene: "it attracted a number of charlatans and inferior players". The writeup on Pharoah Sanders is dismissive of his career arc, and apparently Sonny Sharrock "actually boasted of his musical ignorance". At least it has a lot of detail about UK jazz musicians that wouldn't be in other reference works.

The book seems to have a grudge against certain elements of the free jazz scene: "it attracted a number of charlatans and inferior players".

Critics who fling around shit like this are, for whatever reason, utterly incapable of further articulating their point. What makes a certain player a "charlatan"? "Inferior" to whom/what? If Sharrock "actually boasted of his musical ignorance" why no quote backing this up? The answer to that is likely because what Sharrock has said -- "People used to get mad at me because I’d get hired for a gig and I’d say, ‘I ain’t gonna play chords. That’s guitar. I’m a horn player. I just play a fucked-up horn'" -- was deliberately misinterpreted to bolster that critic's agenda.

You know whose career Ornette killed? The Benny Golson-Art Farmer Jazztet.

I wouldn't say Ornette killed their career. He absolutely got a lot more publicity on that engagement than Golson/Farmer, but they had very long and fruitful careers. They knew they weren't playing the new music. But Farmer toured and recorded right up until his death (including for such prominent labels as CTI and Contemporary), and Golson is still alive and playing at 92 (and was apparently a significant influence on Coltrane, particularly Golson's recordings with Blakey).

And the pianist in the Jazztet, McCoy Tyner, went on to have a pretty decent career.

Here's the full sentence from the book:

Sharrock claimed to be the first guitarist to play free jazz, and so topsy-turvy had values become at the end of the 1960s that he actually boasted of his musical ignorance, saying he could write ‘but not read music. Do not know any standard tunes or any other musicians’ licks’.

Incidentally, Jazz: the Rough Guide has a blurb on the back: "Written by musicians rather than musicologists - and it shows!"

I haven't read a ton of Carr's work -- he wrote a serviceable but largely unnecessary Miles bio some years back -- but he sounds like someone for whom what Cecil and Ornette did was the absolute limit of what he would accept (or accept as "jazz"). And when a movement comes along that appears to dismiss tradition so forcefully, someone like Carr is ultimately going to be lost: his reference points no longer apply.

Can anyone recommend a good Cecil biography?

just to catch up on the ian carr stuff (sorry raymond)

— carr's original version of the miles book came out in 1982: "the definitive" (1999ish) was a later reworking and possibly was by then unecessary but i think the 1982 , and was possibly at that time the first book-length detail study (viz carr was a professional musician himself and dutifully slogs thru the musicology)
— my guess re the snidey stuff on charlatans blah blah is that this is a british critic struggling with the political wing of the new thing (musicians like shepp, even more so critics like baraka and kofsky) and riffing off on the notion (which i certainly recall encountering in the 70s) that some militants considered cecil too academically inclined to be making properly black music? hence that -- despite ornette's approval -- he encountered undeserved resistance? (and i mean the scene was not an uncomplicated love-in… )

it's worth stressing how very *distant* much british jazz commentary was from black US life even in the 70s -- really only val wilmer had good direct contacts and information, everything else was arriving second or third-hand, thru quite biased filters (and as serious as your life was only published in 1977: tho of course some of the interviews that feed into it predate this)

(i shd add that a relative i'm very fond of was close to carr and fond of him so i'm inclined to cut him a little slack just bcz family but he's not a sparkling writer lol)

s/b i think the 1982 , and was possibly

Can anyone recommend a good Cecil biography?

There isn't one. Ben Young has supposedly been working on one for about 15 years but I don't know if it'll ever be published. A.B. Spellman's Four Lives in the Bebop Business has a long and very good section on Cecil, but it's from the 1960s so it's all about his early years.

Also: Clark Coolidge, poet and drummer, has always been v. tuned in to Cecil: https://www.google.com/search?q=Clark+Coolidge+Cecil+Taylor&oq=Clark+Coolidge+Cecil+Taylor&aqs=chrome..69i57j33i299.18708j0j15&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

Howard Mandel’s book Miles, Ornette, Cecil features about 60 or 70 pages of interview and analysis of Taylor, like a very long magazine article. It’s from 2008, so provides a different view to the Spellman book.

Mandel and I have had beef in the past so I never checked the book out, but I'm idly curious. Is it any good?

It's no Bobby's World.

wondering if anybody here has a .pdf of the liner notes for the "cecil taylor in berlin '88" box set. wouldn't be a bad place to look for info after the spellman and mandel books.

Found a used copy of the Mandel on ebay for $7.50, so I'll check it out when it arrives.

I remember enjoying the Mandel book; as I recall, the best section was on Ornette. The Cecil section was largely an interview, and as I suggested above, reads a little like a gossipy magazine feature: "I met Cecil at dawn on the subway, looking like he's much the worse for wear", "Cecil sweeps the white powdered residue off the coffee table before he answers", etc.

wondering if anybody here has a .pdf of the liner notes for the "cecil taylor in berlin '88" box set.

I think the only way to get that now is by purchasing it on FMP’s Bandcamp. I flipped through that book years ago and it’s mostly about the residency. Which, to be sure, is a significant part of Cecil’s career, but I don’t recall much in the way of biographical/historical detail. There are many, many photos, and recollections from the musicians he collaborated with during his residency. I don’t think any of it is duplicated in the individual CD booklets.

Thanks all.

My question was inspired by this Taylor interview from the early 1990s:

https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/authors/funkhouser/ceciltaylor.html

woah. i did not know there was (color!) footage of the '69 band with sam rivers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8esrU0T_J5Y

watched that last week there is a different longer one too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxk-mK-uQsU

short one from 69 in Maeght too
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKmhOO-0Kyw

i dremt cecil was scheduled to give me a piano lesson but we kept being interrupted before it began (which on waking i feel is for the best)

A doc I helped edit in its early stages is now up on YT. I remember meeting CT a couple of times during the process and he was a gracious, sweet man.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Atu8dab3atc

Sure, it's on YouTube now after I paid like $35 for a DVD of it last month.

I think the ‘Complete Return Concert’ could be my favorite Cecil release period

Can’t believe anyone who likes Taylor wouldn’t like his poetry. It’s an essential part of setting the mood and I always found his poetic introductions led fluidly into the music.

I’m a fan of it, and it’s something he worked very hard at. The original plan for the Bill Dixon/Cecil 1992 duos set was to release a 2CD box (both artists preferred CDs to vinyl) with a large folio containing Cecil’s poetry and Bill’s artwork. Obviously, that set didn’t materialize until decades later, and in a less elaborate presentation. But Cecil’s poetry was something he very much wanted highlighted in that package, something more than the typical liner-notes treatment his poetry had usually been given on his releases.

I know he published some poems in small literary magazines here and there, too. At various points he talked about publishing a book but never did obviously.

Unperson, is that new Taylor/Dixon record available legitimately as a download. All respect to Rob Young but his insistence on making these expensive physical objects is annoying.

Nope. $95 for the vinyl or nothing! I was amazed he was willing to send me MP3s so I could review it for The Wire, and even then they were vinyl rips. He's a fanatic.

what release are you talking about?

Might have to troll the dark web

what release are you talking about?