Steve Lake (1989)

CECIL TAYLOR IN BERLIN

If, on a whim, you had dropped into a Berlin discotheque called Abraxas last summer- in, let's say, a desperate urge to get a drink in the middle of the night - you might have been surprised to stumble over the cream of Europe's improvising avant-garde lurking in the smoky gloom. Bizarre: to see a Kowald or a Brötzmann or a Bennink suddenly illuminated by a strobe of light or a mirrored ball or the sickly green-and-pink neon sign advertising a cocktail with a cherry in it. Europe's best (or nearly all of them - the firmly principled Evan Parker stuck to Alex Schlippenbach's local pub) convened upon Abraxas nightly, for this was where Cecil Taylor was holding court. Taylor's European Orchestra - and the young musicians attending his workshops, plus a further circle of friends and associates - followed him into the small hours to marvel at his stamina on the dance-floor (plaited braids aswirl as he shook a tail feather) or to catch some more of his marvellous anecdotes (his life story is the history of the new jazz) or to bear witness to a few of his critical salvos blasting away various contemporaries and cultural icons, blunderbuss style. Within seconds one night he trashed Stravinsky ("little Igor"), banished the Kronos-Quartet with the pained hoisting of a lukewarm eyebrow and dismissed Miles Davis's painting career. At the mention of it, he had buried his face in his hands. A Munich impresario, Karlheinz Hein, was planning an exhibition of Miles's drawings. "What's wrong with Karlheinz?" Cecil moaned, theatrically, from between his fingers. (The moan had to be a roar to rise above the barking hard funk that filled the room.) The context made it all the funnier. Though his criticisms have been known to be withering, he was in too good a mood - for virtually the whole month he was in Berlin, it seemed - to go for the kill. More often he was bubbling over with an infectious enthusiasm that made everybody in the vicinity look at their surroundings anew. "Wonderful" was a key word. Peter van Bergen was a wonderful saxophonist. No further qualification necessary. I had to stop and think about it (I knew he was good). The European Orchestra was a wonderful, wonderful group - double superlative (easy to endorse) - and Cecil wanted to take it to New York. Oh yes, that would put the cat amongst the pigeons, make a few critics and musicians wake up, change some ideas about what's happening and not happening in contemporary music (I'm paraphrasing but this was the general drift). Cecil cackled at the idea of going on tour through America with a European group.

If it happens (it will, it must), it will seem provocative primarily to those who lazily and/or chauvinistically still believe that Europe's sole role in the dissemination of the New Jazz is to copy. This is an old and tired notion. At the creative end of improvised music (it remains a small zone) a handful of Europeans - none of whom to the best of my knowledge lays claim to representing Europe or any part of it or, indeed, anything other than himself - have long since been charting personal, sometimes private, paths. A few have even had the temerity to contemplate ways in which they might improve the musics of certain Americans if given the opportunity. I remember Tony Oxley telling me, at least fifteen years ago, of how he'd play with Anthony Braxton and how with Cecil Taylor, when neither possibility seemed likely. (There were specific surfaces to be played on, specific textures to be located.) At the time, there was almost no dialogue between the American and European improvising communities. The occasional stray free soloist like Bobby Bradford might have been a reminder of the days when Ayler played with Swedes and Dolphy with Dutchmen because they were (a) cheaper, (b) there, and (c) not so bad, but contact had been closed down for the most part when a handful of critics and players decreed that free jazz was exclusively the music of Black nationalism. As such it could not easily look to Europe for help without compromising the cause. Probably a necessary attitude at the time, its most debilitating effect was the isolating of the best American players. Ignored by the U. S. music industry - no record deals, no radio - they were obliged to wander Europe like a tribe twice lost, African-Americans mostly unwanted by America and abandoned by the musical tradition they were trying to extend. That's a pretty chilling scenario and one that goes some way to explaining the period of retrenchment that American jazz has been locked in for much of the last fifteen years. But a number of musicians (again, not enough to constitute a "scene"), individual thinkers, conceptualists, artists, were too advanced to countenance retreat. Braxton, Leo Smith and George Lewis were three such. Cecil Taylor a fourth. They all, I think, recognized that any artistic method eventually exhausts itself and needs to draw on new blood, new ideas. No so-called free jazz milieu was capable of supporting the range of their (very different) imaginations. Certainly a musician of Cecil Taylor's particular strength had nothing to fear from casting the widest possible net his powerful presence could not be undermined. By 1984, he was tentatively proposing his "Orchestra Of Two Continents", something of a hedged bet, since the principals of its European section - Enrico Rava, Gunter Hampel and John Tchicai - had honed their craft in New York. Still, the gesture was significant.

