Cecil Taylor’s All-Encompassing Sound
Different kinds of music don’t exist in isolated worlds; all those different sounds lie together on the same spectrum. And that musical realization becomes all the more clear when you listen to someone like Cecil Taylor, the innovative pianist who died Thursday evening in his Brooklyn home at age 89. Though he is best known for his participation in jazz’s avant-garde — with his apparent suspension of time and percussive approach to his instrument — learning about and listening to Taylor’s music from different periods of his musical life reveal a man well-traveled on that spectrum.
From a young age, the Queens-born Taylor approached the piano dutifully, with an almost religious dedication. His mother introduced him to lessons at six years old, and he was made to practice for the same number of days per week (Sundays were a day of rest). As with many professional musicians, practice remained a core part of his artistic identity; but for him, it wasn’t about discipline or even maintenance of talent — practice, Taylor believed, gave him the space to invent. “The joy of practicing,” he said, “leads you to the celebration of the creation." That youthful dedication led him to study at the New York College of Music, and later the New England Conservatory. It was during this period of formal study that he honed his understanding of Western European classical traditions. While recordings of Taylor playing straight readings of modern classical music may be scarce (if at all present), critics have pointed out its influence in his work, including his approach to contemporary “new” music like 2000’s The Owner of the River Bank:
Now it’s the world of jazz that the pianist is most closely associated, even if much of his work fell squarely outside of that musical idiom. Yet what’s particularly interesting about Taylor’s jazz leanings is what he created prior to a full embrace of that “free jazz” label. Take his debut album, Jazz Advance, a 1956 album that features his interpretations of several jazz standards, including Duke Ellington’s “Azure” and fellow jazz iconoclast Thelonious Monk’s “Bemsha Swing.”
Though he had some years to go before he became the Cecil Taylor of Unit Structures and Conquistador!, you can catch a glimpse of the shape of the pianist to come. In the above recording of "Azure," for example, he’s still working with a dreamy, serene Ellington piece and injecting it with an entirely new energy. He’s taking the listener to new areas of Ellington’s dream world, teasing a conflict of time with Drummer Buell Neidlinger among his panicked-yet-controlled solos.
The New Yorker’s Richard Brody identifies what is perhaps Taylor’s greatest accomplishment: “he released jazz from the lockstep of the metronomic beat.” The result was solos imbued with a radical freedom and ensemble interactions that simultaneously supported one other while encouraging deep individual exploration.
And that’s on display in filmmaker Ron Mann’s Imagine the Sound, a documentary that dived into the world of “free jazz,” featuring Taylor along with other avant-garde musicians like Archie Shepp and Bill Dixon. Watching Taylor improvise in the film, you can’t help but think the music has some omniscient quality to it (that Taylor is alone in a white room, seemingly detached from space and time also helps). What you hear is music that has a little bit of everything — it nods to the crying blues and European dynamism and chords of a world from which we like to call this jazz “freed.” You can’t quite put a pin on what it is you’re hearing, and that’s ok — it’s a journey on that spectrum.
