Diedrich Diederichsen (1984)

Cecil Taylor
Music For Two Continents

A man rings the bell at Mandelbaum’s villa.
“Could you give an out-of-work musician a little money?”
“Why are you out of work? What do you play?”
“I play fagott” ¹ - “Then you must be crazy.
Why are you playing fa Gott?
You should be playing fa die Leit”.
Yiddish Joke

Everything there is to say about that so little-known art form, Free Jazz, is summed up in this little story, isn’t it? It’s not only that all these people play for God instead of for the people; no, Cecil Taylor’s little orchestra even has a bassoon player in it, who very persistently entices from that deformed bundle of twigs all sorts of grunts and buzzes.

At present there’s a public reason to say something about that tabu topic, Free Jazz. I have my own personal reason for taking Cecil Taylor as my focus.

If his man had never entered into my life, quite a few of you might have been spared some trouble. As young man, I too considered myself, a gifted pianist and improvised fondly on the middle sections of titles by The Doors, Soft Machine, and The Incredible String Band. Even today, those monotonous left-hand fifths, which I used to help support breath-taking runs in my right hand, are a horror for the musically literate. But thus it was that I fell in, at a tender age, with a crowd of fellow musicians; I soon had the insight that Jazz, with its untiring struggle to break down the barriers, was the musical style for me; it might even benefit from my energetic support, all the more so, since when I improvised, you couldn’t tell if I was on the verge of breaking down a new barrier, or just couldn’t play.

Naturally I listened diligently to all those records by Ornette Coleman, Archie Shepp, Pharaoh Sanders and however else they were called. It all got started with a piece on the radio by the Peter Brötzmann Octet. That had pricked my interest. But then, one day I stumbled across a Cecil Taylor record, called “Conquistador”, and my God, that was the most breath-taking thing I’d ever heard. On that day I knew: You’ll never be that good. And so, I turned my attention to other, more gratifying matters: e.g. listening to music.

Cecil Taylor was always the furthest out in front. Miles Davis was cool. Lee Konitz was even cooler. And Lennie Tristano, with his Europeoid chamber musicians, Billy Bauer on guitar, was so cool that his contemporaries, who were just then in the process of devouring Existentialism, got frostbite. But in 1955/57, when the first records of Cecil Taylor’s colder, moreover even freer and more atonal, piano music came on the market, Tristano couldn’t keep up. From then on, Taylor had the lead, and always remained around two to five years ahead of the other progressives. He anticipated the atonality of Ornette Coleman’s Free Jazz, the record that gave the epoch its name, by two years. And in his two masterpieces, “Unit Structures” and “Conquistador”, those complex, subtly structured ensemble compositions recorded in the mid-sixties, which are no longer in any sense cool, but rather fantastically energized, cluttered and free – there he was ahead of his fellow travelers by almost a decade. Only Sun Ra and Ornette Coleman had footing in those same Olympian heights, but not nearly to the same extent as those shy, hunched-over-the-keys, cluster- and glissando-joyous Cecil Taylor.

Twenty years later at the Cologne Opera. What I had to do to find a date! On the first try, I got turned down, in the midst of my big talk about how I had tickets for this extremely interesting and unusual really quite out of this world and you know couldn’t-we-two-somehow world-premiere at the Cologne Opera, as soon as the word Free Jazz slipped out. As for the second, that was like trying to sell vegetarianism to an Eskimo. Finally the third came along, mainly because she lived around the corner and didn’t have anything better to do that evening; I guess she figured it beat singing to herself in the bathtub.

So finally, there we are. The foyer was a sea of beards, bigwigs and otherwise beautiful people; the hall itself was by comparison distressingly empty. Mind you, the event in question was the world premiere (and what’s more, the only performance in Germany) of “Music for Two Continents”. Even that concert series in Hamburg put on by NDR, “Das Neue Werk”, where contemporary Yugoslavian composers present their latest pieces for woodwind quartet, generally attracts a larger audience. And didn’t I once see a flesh-and-blood editor from “Der Spiegel” at something so murderously boring as a Terry Riley concert? In the audience that night for Cecil Taylor, besides on well-known exhibition organizer and a critic from a local paper, there was nobody who would have caught your eye. That is, except the Free-Jazz elite with their beards and caps.

And then they came on the stage. All of them were still there. The great Frank Wright, who after his solos never missed a chance to parade around like a triumphant boxer, heaving his sax high above his head as though it were a regained trophy. The Pole, Tomasz Stanko. The Italian Enrico Rava. The woman. On bassoon. The Euro-African in flowing robes and with a wool cap: John Tchicai, whose swelling and ebbing screeches on the saxophone, could be heard as early as 1969 accompanying Yoko Ono’s 25 minute scream (“Cambridge 1969” from the LP Unfinished Music). Jimmy Lyons, the stocky saxophonist, who has collaborated with Cecil Taylor since time immemorial; indeed is his alter ego.

And everybody in these Free Jazz getups, like a 50’s caricature of what artists are supposed to look like: beanies, hats, shawls, absurd cowboy-boots, jockey caps. Nothing had changed in the intervening twenty years.