I could imagine some reluctance on Taylor's part to admit improvising "Europe" into his art. After all, he'd had to read so much wishing-and-hoping criticism about European influences back in the 1950s. (If Stravinsky and Bartók had ever haunted his piano, they had now been well and truly exorcised..)

But Europe does have its contingent of improvisers who are unafraid to feel (the most terrifying thing in our society, Taylor once contented) and, by the mid 1980s, FMP was corralling them on the pianist's behalf. Taylor's stunning success at the 1986 Free Music Workshop had charged everybody involved with such energy that it seemed imperative to organize a festival around him, at the earliest opportunity. And so the full month of concerts from June 17 to July 17, 1988 was scheduled.

Jost Gebers assembled the programme, taking into account a few specific requests from Cecil. Essentially the list of players was a combination of people Taylor knew, people Taylor was curious to know, and people Taylor had never heard of.

When he arrived in Berlin, he was sceptical about beginning a festival with a musician from the last category. How could Günter "Baby" Sommer, a drummer from East Germany, come close to the sources that Taylor drew upon?

The immediate understanding the two players achieved set the tone for the rest of the festival. Taylor came off stage ebullient. OK Gebers, he whispered, as he splashed back into the dressing room, I believe everything you say.

For the next month, the music was roaring.

I've been following this area of music, with varying degrees of love and impatience, for a long time now, and l've never experienced a festival like this one. So much of the playing was so completely absorbing it was like some heavy drug. I'd load UD on as much of it as I could take a few days at a time, then get back to Munich until I was ready to handle the next dose. Back and forth. Munich, Berlin, Munich. At the month's end, I was suffering from train-lag. Very little of the music that I heard was merely mediocre. The worst of it meandered before it found its focus. The best came in blazing and stayed that way.

In the last few years, some European improvisers, including some of those documented here, could have stood accused of complacency, of stagnation. But Taylor's particular charisma seemed to key everything to a more intense pitch. He drove himself so hard that it was difficult for the others, with dignity, to do less. His presence was felt even when he was not there.

In the week leading up to the premiere of the Cecil Taylor European Orchestra, the Kongresshalle's stage was turned over to the orchestra's musicians. They could use it as they pleased, and they performed in any number of permutations. Taylor put in a couple of appearances at these sessions, but most of the time was carved up between the other fellows. There were many excellent, spontaneously organised sets, most of which fall outside the range of the current documentation. I'll mention a few anyway, in the hope that future archive research might save them from oblivion. Were the tape machines rolling? (Can it have been otherwise at an FMP event?)

Friday, the 24th of June, for example. Outside the context of a Cecil Taylor festival such an evening ought to have had people rejoicing in the streets, giving flowers to policemen, hurling glasses into the fireplace etc. etc. Instead, there was a faint hint of anti-climax in the air because He did not appear. Nonetheless, the music was magnificent and virtually given away. Five Deutsche Mark for a night of music launched by a trio of Brötzmann, Bennink and William Parker, all ferocious verve and good humour which, nevertheless, never settled either for free jazz cliché or the all-too-easy clown/art bag that Han Bennink patented long ago.

