Cecil Taylor in Berlin '88

Bert Noglik (1989)

A Light Ignited in the Open

Cecil Taylor - both sides of the wall

The sounds, the body, the words, speechlessness. The voice behind the curtain. Recitation. Incantation. Preparation for the ritual. Stories from long ago and far away retold. Vocal modulations of a wide span of experiences. After a while, he appears for whom mere existing is not enough. He comes with rhythmically shifting steps, little hops, flowing movements. Vulnerable, defenceless, with a shining love of being. As if he had been preparing for this entrance for years that is but only an instant in the succession of moments and experiences. From the cadence of the song and the dance steps he develops a motif at the piano, which leads him on to complex, swarming, vibrating sounds flooded with the movemental energy of the living organism. A dynamic force which once in motion, sets free unforeseen energies. Powers beyond rational calculation and control, powers from deep within, from the place of seclusion. Removed from the gravity of purposeful thought and action, he forms a figure of structural character out of the actual situation. Immediateness and logical consistency. The inner life of the sounds. Life as an elapsing. The ease of being and the logic of the senses. Unbelievable, how gently his strength is sometimes intimated, and how determined is his lyricism. Beyond description: a magical condition. Here is one who has come to take us with him on a journey- excursion through the ruins of ancient cultures, marathons over high plateaus, wild rides through concrete cityscapes, helpless wanderings toward the self. Nothing more than this: an illuminated stage, a concert grand piano and someone playing it. With such obsession and devotion that the experience extends far beyond the mere musical. The music does not die away after the last note has been played. The sounds, having once been made in the world, continue on beyond the duration of the concert and the applause. But only later on is one aware of this. Immediately after the concert: speechlessness. So it is with him and with all those who have followed him here. For the time being, one has the feeling that there is nothing more to say. There is hesitancy in rising from the seats in the Kammerspielen of the Deutsche Theater Berlin, GDR. The evening of a bright and shining day in June.

A small late supper party provides the opportunity for a conversation of wide thematic scope with Cecil Taylor. The mood is relaxed, now and then even amusing. Taylor, whom I thought must be exhausted, is attentive, alert, inquisitiv. No, he did not consider all this to be an exertion, but rather a kind of privilege. At first the questions come from him. Only gradually, after I feel I have been accepted, do I venture to encourage Cecil Taylor to talk about himself.

At lunch the following day, before departing for rehearsal, there is no time for warming up to a conversation. Between ordering a taxi and having a light meal, Taylor gets right down to essentials. "I am very fortunate because I have found the best and most productive way to use my time quotient. Life is made up of time. I am spending my time in my own way. This is a choice I have made and it gives me pleasure. I have the feeling that most people, who also have their time quotient, are not in touch with their own personal obligation to themselves, and as a result they are not satisfied with how they are spending their lives."

Cecil Taylor's tone is soft but forceful, at times almost a whisper, giving the sense of his words a melodious emphasis. The flow of his thoughts, through association, often branches off into unexpected directions. Sometimes he articulates only half a thought and continues with, "you know ..." Now and then he comments only with a laugh, with sounds and interjections: ah... nnnn... u-uuh...

One can read Cecil Taylor's biography in music encyclopedias. What began in the middle fifties in a group with the soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy, Buell Neidlinger on the bass and Dennis Charles on the drums - as a bold initiative, evolved into a life-work. "The thirty years went by very quickly", says Cecil Taylor, "and at the same time I am very fortunate to be alive." No complaints about the long, hard, difficult years. Only the concluding comment: "Sometimes I wonder how I survived."

For a long time, Cecil Taylor with his genius was denied the recognition of his contemporaries, and had to take on menial jobs to earn a living. Then too, there were the frustrating working conditions as a musician: the inferior pianos, the quarrels with club owners, who appreciated the number of drinks they sold more than a musical message; all the badly paid gigs, the shabby places. When Taylor moved into "Five Spot" with his group in 1957 the floor was covered with sawdust. Later, there were times when Taylor had no engagements, and had to imagine he was communicating with an audience just to keep going. Cecil Taylor has certainly not forgotten any of it. Yet he emphasises not the bitterness of the conditions, but the joy he experienced in his musical development. "Being obsessed by an idea; plain existing as if there were no tomorrow. Give the absolute. And this is a statement. Evaluation is not that important (whether you played better tonight or not), you just play off. And if you have this passion and belief, then I think you do get better. This is the optimal way for me to live my life. It has to do with obsession and with beauty, with a genuflection of the senses, with devotion." After having talked so much about particular individuals the previous evening - certain musicians, composers, choreographers, authors -, I am surprised by the unexpected confessional tone of these words. Taylor talks about the synthesis of idea and emotion in music, in art, and in poetic expression. For him, the last of the three covers and penetrates everything. He says, "I think that poetic expression is the primary natural force for every human being who is working to become more understandable, more compassionate and more human."