And yet. And yet every tone in these two one and one-half hour compositions was light years ahead of any of those Wavers, from Test Department to 23 Skidoo, who’ve just discovered a taste for atonality. In this highly sophisticated form, Free Jazz can bellow that it remains far out ahead of pop music.

Now of course we all know that what’s important in pop music is not the music itself but the outer trappings, and that the old-fashioned art of pure music has finally found in Jazz and/or Free Jazz the down-at-heel old folk’s home it deserves.

Still, jazz apologists combat this with the widely accepted rhetoric of Intensity. Intensity is what Jazz is supposed to be all about, and what’s lacking in the pop song, that shameless, safe thing one could offer to a mild-maid but not to an intellectual; the development of intensity as a product goes all the way back to the days when Free Jazz was still hip, and rock musicians like Eric Clapton were happy to be compared with Pharaoh Sanders, that’s to say when boundaries in Rock were still being torn down and dams still broken through. All this reminds me of a staff meeting I once witnessed at the magazine Filmkritik, where a writer countered someone’s glowing account of the film Help by pointing out that Ringo Starr didn’t play nearly as well as the drummer in Ornette Coleman’s group. Q.E.D.

Intensity was that ominous, eschatological, unspeakable Last Thing – the finger that points to the moon in those Japanese pen and ink drawings: the Numinous. Like “swing” in older music; or “getting down” in rock.

One glance at the members of the Cecil Taylor Ensemble, whose hairs have grown grey in the service of intensity, informs us otherwise. Sure, a layer of sweat several centimeters deep covers the white keys, and laps up against the black. And sure, the forehead of one or another reedman is slightly moist. But on the whole, these people down there are miles away from anything resembling ecstasy. They’re musicians. Highly qualified, doing their job, one which requires a great deal of attention, discipline, and will to survive in the everyday world.

This so-called intensity, this mental perspiration, simply means that someone has successfully presented a predetermined form by following the rules. A form, which after twenty years has clearly emerged as a Genre that has no more to do with Liberation an “extending the boundaries”, than Papa Bue’s Viking Jazz Band.

For if this music were really about making deeper and deeper inroads into that place where, somehow by means of structured atonal collective improvisation (in agreed upon sections), they make intensity, then why hold on, like the staunchest of traditionalists, to those same old style-purveyors: the overblown saxophone, the piano-cluster, the Sustained Quiet Passage (this has really become a ritual; we need some contrast, right?), those death rattles of a tormented bass-clarinet, those tones of a trumpet brought to bursting by Polish lips? All of that is Genre and has a language consisting of fixed, constantly recurring elements. Like Pop. Not intense, but referential.

On the other hand, these musicians are only a couple of meek little souls who need their solace. The number of flipped-out religious nuts among the Free Jazzers is legion, even significantly higher than among the Soul people. Whether Don Cherry mouths the Buddhist “Mu”, John McLaughlin pays homage to Sri Chimnoy, Chick Corea gives his hard-earned dough to Scientology, whether Albert Ayler considers “music” to be “the healing force of the universe”, of Sun Ra believes he hails from the planet Saturn – they’ve all got a few loose screws in this area. Cecil Taylor, by the way, hardly or not at all.

And if you were to take a closer look at one of their lives, you can understand what all this is about. I once had a chance to do just that, with Gunter Hampel. I saw him in the East Village, sitting among the poor and lowly who sell their last earthly belongings on little rugs (“Hunger Sale, each item 2 $); laid out before him were copies of hours later from the movie theater in Lafayette Street, he still hadn’t sold anything.

A year later in the Cologne Opera, as he wailed the guts out of that clarinet of his, at his side that “bursting with intensity” Jimmy Lyons (=Jazz Critic Language, of the Joachim-Ernst Berendt variety, whom the Bhagwan also finally caught up with), then he was in holy communion with his God, in whose service he’s taken this life upon himself. Who care if that God is named intensity or Vishnu? The point is that a language is involved, a learnable high art. And what is its message?

First of all we can be glad that, in reality, regardless of whatever the musicians might think about themselves, this art does not worship the avant-garde idols of the Continuing Liberation. What this art says is more than one believes seemingly speechless music is capable of saying. It says, it is, because it is under fire. Not under real fire (“Intensity”), but under encoded fire; it uses signs for fire. It says, it is always correct to behave hysterically. It is always correct to speak in superlatives. Yes, this music exists, because it is a superlative.

And that’s a quality, which, yes children, we probably have to admit, pop music is losing: the capability of hysteria, of the superlative. That is something one perhaps still finds in Thomas Bernhard, but where else? And on that point, this art wishes quite unreligiously, of its own objective will, not because of the subjective will of its emissaries, nothing more than to keep alive an additional form of expression, on which “is not going to play over at their place”, as Ken Kesey would say. Free Jazz today is not an avant-garde art, but rather, once you strip it of all the ethnic nonsense and religious fustiness, which was also part of the evening’s performance, a revolutionary one.

Translation: Daniel Werts

¹ The humor rests on the untranslatable wordplay between
“Fagott” (in German: bassoon) and “Fa Gott” (in Yiddish: for God).
The punch line goes something like this: “I play fagot (bassoon)”.
“Then you must be crazy. Why are you playing fa God (for God)
and not for the people?”

Reprint from SPEX No. 11/1984