Bennink in Berlin.. my God, he was a book, a festival all by himself. (Sometimes over-familiarity can keep you from seeing/hearing what a player can do. Bennink's humour in Berlin had a deadly accuracy and his drumming, the powerful reaping of real rhythms, a slashing attack balanced by a disconcerting subtlety, was about all one could ask for any player.)

A duo of Tristan Honsinger and Evan Parker. Again confounding expectation, this was a very concise, controlled exploration of timbral possibility. Rigorously disciplined, at times almost dry, an improvised chamber music. They turned the music through unorthodox perspectives together, investigating the grain of the sound. Afterwards, you wanted a tape of the improvisation so that you could study the material as attentively as they had.

Next day. The Schlippenbach trio. Alexander von Schlippenbach wasn't officially scheduled to appear in the festival at all. But, hell, he lives in Berlin, Evan Parker and Paul Lovens were there, and it was a beautiful piano. Why not? It takes certain courage, if you're regularly cast as being "Cecil Taylor influenced", to get up and take part in that man's showcase. And of course Alex is Taylor influenced, but he's taken that influence someplace else, as was apparent in this strong, clear set. Even Paul Lovens's scattershot, disruptive drumming seemed contained and to the point.

There was a lot of good stuff. Peter Kowald and William Parker playing together, the wefting of their basses, a mesh of detail one could not catch with such clarity (even under optimum recording conditions) inside the European Orchestra. What else? A quartet of trombones. Then Paul Lovens together with Martin Mayes and Hans Koch, playing for the most part a very quiet music, of rustling prettiness.

Not all players were willing to exhaust their energies in these nightly sets. I met Enrico Rava on the Kongresshalle stairs one day and he was looking seriously careworn, in a state of anxiety that even a rather natty white sports jacket couldn't disguise. He was pooped, in a word.

"I don't want to do this," he said, referring to the sessions. "We're rehearsing the big band five or six hours a day and that's demanding music." He said he didn't consider himself a free jazz trumpeter any more and I said that was a pity (remember that really nice group he had with Roswell Rudd or Lacy's "Forest & the Zoo"?) "I mean," he continued, "I love to play with Cecil. He's fantastic and you always learn a lot. But this other stuff.." He jerked a thumb towards the recital room where half a dozen improvisers were brewing something luminous. "..it's too much. I could play that or Cecil's thing. But both..." And he was off, grumbling, towards the bar.

The Orchestra rehearsals were, not unnaturally, the subject of a lot of discussion, most of it confusing to me. It was hard to pin down any of the players on questions I thought straightforward. How much of the material in preparation was written? What kind of structural limits were imposed upon the improvisers?

(Later, Taylor could prove just as foggy. He and Han Bennink had played an encore that seemed too neatly-turned to have been pulled spontaneously out of the blue sky. So I asked: Was that a written piece? Cecil's slightly ruffled response: "Whatever that means.")

In fact, Cecil Taylor was encouraging the Big Band players to write their own music, using the building blocks that he'd provided specific pitches, scales and melodic fragments. In the early stages of rehearsal this was less than crystal clear to some of the musicians. One could ask, "How free is it, this music you're going to play?" and be told "Oh, it's completely open" or "Everything's written down."

When the concert series was finished, I read an illuminating article in Coda by Mark Miller, probably the best thing I've read on Taylor, in which he describes, blow by blow, Taylor's realization of one of his ensemble pieces with a student group...

"Taylor's terms of reference were intentionally vague, and initially they brought him scepticism. In the absence of a clear direction, he asked implicitly for his musicians' trust. But the focus of that trust shifted gradually: as the preferred responsibility was assumed (...) it became a question of whether the musicians trusted themselves (.) the orchestra is my instrument, Ellington used to say. The orchestra is their instrument, Taylor now seemed to be suggesting. (.) The transfer of control was complete. Taylor would retain only the element of surprise."

Later in the story (it's worth taking the effort to track it down), Taylor tells Miller: "To sit down and write a piece of music and to ask musicians to perform that music under the same directorial tutelage that Handel gave his musicians seems to me to be rather questionable in concept."