With reference to the Afro-American tradition and how he has extended it by assimilating elements and substances from other cultures, Cecil Taylor emphasizes not only his African-American heritage, but also his American Indian roots. Both grandmothers were of Indian descent. Taylor says that his origins direct his investigations, promote his understanding, strengthen his gratitude. Affirming that his music is rooted in jazz, Cecil Taylor praises Thelonious Monk and Billie Holiday: "It is to this particular school of human expression that I am indebted. I think Billie Holiday and Duke Ellington achieved the same level." After a small pause, Cecil Taylor adds, "Billie Holiday was an extraordinary poet. I saw her the first time when I was twelve. I realized that experience would change my life. When I was eleven I saw Maya Plissetskaya. And that, too, was simply phenomenal." In a few words, Taylor sharply outlines the almost simultaneous emotional upheaval he experienced through jazz and classical ballet - forms of expression from two entirely separate cultural spheres. But it is just this - the limitedness of imaginative capacity - to which Taylor offers opposition.

Conscious of the strong influence that non-European sources have on his playing, Taylor has widened the radius of his music far beyond the range of his origins. On the other hand, improvised - music, as it has developed in the last twenty years in Europe or Japan, has been profoundly influenced by Cecil Taylor and the musicians who have worked with him. Time has passed and the imitations have dropped by the wayside. As improvisatory musicians in different parts of the world developed their playing according to their mentality, traditions and environment, a new standard of correspondence emerged which extends over and beyond the continents. Today, the fact that Cecil Taylor is involved with European musicians, for example, on an equal working basis - is a good sign that the prospects for active exchange have ripened.

Call and response. Points of reference in the conversation connect like themes and motifs in Cecil Taylor's playing. There are returning thoughts that subliminally pervade the whole over these are thoughts that leap, that make sudden turns. Taylor interrupts a conversation about the difficulties that an artist like him faces in New York, to express something very personal. "If you have one or two friends - that's the maximum you can expect. The rest you have to do yourself." And then Cecil Taylor begins talking about life in New York, the children in that city and - almost a leitmotiv with him - about the beauty of the bridges. I did not ask Cecil Taylor about Jimmy Lyons, with whom he worked from the beginning of the sixties until his death in 1986, and to whom he was musically and personally very close as he is to only a few. Taylor himself said he would not, nor was he able to talk about him. And in that simple statement lay profound esteem.

To give something to give something up so that the positive energies can increase and not to lose one's self in self-complacency. To do something more effective than giving political lip-service. Cecil Taylor speaks of his concern for the children and the youth in the New York ghettos - districts where violence is commonplace, where the schools are dominated by police. Cecil Taylor asks, "What can be done for these children to exposure them to another way of life? I want to write a proposal. I have an idea about the elementary, junior high, and high-schools in New York. I would like to go into the schools and put on concerts, poetry readings, theatrical events." Then Taylor criticizes the pressure of the mass media, and the waste of life energies. "The only thing I can do is to present something else to these children, and to see if I can engage the attention of these young people enough to help them find direction for their lives. We are limited to very small margins to accomplish something in life."

Cecil Taylor speaks with concentration, and yet he seems completely relaxed. He senses my interest and he probably also noticed my apprehension as I set up the recorder on the table. He watched me hesitantly, and then he accepted the turning tape as he accepts the course of time. We were finished with the fruit salad and were still waiting for the taxi. At this point Taylor starts to get nervous. He still has a whole, long afternoon until the concert duo with Günter Sommer begins. But Cecil Taylor wants to practice, or better said, he wants to get into the mood, to prepare himself. A dally drill lasting several hours, to which his technique and musical ideas are indebted for their heavenly flights. Hard work as the basis for a soaring up to the regions of emphatic ecstasy in playing and musical self-forgetfulness. The taxi finally comes and Taylor wants to take the fastest route to where the concert will be. We almost get lost while looking for the stage entrance in the basement of the Deutsche Theater. We wander through the labyrinth. So many hallways, so many doors. And what keeps running through my mind is that someone should protect his hands. Having finally arrived on stage, Taylor wants nothing else but to sit down at the piano. No tedious soundcheck. Complete devotion, as if now only this and nothing else counted.

