Legendary pianist and poet Cecil Taylor is one of the greatest improvisers in the history of modern jazz. Since the first performances of his quartet at the Five Spot Café in 1956, he has unflinchingly and tirelessly worked to define a sound that is still light years ahead of its time. His playing has been called fierce, constructivist, percussive, and atonal. We call it a thing of beauty, an expression of pure genius.
ISSUE Project Room and Harlem Stage, in partnership with Anthology Film Archives and the Jazz Studies Department of Columbia University, are proud to present a month-long celebration of the great maestro Cecil Taylor, featuring a range of performances, readings, conversations and screenings as well as two extremely rare performances by Cecil Taylor himself at Harlem Stage and ISSUE Project Room.
When I was young, my sister pulled out this record and started to dance around our living room. I asked her, “What is that?” And she said, “Jimmy Lunceford…For Dancers Only”. I asked my mother if I could get a drum set for Christmas and she said, “We’ll see.” When I brought my report card home it was all A’s and B’s and one C. She said to me, “How dare you bring a C into this house”. Instead of the drums we had a piano. When I asked for lessons she told me, “You will be one of three things: A doctor, a lawyer or a dentist. That instrument will be your avocation. You will practice six days a week and I will supervise.”
In the yearbook at Flushing High School, under my name it said, “the most argumentative student we’ve ever had.” So here I am at the New England Conservatory and they can’t find my application and I look at that man and say “I’m not responsible for the bureaucracy of this institution.” Well, I got in. Okay, I’m 17, and all the veterans from one of our many wars are here, and you have to write a piece. I’ll never forget it. I remember, the conductor, when he plays my piece – he’s smoking a cigar – and he says: “Well, it’s mood music, and that’s all right as long as it’s not Mood Indigo” and I said, “Motherfucker, you’re going to have problems with me.”
I had a keyboard teacher named Lautner. And now Lautner went to New York to hear Bird and Bud Powell, but when she came back she talked about Bud Powell. 30 years later in Birdland when Bud played Glass Enclosure, I immediately thought of Lautner.
I had Lee Konitz introduce me to Lenny Tristano. The interesting thing about Mr. Tristano, he invented a language that was his. He was not a bebop pianist, but he could play that fucking piano. So the second year I’m in the conservatory and I think, “I’m going to get all you motherfuckers,” and I’m making all of my own scales. And now here’s the thing: Mother gave me the Hanon pieces to play. And now she was so slick, her favorite philosopher was Schopenhauer. But it was her brother that introduced me to Shirley Horn. She not only wrote her own music, but she sounded like Nat Cole. And what she knew as a pianist, she knew each range of the piano. Once she wrote a piece in which she rhymed Schopenhauer with something.
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And by the way, I’m in this bar and I’m talking, and this writer says, “I’m the greatest writer in America” and I say, at the age of 23, “Well, then, I’m the greatest piano player in America” and there’s a piano there. I play. And for some reason he says, “Well…you are the greatest player.”
That was Jack Kerouac. He told me about The Subterraneans. He also told me who that was written about: a black woman. But when they did it in Hollywood, well…you know. Now Jack Kerouac, he was into wearing Zoot suits. And well, Zootie-boy, he took me to meet Baraka. And well, the first time I read poetry at Judson, Ginsberg walked right past me, and when I finished one of Allan’s people said, well now what am I supposed to do? Two Latino young boys came up to me and said, “That’s some dangerous shit you’re doing.”
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it leans within the scented parabola
of a grey slated rising
palm of dampened mud
impossible to discern
the trigonal or endomorphism
set and rains as an architectural grid
established by nature’s limbs
upwardly establishing a metabolism of nitrogenous elements
and nutrients spread to rising
to the teeth and rim of leaves
saturating the burning acid above us
thin air to thick
having no parts of its own
/ / / / / / / /
Well, I got a job in a club, and the leader of the band was the father of William Parker’s teacher. The reason I got that job was that when I was connected to the Living Theater, and there was a woman there. Well there were two women there that were very interesting … Willis was sharing an apartment with an Italian woman, Evelyn Bettina. And Evelyn Bettina was going with a very handsome English man. The band was getting paid on the door and this guy got me paid 10 dollars a night, and the last night…and I had seen Jimmy Lyons before, but I didn’t know who he was, and he was standing next to a very handsome Latin woman … and I said to him, I’d like you to come to the house. We’re rehearsing at 23 Bleeker Street. Marlon Brando and Wally Pitt when they came to New York, they lived in that building. In those days young musicians … in some ways it was a training area and I wrote a piece for the band and this young man said “sounds like George Russell to me” and that’s how I met Earl Griffith. Earl Griffith played Vibes. We made a record together [Looking Ahead]. The last time I saw him was at the Museum of Modern Art, looking very well.