Taylor's, obviously, is an enlightened leadership. But the European Orchestra was no student group and rather than proceed cautiously with his composition on opening night they attacked it with a reckless, sloppy abandon, flattening the piece's dynamics in a blurred frenzy. Or so I'm told. I was on the night train from Munich at the time. "If you want to talk about muddy performances that was one of the muddiest," one of the saxophonists admitted. On the other hand, Brötzmann, that unrepentant energy player, said he liked it. Jost Gebers, I believe, was very disappointed and gloomy about the cost of the state-of-the-art multi-track console he'd hired to record the piece; he wondered if it was worth retaining the machine to document the following night's performance. Maybe it was best just to forget about the Orchestra? (Maybe history can't be forced?)

But if Cecil Taylor felt let down by the team, he didn't show it. On the contrary, he went out of his way to find aspects of the performance to praise. Is he so generously open-minded that he finds any realization of his work interesting? (Hard to believe - how could one reconcile that with his own emotional commitment to the performance?) Or was this some advanced psychological approach to leadership, a way to shame the musicians into a more organized showing? Maybe he expected the players, un-caged after a week of rehearsal - an unfamiliar discipline for many of them - to go for broke and break it.

Anyway, it couldn't happen twice and it didn't. The second performance of the European Orchestra was a mountain range of real invention that vindicated everybody's faith in the idea, a large ensemble music like no other before it. A dream music for anyone who'd followed the vicissitudes of transatlantic free jazz over a few decades and been wearied by all the them-versus-us bickering. It was as if giant cogs had finally clicked and the last pieces of a gigantic machine fallen into place. These men could have been playing together forever. In a sense, they had. It merely took some of them this long to know it.

Call me sentimental, but it was really something just to see them all on one stage, like some veterans' homecoming. After the hundred years war against Philistia, they looked like this. Such a long campaign takes its toll on a man's physiognomy, the way he carries himself in the struggle to get by. You could read any number of attitudes in the stance and self-presentation of the players. Militancy, arrogance, humility, cool indifference, craftiness, cunning, scholarly seriousness, a finely-developed sense of the absurd... all there. An outsider wouldn't have guessed that these men were in the same profession. The balletically dapper Taylor in white sun hat, pink sweatshirt (inside-out), pink cotton pants tucked into bright yellow socks. The shambling Stanko, all mufflers and mittens and trailing overcoat, like a refugee from a Jazz Jamboree scripted by Dickens. The big pink Bennink in T-shirt and shorts, a giant on holiday. The spectral Hampel, skeletal grey-haired ghost of a vibraphonist.

None of these details would have been lost on Taylor who is, by his own gleeful admission, something of an actor, making the most of the world's stage. The richer the carnival the better.

Onward!

Bennink led the charge, and was soon shattering sticks on the snare's rim, broken shafts propelled thirty feet over the heads of the audience. It was like Agincourt! Han built to a thunderstorm crescendo, than backed off as the horns edged in. They filled the air with a big, anthem-like melody, a song of praise in stirring antiphony, its theme sweeping through the orchestra from brass to string section. Soloists leaped out of the sound mass in rapid succession and chains of call-and-response ricocheted around the band. The music was dense, complex, coherent, impossibly exciting. Adrenalin shock upon adrenalin shock. This was the sound of the Winged Serpent aimed at the Next Level, scales and feathers flappin' for the spheres.

It was music that ate up time that froze it in its tracks. They were there. They were gone. Disappearing through the audience in another round of gnostic mumblings. Bennink pausing to rattle sticks against the plate glass windows. A few seconds silence, then the audience went off the deep end, cheering, whistling, throwing hats in the air. What a great night.

At the dressing room door (or curtain, to be exact), Enrico Rava, Martin Mayes and Hannes Bauer turned back to play a final fanfare. It was proud, celebratory and had every right to be.