One can read about the Cecil Taylor concerts in Berlin in Liner Notes. Moreover, one can listen to the recordings. So I will cut over from that afternoon to late that night, after hours: Cecil Taylor and I, with Dagmar and Jost Gebers, in the nightclub at the top of the hotel "Stadt Berlin", overlooking Alexanderplatz. West Berlin is only a few hundred meters away, as the crow fly. The disco music is the same that is heard the world over. In the same way Cecil Taylor was drawn to the concert piano this afternoon and this evening, he is now drawn to the dance floor. This man has enhanced the legacy of black music, refined it and taken it on to abstract and highly artificial forms of artistic expression; at the same time he is still enthralled by the music of Marvin Gaye and Aretha Franklin. He who tries to interpret Taylor's work by analogy with Euro-American composers will have difficulty. Taylor dances with Dagmar, than he dances alone, jumps about as if he were a youth. Taylor once said that when one has reached a certain point, the energies flow together organically. Assuming one survives that long. Taylor says he is in harmony with himself. The man who created music for a ballet by Mikhail Baryshnikov, and who worked with groups like the one lead by Mickey Davidson, sees nothing that separates the theatre of the dance, from the common movements of daily life and disco. After all, music is a kind of body language.

While we were waiting for the taxi earlier in the day, Cecil Taylor surprised me with the following story: "About fifteen years ago while I was on my way to the eastside, I dropped into a discotheque. It was in an area which is economically pretty deprived. I was watching those young people dancing and I was absolutely modest. What was unique about it was this; I was just coming from seeing Balanchine's company perform. I thought about the long years of study it takes to become a ballet dancer and how wonderfully these young people were dancing, who had never had a lesson. No one where they lived had ever told them that they were magical." And with a touch of sentimentality, Taylor added, "I wonder what has become of them. But that's long since. It's gone."

The night-time enlivens Cecil Taylor. High above Alexanderplatz he talks about New York. "When I go from Brooklyn to Manhattan at, say, twelve o'clock midnight, I go over the Manhattan Bridge. On the left, there is lower Manhattan and the Brooklyn Bridge, and to your right is the Williamsburg Bridge, which, structurally, is my favourite. And the buildings in that light at midnight are a great sight. Coming back about six, seven or eight in the morning, the impression is completely different, because all that water is under there; that is just as fascinating."

Far from New York in the discotheque of the Hotel "Stadt Berlin", I do not know if I will be able to hear Cecil Taylor this summer in West Berlin. I have not been there since my childhood, when the Berlin wall was put up. It is not yet certain that I will get a visitor's visa for West Berlin this time, for which I have often applied. I mention this, doubting whether Taylor can understand the problem at all; besides, we are discussing other topics. When we say goodbye, Taylor surprises me with the remark that he had another story to tell me later this summer, on the other side of the wall.

Home alone, I listened to records of Cecil Taylor for days on end. It is music that never wears out. Often, lighter music that at first was found pleasing is soon dismissed, but one gradually discovers broader, deeper levels in Taylor's playing. The sounds glow at all times of day or night. It is music that can accompany life.

Cecil Taylor, who stood it through, the survivor, is conscious of a driving power that stems from distant cultures. At the same time he has always endeavoured to register the sounds around him like a seismograph. From the beginning they blended together and were superimposed. The Afro-American and American Indian roots, the study of classical piano, European concert music. Duke Ellington, whom Cecil Taylor's parents loved and whose importance he only gradually fully grasped. His studies at the conservatory, but also his way into the black ghetto of Boston, where Taylor learned more about music than he had in all of his composition classes and piano lessons. After he had discovered Horace Silver for himself he could no longer respond to Dave Brubeck's playing. Even in the early years, Taylor is interested in music with a hot impulse. Moreover, his effort is directed at opening this music towards different cultures. The result is an assimilation of the tonal ideas inspired by Kabuki theatre and Balinese orchestras, as well as European influences, and virtually extends over into the cultures of the Yoruba and the Aztecs. Cecil Taylor is sensible enough not to include obvious references, folkloristic colouring, or forced attempts at synthesizing. Because he only plays what he has lived and experienced, his biography reads like an imaginary score. The confrontation with Bela Bartók's music taught Cecil Taylor how to use musical material that comes from folk music; and it was mainly Duke Ellington who showed him the way to integrate European influences into music with an essentially American stamp.1) Taylor is able to abstract concrete musical formulations; in all he does, he never disregards the more intrinsic living pulse of an energy based on physicality and movement, to which he adds a magic, spiritual meaning. Every attempt to compare Taylor's work with modern European music on a purely structural level misses its intention and its originality.

