Cecil Taylor, Dark and Luminous

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In the Brewing Luminous: The Life & Music of Cecil Taylor
by Philip Freeman
Wolke Verlag, 2024, 344 p.

Like his contemporaries and fellow avant-garde masters Bill Dixon and Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor (1929-2018) was not the easiest subject to approach for a music writer. Enigmatic, frequently baffling interviewers and critics who tried to approach him, he could be almost hostile at times—or at least a bit condescending. (This reviewer recalls an uncomfortable dialogue where Taylor tried to express to a French documentarist what it means to be born “on the wrong side of the tracks.”)

At other moments, Taylor just enjoyed being the centre of attention a little bit too much, as related by freelance writer Hank Shteamer about an interview he made with the pianist: “I would n’t classify it as an interview at all, more as a monologue, or even a performance that I was witness to. … I was there, in his presence, but I ceased to become a factor.” It may be that Taylor’s elusiveness, his way of deflecting questions eventually discouraged writers, and that could explain why, until recently, there was no exhaustive biography on Taylor, an almost unthinkable situation for such a major figure in American music. Veteran music journalist Philip Freeman has now remedied that unfortunate situation with the 300-plus pages of In the Brewing Luminous, released earlier this year.

Having met Cecil Taylor for an in-depth piece for The Wire in 2016 (Taylor was then celebrated at the Whitney Museum in New York, where he would give his last public performance), Freeman set out the difficult task of summing up the pianist’s life and career, from his childhood in Corona, Queens, to his lonely last years in his Brooklyn apartment. Freeman was all if not thorough; he seems to have gone through every interview, every article, every recording made by Taylor throughout the seven decades of his career. Especially interesting are the chapters on Taylor’s formative years in Boston, at the New England Conservatory (where, not surprisingly, he encountered institutional racism), and his early friendships with such jazz figures as Nat Hentoff (who would produce his Candid albums in the early 1960s) and George Wein (described, with an affectionate laugh, as “at one time … undoubtedly the worst pianist in Boston”), who would invite Taylor to perform at the Newport Jazz Festival as early as 1957.

While the core of Taylor’s career can be followed through his many recordings—and Freeman certainly devotes plenty of time to analyzing and describing the evolution of Taylor’s music and various bands—he would spend the last decades of his career away from the recording studios; even concert recordings were few and far between for the years 2000 to his last performance in 2016. Those last chapters of his life are perhaps significant in that way: while he was finally celebrated as a major artist and composer, his appearances became rarer and his recorded output reduced to a trickle. (Here we can also make a parallel with his old friend Ornette Coleman’s last years). Already in the 60s, the pianist confided to A.B. Spellman: “I’ve never been really comfortable in a recording studio. For the most part it’s such an artificial situation, and the engineer makes it even more artificial by the insistence on arranging everybody to fit his idea of sound, when actually the musician should be the one to tell them what the nature of their sound is, and how the music should sound.” It is no surprise, then, that some of Taylor’s greatest achievements are not studio albums but concert recordings, such as: the famous Café Montmartre trio sessions of 1962; the 1966 Paris concert Student Studies; the three-volume Nuits de la Fondation Maeght; the Montreux solo set Silent Tongues; the intense Japanese trio concert on Akisakila; One Too Many Salty Swift and Not Goodbye from his celebrated 1978 six-piece Unit; the towering Berlin concerts of 1988, etc. Reviewing these and dozens of others, Freeman adopts an approach that can seem a bit repetitive, but which also has great merit, helping us better understand Taylor’s methods through the comparison of different versions of the same piece or the merits of his musical associates.

As critic Howard Mandel said of Taylor: “I’ve only fleetingly encountered the person behind the performer.” It seems the pianist’s difficult façade was also a way of preserving his private life, and who he was as a person might be hidden somewhere between the lines of Freeman’s book. Here and there, we hear of his sometimes harsh judgments of other musicians, of his friendships and quarrels with intellectuals, of his homosexuality, of his complicated relationship with his family, of those who ripped him off in his later years, when he won the prestigious Kyoto Prize. On the whole, though, Philip Freeman’s book delivers what was needed—a portrait of one of the most important musical artists of his time.

The book is available though the German publisher Wolke here.

ARCHIVE OF THE MONTH

Forces of Nature: Live at Slugs’
McCoy Tyner, piano; Joe Henderson, saxophone; Henry Grimes, bass; Jack DeJohnette, drums
Blue Note, Nov. 22, 2024

A never-before-issued live recording, the tape was carefully kept in Jack DeJohnette’s archives nearly 60 years for this 1966 live set at the legendary East Village club Slugs’ Saloon by a quartet composed of pianist McCoy Tyner, saxophonist Joe Henderson, bassist Henry Grimes and, of course, DeJohnette himself on drums. Tyner and Henderson had appeared together on three of the saxophonist’s Blue Note albums and would soon collaborate once more for Tyner’s The Real McCoy; it’s only natural that the famous label should release these Forces of Nature (as a double LP, 1000164581, and a double CD, 1000165713)!

For more information, visit the Blue Note website here .