Was this the optimum big band that could have been assembled from the pool of European improvisers? It's hard to think how it might have been improved. I could have imagined Barry Guy added to the bass section, but then he already has his own, rather splendid orchestra. Maybe there was room for some fine-tuning in the trombone department. The rest of the orchestra featured such strong personalities, but I tended, perhaps wrongly, to think of the trombones as Hannes Bauer and The Others. Playing God, I might have substituted Radu Malfatti and Paul Rutherford. Then again, an improvisers orchestra ought to feature a few players-in-bud if we want to believe in this idiom as "the living music".

But why nitpick. The collective played some new music together: that's enough.

I wish I could feel as positive about Taylor's inclusion of his own poetry in these concerts. Various journalists keep insisting that Taylor's use of his voice and his written words directly parallels or extends what he's doing with the piano. I don't hear this. At best it seems to me decorative in performance and more often intrusive; I thought it came close to nullifying the first part of the duet with Derek Bailey. Lack of interest in poetry is not the - or not my - problem. Taylor can be as cryptic as he wishes on the printed page and I'll happily wrestle a meaning out of his texts. But their power plainly resides in the image. If I can't hear what is being said, then there is no power. I find Taylor's delivery frustratingly obfuscatory.

Charles Olson, in a famous essay, talked about "all parts of speech suddenly (being) fresh for sound and percussive use." Ezra Pound urged the modern poet to return his words to song and carry on where the troubadours left off. And there's a not particular distinguished tradition of American text/sound poetry personified by the likes of Aram Saroyan. It's not as if there is no precedent for what Taylor is trying to do. But I don't believe that concerts of improvised music are the appropriate context for it.

Feeble criticism. I know it. "In order to understand the mushrooming effect of what an artist-poet attempts to do, one must be aware of the choices which shape the criteria that moderate the thought and act." (C. Taylor, down beat 11/86).

Okay. We know, those of us who have read the interviews that Taylor is aiming at a target broader than the most experimental poetry reading. He claims his concept of utilizing the voice draws upon Kabuki, Bunraki and Zuma Kabuki Japanese theatre modes, upon American Indian chant, upon African magic ritual. He wants nothing less than a synthesis of all of these with a Black poetry tradition that goes back to Robert Hayden (winner of the grand prize for English poetry at the World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, Senegal, 1966), and then back some more.

A lifetime's work at least.

Is anybody equipped to guess whether it works or not? Is there an ultra-literate ethnologist in the house? And what's the consensus opinion from Japan and Africa and Turtle Island?

If Taylor is at home in all of these traditions, is it not his job, as artist-poet, to give us a hand or foothold to let us into these worlds, too?

If Taylor is in a position to open our eyes, why would he choose to mystify us?

He certainly arms his critics with ammunition when he calls a record featuring his poetry "Mummers". One definition of "mummery" (Websters Dictionary) is "a ridiculous, hypocritical, or pretentious ceremony, observance, or performance." Well, I wouldn't go that far. But one felt a sense of relief sweep the Kongresshalle when, in the concerts with Bailey and with Bennink, he sat down at the piano and, as the saying goes, got on with it.

His dancing? No objections, your honour. He's dramatically striking in movement. Check out Dagmar Gebers's photos. How we move, he has said, defines how we play. In this regard, I hold out very little hope for tight-assed Europe. Gracefulness is beyond our grasp. I stuck my head around the door of Cecil's Ensemble Workshop one day, caught a group of his students in mid-prance, and withdrew quickly. Nobody would have paid to hear Taylor imitate the leaps in space these dancers made.

In an interesting interview masquerading as the sleeve notes to the "Live in Vienna" album, Taylor had some provocative things to say about rhythm and about Miles's use of the drum machine being "the supreme betrayal of the music":

"Rhythm is the core and they don't seem to understand. That clap trap which has resulted in that machine, percussion machine, it is perhaps the equivalent to Mayor Goode bombing American citizens for the first time. It all comes back to what you destroy, a large part comes back to you yourself."