It is no wonder that Cecil Taylor is not interested in being recognized as a composer. He opposes the idea of the intellectual illustration, abstraction and fixation of music by using symbols and signs, and strives for attentive listening and the immediate sensuous transfer of ideas in collective playing and rehearsing. Fully aware that unbridled physical energy as a form of expression only leads to unsatisfactory, amorphous results, Taylor is interested in cultivating the instincts, and in an interplay between the intellect, the muscles and the senses. The control of spontaneity partly deliberate, but for the most part unconscious, even subconscious, leads to musical happenings that cannot be classified within the dualistic thought pattern of composition and improvisation. For Taylor, sensuousness and construction are not at opposition. Structures develop in the musical process that cannot be seen as an objective result detached from spontaneous playing. Playing one's self also means for Cecil Taylor to go out of one's self in playing; and when he speaks of a trance, he surely means relinquishing all calculation, becoming one with the process of playing.

With the background of Cecil Taylor's cultural traditions in mind, one can discern the continuity of his innovations. In the long years of his development, Taylor has brought forth music of unique contours and unmistakable individuality.2) Taylor, like Thelonious Monk, refuses to compromise, and he instinctively follows the musical-moral imperative that Monk once put into words: "I say play your own way. Don't play what the public wants - you play what you want and let the public pick up what you are doing, even if it does take them fifteen, twenty years." 3)

What sometimes has been described as the increasing atonality of Taylor's playing, can by no means be considered a reiteration of the composition techniques of European New Music, but as a reflection on the music of non-European cultures; as a reforming, as an expansion of resounding, rhythmical energies of movement. In this way, Cecil Taylor breaks through the barriers of formally defined musical idiom, including even that of bebop. What in European music was often divided up and systemized into aspects of melody, harmony and rhythm, flows together with Taylor. The physical immediateness of sound as the counter-design to subdivision through chord patterns and consecutive rhythmic measures. Because Cecil Taylor retained the drums and in most cases the double bass in his groups, even when instruments like violins and bass-clarinet were added, there arose of necessity new standards of group playing in the process of unconventional animation of improvisation. A transformation of jazz rhythm - brought about by Cecil Taylor with Sunny Murray and later with Andrew Cyrille - into wavelike forms of movement that do not recur at regular intervals, but are by comparison equally exciting and absorbing throughout also influenced the playing of brass instruments and the mode of musical interaction. "But playing with Taylor," recalled Archie Shepp, "I began to be liberated from thinking about chords. (...) At first it didn't seem like a liberation... it was frightening. It called the whole foundation of what I knew into question. But then I became very conscious of the rhythm section. I hadn't thought too much about it before, with just the steady pulse. But with Cecil because there's no steady pulse going on rhythmically. Cecil plays the piano like a drum, he gets rhythms out of it like a drum, rhythm and melody. And this new music is about a melodic and rhythmic approach to the music." 4)

Now, almost twenty-five years after Archie Shepp's remarks, this music is no longer considered to be an experiment, but a life's work, as work in progress. The fact, that its recognition came so hesitantly was not only due to unimaginative conventional listening habits. Taylor's music was misunderstood by those oriented toward the premise of European musical tradition, and, on the other hand, it plunged into doubt what was for jazz musicians an idiomatically narrowly defined axiom. Shepp suggests this aspect, and calls Taylor's music atavistic; a throwback in the direction of the African influences. Today we know that the atavism in Taylor's music is coupled with a projection into the future.

The piano treated as a percussion instrument, as eighty-eight tuned drums, and - completely in the tradition of Duke Ellington - the piano as an orchestra. The following is characteristic: Cecil Taylor admires about Thelonious Monk just what the conservative critics call a weakness: his technique. Taylor simply follows different criteria; he judges technique not on the basis of an abstract standard for virtuosity of musicianship, but in relationship to the range of artistic expression made possible by that particular technique. Following his own individual musical direction, Cecil Taylor has added to piano a new multidimensionality, which without the technique he himself developed would have remained an unrealizable idea. The musical complexity springs from and corresponds to psycho-physical life activity, and even in solo playing it reveals an imaginary intertexture of different voices, growth processes and sequences of movement.

