Cecil Taylor is no longer re, died on Thursday at his house in Brooklyn, where he lived for many decades. He became 89, a great age, especially for a jazz musician, to whom nothing human was alien.
He was a man of men, of tobacco, of champagne, of summoning. The stage he entered on wool socks. He murmured, he hissed, he danced around piano. He waved papers, no notes on it. He cried, “PO! To! Mi! ta! “, and words faded from darkness of backdrop.
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Then he touched wing. He who had ever given him hand knew with what pressure. The keyboard was gym of his fingers. Music was his strength, sweat and excess. He practiced from early to late. Again and again and again se meandering runs: y enrolled in his neural pathways. Head, neck, chest, arms, plates, edges, crests. Loins, thighs, shackles, toes.
His audience also had to practice: to hear him. He had river and abundance up to nauseum. He couldn’t stop. He played two hours without interrupting or subletting. He played and played and played and played and played. Was that still playing? He made karate at piano, he milled across keys, water splashed from his forehead.
Music as invocation of highest, animalic, driven, transitory, present. Free Jazz! Many did not endure this. The word went astray. For what he did re had reason, besides hand and foot. And again se meandering runs, again and again and again, y were structured down to last nuance. Sometimes, in his later years, he played allowances – after two hours of frenzy suddenly a calmly breathing miniature: lyrical, balanced, beautiful. As if he had just gone to this moment.
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He could say anything with all notes or with quite a few. He was a madman and an enlightened, a iriscendent genius. Did he make 50 plates or 100? Here are just three examples.
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The world of Cecil Taylor from 1960, re still seems to be all right. A black jazz pianist plays a me from a Hollywood movie, this Nearly was mine. A desperate soldier’s love in eight and minutes: I almost had you. But n he plays his solo and while his companions to bass and drums pretend that nothing is, he makes melody, harmony and rhythm collapse, falls to slowest and most fascinating of all: a preliminary study of what to follow.
For example, Silent Tongues, recorded at Jazz Festival in Montreux in 1974. The waves of reflection that run on and off, everything is in motion, a billows at all levels in time and space, stretching and sealing, expansion and compaction: free jazz? Never!
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And n best: feel trio. Cecil Taylor with William Parker on bass and Tony Oxley on drums. In looking (Berlin version), recorded on November 2, 1989 in Berlin, y bring wall to a collapse. This is really crass music: Taylor’s repetitive dances, Parkers ostinates insistence, Oxley’s fluid rhythm that does without all tact. To this day a visible survey in wide landscape of piano trio. Free Jazz? Yes. Yes, yes. (and No.)
Looking (Berlin version) trio by feel trio
Cecil Taylor has brought free jazz into shape and led to height. Freedom as Transzendierte art, in which all history is lifted: Call and answer of cotton fields, blue notes, swing, European classics, Indian heritage and wild ego with Codex of civilization.
Thank you.
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