Rhythm is the core. Important statement. If European improvisation has failed, periodically, it has usually been because it has failed to grasp this. If there's a lack in the ranks, it is here. We have very few of the drummers who can play "long and strong" (as Sonny Sharrock says). Endurance is half of it if one wants to go the distance with Cecil Taylor. One could say that this Berlin festival rounded up all of the best, and even then only three of the five players - Bennink, Moholo, Oxley - could be characterised as hard driving drummers. Lovens and Sommer are admirable for other reasons but don't, to my ear, have that elemental power to carry a musician to the borderline of trance, the frontier where Cecil Taylor operates most persuasively. The man who wants "to become a force of nature" has to settle for being less than a Niagara of sound if he's partnering a drummer with a lighter touch. Or he can obliterate that partner. Had this festival been organised a decade earlier, it might have been that way. But all of these concerts were marked by very considerate playing on Taylor's part. I'd been brainwashed by all those stories of the early days that Buell Neidlinger and Steve Lacy like to tell, of accompanists lumbering clumsily after Cecil and ducking as the keys came flying out of the piano like throwing knives.

In Berlin, it was never like that. He gave a sort of explanation in the discotheque one night. New York might be a competitive society, he said, but some of the cats had finally figured that this music was not about athletics. His best energies were directed towards understanding what the European players were doing and making them sound better at it. In the context of the Big Band, for example, he'd edit and punctuate, make the occasional struggling solo seem a dramatic masterpiece by slapping exclamation marks into it or render it profound by solemn pluckings of the piano's bass strings.

When Derek Bailey was playing acoustically, Taylor was obliged to abandon his "normal" piano approach and he found another way that they could work together. (It involved coaxing koto-like sounds from the concert grand's interior.)

Through the various duo concerts and sessions his generosity was noted and appreciated but it was good, too, when there was no call for braking. Of the concerts I witnessed, the best example was Taylor and Bennink. Players of equal strength, aware of each other's potential through the testing Big Band rehearsals and performances, they could dive freely and fearlessly into the music, as if off cliffs.

After a quarter century of Mengelberg-Bennink, this concert was like The Piano's Revenge, Han finally up against a keyboard that couldn't be satirized or overpowered, try as he might.

As the series drew toward a conclusion, a solo performance on July 16 was a reminder of just how complete and self-contained a universe is the Taylor piano. You want drums? Here are eighty-eight. A fast arpeggio scorched by a thumbnail sounds like the call to arms of a martial snare-roll. The back of his hand flops onto the keys like a gentle cymbal splash. A fist in the lower register has a bass drum's finality. Alternating forearms are throbbing djembés pulsing in some West African choir.

Endless shifting blocks of sound, harmonics billowing like storm clouds out of the piano. ("No you needn't tune it beforehand, but it might be an idea to tune it afterwards.")

This was music to fill you up.

Not Cecil Taylor, though. In the dressing room he acknowledged the congratulations of a horde of musicians and friends but was in a great hurry to get towelled down and away.

Why, what's happening?

"Don Pullen's playing at the Quasimodo." He spoke with real excitement of a player that critics are still writing off as a Taylor imitator. "Gotta go hear Don Pullen." Awe in his voice.

"Wonderful musician."

It was nearly over. On my way out of the Kongresshalle I bought a Cecil Taylor T-shirt, even though I thought the drawing of Cecil on the shirt was rotten and hadn't worn a promotional shirt in years (trying to distance myself from the ignominy of my profession). Then I went to Dieter Hahne's Jazzcock record stall and bought a CD of a Taylor album I already had. Obviously I was in bad shape, reduced to fandom, a carefully nurtured cynicism shattered.

A couple of days later there was a party at the Abraxas to wrap it all up with teary goodbyes and buckets of alcohol. I couldn't go. I was back in Munich interviewing I can't remember which pop star for I can't remember which magazine. Schedules to fill, rent to pay, business as usual.

As for Free Music Production's Cecil Taylor Festival, nobody who was there is going to forget that.

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