Cecil Taylor often refers to analogies between his mode of playing and the movements of dancers. In the early years he played dance music and accompanied ballet groups on the piano during rehearsals. The tap dancer Baby Laurence was one of the idols of his youth. It has already been mentioned that classical ballet and disco have an equal place in Taylor's sphere of imagination and experience. The day before I met Cecil Taylor in Berlin, he had watched the Merce Cunningham Dance Company perform - it had enchanted him, he told me, and had confirmed his own intention. Taylor has worked with dancers and outstanding choreographers many times. His fascination for the medium of dance is related to his endeavour to uncover and give new life to the tendency to move, inherent in the playing of music, which in present European musical practice is largely suppressed. Movement - this could, indeed, be a keyword to describe his playing; together with energy, magic, spirituality, trance, intensity. The harmonizing of music and movement, which Cecil Taylor observed in Thelonious Monk's strange practice of walking around the piano in little circles, can be observed more often in another way in the process of his own playing, as a characteristic feature of his performances. His incidental supplementating of piano technique by using, for example, the palms of his hands, his fists, his forearms, is aimed at tonal expansion, but it is also an expression of Taylor's physically sensed musicality. In the end, one aspect is joined with another, playing and dancing; Cecil Taylor sometimes opens his concerts with dance movements and recitations of his own phonetic poems, before producing any tones at the piano. What may seem exotic to the outsider is nothing more than the revival of a cultic aspect, which has been inherent in the music of different social forms since ancient times. One who becomes absorbed in Taylor's music, even if he does not wish to follow its magical intentions, will sense another quality arise in its structures, and also in his way of playing: clarity. For Taylor, there is no contradiction between clarity and magic.

Cecil Taylor reaches back to basic forms of communication: to body language, and vocal expression. At the beginning of the fifties, Taylor confessed, he occasionally worked as a singer.

The sound of his piano playing sometimes is reminiscent of voices or choirs. The bass player Buell Neidlinger, who performed with Taylor's groups in the fifties, described how, while rehearsing, Taylor first sang and then tried to achieve a similar sound on the piano. Even then, Neidlinger had the impression that one could almost hear Taylor's piano scream or cry. When Cecil Taylor attends choral projects, it is obviously a consequence of his rehearsing and performing with instrumental groups, where he sometimes includes voices like that of Brenda Bakr. "One thing that I learned from Ellington is that you can make the group you play with sing if you realize each of the instruments has a distinctive personality." 5) Cecil Taylor, who as a pianist and who also strives for vocal expression in his playing with groups, sometimes goes so far as to sing himself. The recital of his poetry lies somewhere between speech and song, between recitation and improvised sound poetry. On the other hand, Cecil Taylor understands poetry to be a form of printed music. Not the notes however, but the recordings of words and sounds that provide room for association. Yet as interesting as Taylor's poems are to read, they first come to life in the process of his recitation. Taylor, who does not claim to be a composer, also does not feel the need for recognition as a writer; however, he does see himself as a master of poetic expression. His poetry develops mysterious power in the process of actual oral presentation. One of the most remarkable records with Cecil Taylor is the album Chinampas, recorded in 1987, where Taylor is heard not as a pianist, but as the reciter of his own poetry, accompanied sparingly by percussion instruments. Voices that intertwine - so soft, so full of corporal dynamics, so emphatic, so full of love, of fear. Cecil Taylor, who makes music out of the poetry, who breathes poetical expression into the music. About himself he says, "I've always tried to be a poet more than anything else." 6)

I have listened to Cecil Taylor's music for many days at a time I have felt its energy, its ease. It is an easiness that is based on a life of hard work. I have recognized the hidden precision of this music as well as its profusion, recognized Taylor's vulnerability and sensitivity as well as his strength, his humility as well as his generosity. And I have also felt the pauses that allow the music, the musicians and the listeners, caught up in the wavelike fluctuation of excitement and tension, to draw a breath. I have learned that one can live with Cecil Taylor's music, and how one can live with it. And I have perceived something that can only be described with the most abstract of words. I have felt the pure beauty of this music.

In a conversation with Meinrad Buholzer, Cecil Taylor said: "The most important is life and how one spends it. The danger is to become a material object. You cannot own time, you only can exist within it." 7) From here I shall skip over to a seemingly different subject. The linguistics philosopher Benjamin Lee Whorf, who has made a detailed study of the languages of American Indians, made a comparative analysis of the SAE languages (Standard Average European) and the language of the Hopi Indians; he discovered differences in the spheres of reasoning and in the habits of thought of both cultures.

