In the Brewing Luminous: The Life & Music of Cecil Taylor

In the Brewing Luminous: The Life & Music of Cecil Taylor
Philip Freeman
344 Pages
ISBN: # ISBN 978-3-9553-261-9
Wolke Verlag
2024

"The thing that makes jazz so interesting is that each man is his own academy," Cecil Taylor once said, (quoted by Val Wilmer in Jazz People, Da Capo, 1970). The pianist/composer was certainly a school of one, a pianist and composer who occupied a unique position in contemporary music for almost seventy years. Yet if jazz purportedly celebrates individual virtuosity, it seems surprising that In The Brewing Luminous... is the first full-length biography of this NEA Jazz Master and recipient of both a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Kyoto Prize.

Why has Taylor's music proven so problematic? As author Philip Freeman relates, Taylor's music did not conform to the jazz as proscribed by the purists/stylists in the '50s and'60s—and every decade hence—and was considered too avant-garde by many club owners, repelled by the idea that a single composition could last an hour. His atonality (a label Taylor questioned), extreme chromaticism and fiercely percussive attack—it was Wilmer who coined the phrase "88 tuned drums"—meant that Taylor was never an easy fit on the scene.

Despite the incomprehension and the disdain—Miles Davis made his feelings clear by spitting on the sidewalk when passing Taylor one day— Taylor saw himself very much as belonging to the jazz continuum, his music at times displaying the influences of Fats Waller and Duke Ellington, Lennie Tristano, Bud Powell, Horace Silver and Erroll Garner. In an interview in 2000 in Bologna, Italy, with Franco Fabbri, Taylor said: "I am just a carrier of a tradition that I was fortunate enough to be included in."

Freeman consistently identifies the references in Taylor's playing that tie him to jazz traditions—blues, stride and swing—even as some audience members were walking out of his concerts, unable to decipher the uncommonly intense barrage of sound (Nat Hentoff described it as "an unending volcano of feeling") that Taylor wrought from his keys. "He was considered a musical terrorist at that time," said saxophonist Steve Lacey of the typical response to Taylor's music in the pianist's first decade as a gigging artist.

Taylor, the author acknowledges on more than one occasion, did not always help his own cause. It could take a lot of chewing to digest Taylor's sometimes obfuscatory explanations of his music, of which there are a few especially florid examples to wonder at.

But for all those unable to digest, relate to, or endure Taylor's music, there were plenty who heard in it something extraordinary, revolutionary even—the sound of genius. Romanticism, tenderness and beautiful melodies, the author unfailingly reminds the reader, all came out in Taylor's playing as well, like streaks of sunlight piercing storm clouds.

Not everyone found Taylor's music impenetrable. Drummer Sunny Murray described a trio tour to Scandinavia in October 1962 with Taylor and saxophonist Jimmy Lyons where the crowd in Oslo danced to the music: ... " they were such hip people that rhythmically they had worked it out, and they were coming in on the beat. It was heavy. Cecil was just laughin' and playin,'" Murray recalled.

In conventional biographical manner, and in meticulous detail, the author traces Taylor's childhood and musical upbringing either side of WWII in Corona, Queens. His father, Percival Clinton Taylor, was an ex-military man turned head chef, while his mother, born, Almeida Ragland, was a dietician who played the piano and spoke French and German. For Freeman, Taylor's upbringing as "a member of the Black bourgeoisie" is crucial to understanding his personality and how that fed into his music. "I am difficult because I don't want anything else but absolute art, Taylor once said. "That's why I exist." For Taylor, the reader quickly learns, the music was everything. His musical independence was everything.

Albert Ayler, who played briefly with Taylor in late '62 recalled how Taylor would give all the earnings from gigs at that time to his band members, taking nothing for himself, because he was so keen to keep them happy and to keep the music turning. ... " he loved music maybe more than a lot of musicians, I think," Ayler said in a 1970 interview.

This intense love for the music required total commitment from his band members. Avant-garde bassoonist Karen Borca, who was a student at University of Wisconsin when Taylor taught in the 1970-1971 academic year, would go on to play in Taylor's Black Music Ensemble, his big-bands and in the Cecil Taylor Unit. She describes a regime of almost daily rehearsal, Saturdays and Sundays included: "If you're going to play in this band then you have to love it enough for it to be your whole life while you were doing it."

The ten chapters cover all the stepping stones—big and small—in Taylor's career, Freeman drawing extensively from contemporary interviews and articles by the likes of Chris Funkhouser, Amiri Baraka, Stanley Crouch, and the aforementioned Hentoff and Wilmer, to name just a few. Every gig or residency is duly recorded, with extensive detail on Taylor's year-long artistic residency in Berlin in 1988.

Every one of Taylor's ensembles, every duo partnership, big-band and multi-media project is analyzed comprehensively. Taylor, of course, was a multi- disciplinary artist, a dancer and a poet; Freeman does a commendable job of illustrating how these different aspects of Taylor's art fed into each other, right until his final project in 2016.

The case for the influence on Taylor of composers such as Béla Bartók, Olivier Messiaen and Alban Berg on has been made repeatedly—if not entirely convincingly—over the years, though Taylor certainly seems to have had catholic tastes, enjoying opera, for example. But the influence of dance and poetry (and the architecture of Valencian Santiago Calatrava) on his music come across as far more profound and more immediate in these pages. Interestingly, Freeman also suggests the influence of Caribbean music, an analysis that in itself invites closer listening.

Taylor's philosophy of composition—closer in some respects to African oral traditions than to Western written systems—and how it related to improvisation are also addressed in some detail. Idris Ackamoor, a student at Anticoch where Taylor taught, and also a member of his Back Music Ensemble, recalls Taylor's wholly unorthodox but inspirational—not to say demanding—methodology: "If you thought you could come into the Ensemble [with] the whole idea of notes, and music, paper, and lines on music paper—you had to throw that shit out."

If little of Taylor's life beyond the world of music can be gleaned from Freeman's extensive digging, other than the pianist's fondness for champagne, cocaine and 24-hour clubbing, it is maybe because music is represented as an all-consuming passion for him. Even in the early hardscrabble years when he could hardly get a gig and had to take jobs in a bank and in a record store, delivering sandwiches, working as a dishwasher or as a short-order cook, Taylor would still practice at the piano every day for hours, religiously. This life-long regimen was central, Taylor would say, to his improvisations.

In fact, the bulk of In The Brewing Luminous seems to chronicle every gig or ensemble that led to a recording, of which over eighty—and rising—in total. It is unlikely that anyone has spent as many hours at the coalface listening so closely or so intently to Taylor's entire body of work as Freeman, nor labored so diligently to describe the mechanics at play. Clearly, it has been a colossal undertaking, to analyze Taylor's playing on every album, minute by minute it seems, and to strive to do so in language that reflects the complexities, the musicality and the unparalleled power in Taylor's music.

Frequently, the descriptions of Taylor in full flow are brilliant, though almost inevitably, a little repetitive at times. The wonder is that that a book so thorough comes in at just 344 pages, 440 pages fewer than Aidan Levy's Saxophone Colossus: The Life And Music Of Sonny Rollins (Hachette Books, 2023). Yet there is never a sense that Freeman has omitted anything of note.

As insightful and persuasive a study of Cecil Taylor as one could hope for, Freeman's biggest achievement is perhaps that he succeeds in repeatedly drawing the reader back to Taylor's music, inviting reappraisal and (re)discovery every step of the way.

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