When we played at Birdland, Red Gardland was supposed to play with Miles’ band. He didn’t show up. During our set I saw something: Miles had left the bandstand. I’m playing, and the mean devil jumps up on the stage and says “you can’t play that shit so fast” and he falls off the bandstand laughing. And the next day I’m walking on 42nd Street, when I’m about to speak to him he looks at me and spits on the ground. I say, “There’s only one man in my life who has the right to do that and my father would never thought to do that” and I say “I’m going to get you Miles Davis”.
Ok. Would you believe it, in 1969, Mr. George Wein is going to put on 50 concerts with Ellington for his 50th birthday and George says, what about you and Miles? And I say, I’m waiting. We have 2 concerts in Milan. And the wonderful Andrew Cyrille says to me, “Cecil, Miles has sent you a message: ‘you tell Cecil I don’t have time to listen to that shit’.” But now at the concert, you see, every member of Miles’ band is standing there at the scrim of the stage: Chick Corea, that English bass player, Dave Holland, they’re all there.
And when Miles made that statement everybody laughed but me. But then, you know … Once, Quincy Jones was asked, what do you think of Cecil? “Oh he could have been a good arranger until he started playing all that crazy shit”. My father said “Son…Can’t you play a melody? I looked at him and said, “IT’S ALL MELODY!” But you see, Mother knew.
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But I realized that wherever my mother’s bones are, she is probably pleased. Because her father was a pianist, and her youngest brother was a pianist. And Dad, on the other hand, he loved Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, Ella Fitzgerald, Bing Crosby and Judy Garland. The nicest thing I ever did for my father; he gave me the money, I told him, I’m going to take you to a concert tonight, didn’t tell him where, took him to the lower estate, and I believe it was one of Judy Garland’s last performances, and she was on, and dad was so pleased.
I asked him if I could see Billie Holiday, and he rarely raised his voice and said, “No son of mine will ever see that woman.” Yet he gave me the money to go, and she is still my favorite.
I think I was twelve. Outside of this club on 52nd Street, they had a man six feet tall guarding this door and he had gold lapels on his shoulders. He said, “Kid, where do think you’re going?” And wasn’t I lucky? My mother’s temper got me and whatever I said to this cat, he looked at me and he laughed and he said, young man, follow me. He takes me to the bar and he tells the bartender, you give this young man any soda he wants. Now isn’t it interesting, the first thing you see were the gardenias here, all in white, up to here. The body is rather zaftig, but when she started to sing, this arm bent this way, and this leg bent that way and I say “where in the fuck am I?” and the next day at home I say “If I ever grow up, what she did to me, that’s what I’d like to do to an audience.”
I saw her when she had her debut in Carnegie Hall, and there she was all dressed in black. Every time I saw this woman, she gave us all – every time.
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I followed Mary Lou Williams out of Carnegie Hall, and then in London, Andrew Cyrille introduced me to Ms. Williams. When I went to this new building in Boston, there was Ms. Williams giving us Erroll Garner. Then Ms. Williams goes into retirement to become a Catholic nun. Meanwhile, Andrew Cyrille is studying percussion at Julliard. And those silly people there say, “Well guys like you never make any money.” And Andrew knows that Ms. Williams is coming out of retirement and goes to her and says “Ms. Williams, I’m studying percussion at Julliard,” and she cuts him off – “Look boy, I don’t want to hear that. Can you play the drums?” I’m eating at the cookery and here’s a piano. This bass player who survived Sun Ra and Archie Shepp, Ms. Williams said something to that man and he says “Ms. Williams, I don’t like to be told I’m unintelligent” She says “I didn’t say you were unintelligent, I said you were a dumb motherfucker!” Oh…but she picked me, you understand [to play a duet with her at Jimmy Carter’s White House]. And I’ll tell you, when Billie Holliday died, only two people went to see her: Lena Horne and Mary Lou Williams.
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Transmitted through the larynx
Fissionable Molecules
Penetrate the Ictus
Yui-Gdn
cranial pump
sound
the atom
with nucleus
at its core
Occipital & auditory
seraphicum
subterranean
cemetary of
Apis the sacred
cycle of that which is equinoctial
precession
great year
vernal colure
Aires opposite
heard Gia Pe.2) exogamous thrice
fire in water
twice fire in air
Lama from Scythian
L-A-M-A-H
Penta-dacty-late
Odouwa
Odu-duwa
one of the white
deities sent as
a Messenger from
Orishala
Blakey Art Within
Fashion
unborn
children
Orishas que bola
Lee Morgan
hemitrope
a twin crystal
having
one part in reversed
position with
reference to
a gram second
unit of force
statements
begun with
universal
quantifiers3) Parietal
lingual
but in water
by direct
gestation
energy as a
kinetic phenome-
mine of masstherefore motion from within
the still point oriented organism
(sound) endogamous growth
within the foetus: the essence of the
catabolic pulled by a flexible
inextensible force / tropism = ing
mu-meson short lived or rather
a mass intermedian between
that of the electron v proton
2.2x(10.6) millionth of a secondShe was to become
transcendent cream
oblivious to a centimeter
squared by time thus never
a ricochet to a futile
obsolescence found in
greying chalk
16/3/08
Cecil Taylor
For Mother