Whereas in the cultures of the SAE languages "the real world is engaged for the most part in seeking to establish a relationship between so-called 'things' (….) on the one hand, and so-called 'substances' on the other", the Hopi do it "largely in terms of incidents (or better of happening)". Whorf continues these reflections: "Experiences, which lie deeper than language, tell us that the application of energy brings about effects. We tend to assume that this energy remains in our bodies without affecting other things, as long as we do not deliberately set outward actions into motion with our bodies. However, perhaps this assumption is only based on a theory founded in our own language, which says that formless 'somethings' like 'matter', are things in themselves, that can be given a form only by means of similar things, that is by other forms of matter, which are then isolated from the powers of life and of thought. The view that thought touches everything and fills the universe is not more unnatural than the view that the rays of a light ignited in the open can do the same." 8)

While Cecil Taylor gives concerts in West Berlin, I sit home listening to records of his music, and reading all the literature on Taylor that I can get. Almost at the end of the concert-and-work project with Cecil Taylor, I finally receive what I had almost given up on: a visa for West Berlin. Hours before the concert - probably while Taylor is warming up, getting prepared - I run through the Tiergarten. On the other side of the wall - for the first time. Aside from myself no one else is to be seen far and wide in this specious park landscape. Alone with my thoughts flying forward, backward, around in circles. Hardly more than a stone's throw from the wall. A state of speechlessness of another kind. This concert - like the one four weeks earlier - will be an important experience. A different ambience, different acoustics, different moods. Even though I could not listen to, was not able to attend the concerts and workshops that took place between the beginning and the end of the project, I sense something like the curve of a bow. Without losing its intensity, the music seems to be coming to the end of a phase, to be loosening in tension. In the dressing room and office area of the Kongresshalle are Taylor's devotees. Dagmar slips me an invitation to the closing celebration in "Abraxas". Taylor, who is pleased that I could come, has no story to tell me after all. The fact that I got there while he was still in West-Berlin: that is the story.

It's a good thing I was able to have a long, quiet talk with Cecil Taylor four weeks earlier. The present mood is one more of completion and leave-taking. Four weeks in which we lived with Taylor's music. In different ways. At the very beginning I shared with Taylor some of my feelings about his music. As I did not want to ascribe to him any intentions on my own initiative, I was also eager to find out whether what I thought about it was of any consequence to him. Assimilating my ideas and extending them, Taylor concluded, "Above all, I play out of a feeling of joy; to celebrate life, yes, that's what it is."

At the end of the Free Music Production's Cecil-Taylor-project, everyone is back in "Abraxas", where they often met at night, sometimes even seeking refuge during the past weeks. Compared to the discotheque at the Hotel Stadt Berlin, "Abraxas" is a pretty earthy place; the atmosphere is hot and the music is black. It is Ulrike, a white woman dressed in black, who towers over Cecil, Ulrike with closely shorn hair and a face wherein I seem to read self-assurance, as well as the melancholy of a survivor, an after-comer, a lover; it is she who almost protectively accompanies Cecil Taylor. They seem, at first glance, to be an odd couple on the dance floor. A sequence of impulses of corresponding movements. Fly! Fly! Fly! Fly! Fly! That is all there is to say. With the language of words, of sounds, of the body. In a few days, Cecil Taylor will be back in New York.

When I leave the night time mood of "Abraxas" and step outside, it is daylight and everything is bathed in sunshine. I should have crossed back over the border to the east at midnight. I seem to hear the sounds of Cecil Taylor's music in the noise of the rolling subway train. Summer began just four weeks ago. It is as if time in its relentless march stepped out of pace for a night and a day.

Notes

  1. A. B. Spellman: Four Lives in the bebop business. New York 1985, pp. 1-76.
  2. Ekkehard Jost: Free Jazz. Mainz 1975
    John Litweiler: The Freedom Principle. New York 1984, pp.200-221.
    Valerie Wilmer: As serious as your Life. London 1977, pp.45-59.
  3. Nat Hentoff: Jazz Is. New York 1984, p.146.
  4. Leroi Jones: Black Music. New York 1967, p.152.
  5. A.B. Spellman: Four lives in the bebop business. New York 1985, p.74.
  6. Cecil Taylor/interview with Spencer A. Richards. Liner Notes to "The Cecil Taylor Unit"- Live in Vienna,
  7. Cadence, Vol.10, No.12, December 1984) (Cecil Taylor: Interview with Meinrad Buholzer).
  8. Benjamin Lee Whorf: Language, Thought and Reality. Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1956.


Translation: Barbara Fußmann

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