SOUNDTRACK: CECIL TAYLOR-Jazz Advance (1956).
As the biography below states, Cecil Taylor was ahead of his time and harshly criticized for being so. This was his first album and it made waves–as did his subsequent performance at Newport Jazz Festival (it’s like when Dylan went electric, but for jazz).
Since I’m not a big jazz follower, I’ll start with those who are. Here’s some notes on the album from The Guardian.
A Taylor group comprised of Buell Neidlinger on bass and Dennis Charles on drums is augmented here and there by soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy; the repertoire mixes tunes by Ellington, Monk and Cole Porter with the leader’s fearlessly personal reinventions of the blues. Thelonious Monk’s “Bemsha Swing” is played even more cryptically and succinctly, the lines breaking up into jagged fragments and jutting chords. Taylor’s “Charge Em Blues” is a 4/4 walk with a surprisingly straight Lacy sax solo, and “Azure”‘s lazily struck chords and delicate treble sounds might even remind you of Abdullah Ibrahim, until the cross-rhythmic improvised piano patterns clattering chords typical of later Taylor emerge. … It’s a historic document that still sounds more contemporary than most jazz piano music being made today.
As I listened I first thought it didn’t sound all that shocking and I wondered if that was because I was listening in 2021 and not 1956, but around two minutes into “Bemsha Swing” he starts throwing in some atonal and dissonant notes. You can tell that he knows how to play, but that he’s deliberately hitting either “wrong” notes or just letting his fingers fly where they will. And it still sounds surprising today.
“Charge ‘Em Blues” sounds far more “normal” at least in the beginning. Lacy’s sax solo is fun and bouncy. Then around 5 minutes a back and forth starts with Taylor’s wild free-jazz atonal improv and a drum solo.
“Azure” is a more chill track although about halfway through the improv starts going off the rails.
About half way through “Song” the solo is all over the place–sprinkling around the piano and pounding out a few chords here and there. It’s dissonant and off-putting, but seem more like it’s trying to wake up the listener. When Lacy’s pretty sax comes in and plays a delightful improv and Taylor is bopping around behind him, the contrast is stark.
“You’d Be So Nice To Come Home To” is the only song on the record that I knew before and I never would have recognized it here. As AllMusic puts it
At his most astonishing, Taylor slightly teases, barely referring to the melody of “You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To,” wrapping his playful, wild fingers and chordal head around a completely reworked, fractured, and indistinguishable yet introspective version of this well-worn song form.
This is a solo piece and he is all over the place. At no point did I recognize the original melody.
“Rick Kick Shaw” features some lively drums and walking bass while Taylor goes to town. He plays some really fast runs which slowly turn experimental. I’m very curious if future renditions of this song were in any way the same or if all of this soloing was improvised each time.
“Sweet and Lovely” is very slow and more traditional sounding. Without the speed of his solos, this song comes across as almost like a standard jazz song. Although at the very end he throws in a few sprinkles of chaos just because he can.
[READ: February 2, 2021] The Musical Brain
I’d only read a couple of short stories from César Aira (all included here). His novels are so short it almost seems weird that he’d write short stories, but some of these stories are very short indeed. They do also tend to meander in the way his novels do which makes it seem like some of them don’t end so much as stop.
“The Musical Brain” was the first story I’d read by Aira, and what I wrote about the story has held true for pretty much everything I’ve read by him:
There are so many wonderful and unexpected aspects to this story that I was constantly kept on my toes. This also made it somewhat challenging to write about.
“A Brick Wall”
I thought I had read this story before but I guess I hadn’t. It begins with the narrator saying that he went to the movies a lot as a kid–four or six films a week (double features). He says he has an impressive memory for details. He remembers seeing Village of the Damned decades ago. A small village’s children are all born as zombies. The zombies can read everyone’s minds so the hero thinks–erect a brick wall. He also remembers North By Northwest which was titled in Argentina: International Intrigue. He and his friend Miguel loved the elegance of the movie. And they decided to become spies. So they created a game in which they would “forget” that they were spies. They would leave notes for each other and then “discover” them so that when they came upon them they were new and exciting. It was surprisingly easy to forget the game, apparently.
“Picasso”
I had read this story in the New Yorker about five years ago.
This story asks the question: would you rather be Picasso or own a Picasso. His first thought is to own a Picasso–it would make him rich beyond anything he needed.
As soon as he thinks that, a painting appears on the table in front of him. It is clearly a Picasso. He spends the next few paragraphs describing the painting and then comes upon a “meaning” for it. It’s an interesting look at a Spanish fable or joke. The fable involves a queen who is lame and her servants who want to tell her without actually telling her. The punchline of the joke comes down to “Su Majestad, escoja” which translates as “Your Majesty, choose” or if the last word is broken up (into es coja) “Your Majesty is lame.” It’s a pretty elaborate painting for what amounts to a joke (and I have no idea if this is a real painting or not).
As the story comes to an end, the final paragraph introduces a whole new aspect of the story which was quite unexpected. It was a great twist.
“Athena Magazine”
In their twenties César and Arturito wanted to launch a literary magazine called Athena. They had all of the stories decided upon, but they had to determine what their frequency of publication would be: monthly, biannual? Then they decided that the number of issues rather than frequency would be more sensible. So a subscription of 6 issues could take however long. But what if their second issue needed to be smaller than the first? That would look bad. So what if they made the first issue a double? (#1-#2). Then the second one could be half sized and still be a full issue (#3). If they wanted to make a really small magazine, they could make the first issue a triple (#1, #2, #3) and the next one could be two issues (#4-#5) or just one (#4). They could start with a quadruple issue. Or even more! Their magazine was to be 36 pages, they could make the first one issues 1-36. Then issue 37 could be 1 page long. So many possibilities.
“The Dog”
Most of Aira’s stories are theoretical, but this one was very visceral, and it was really exciting. A man is riding on a bus when he hears a dog barking at the bus and chasing it. Everyone on the bus wonders who the dog is chasing. Then the narrator realizes the dog is after him–he once mistreated the dog and it must have sensed him and is after revenge. The bus kept going and the dog didn’t stop Even on the freeway. Finally the bus had to stop to let passengers on, and there came to the dog, brushing past passengers…
“In the Café”
This is another story where things progress to the absurd. A little girl is running around the café. An older man folds her a boat out a napkin and she is delighted. As it fell apart from the fun the another man made a doll. Not to be outdone the next patron made a hen, then two young women created a clown in a hat. Another make a bouquet of flowers, then a cup and saucer, then the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. How were so many good folders in one place at one time?
“God’s Tea Party”
This story progress into the absurd microscopic detail and really lost me by the end. God started having a birthday party which he invites only the apes–a sarcastic joke aimed at humans who have disappointed him. God sends out invitations simultaneously and all the apes arrive and he is good party host. The apes ruin everything as apes are wont to do, but it’s all fine. But then an interloper attended the party. She wa s subatomic particle–and things get really crazy from there, with Aira going into many pages of details about what this subatomic particles does.
“The Musical Brain”
This story was in the New Yorker and about it I wrote:
As the story opens, César remembers a night when the family went out to dinner. And on that occasion, he recalls the high school headmistress Sarita Subercaseaux holding forth in the corner of the restaurant while people brought her boxes of books. He concludes (in the present, but had no idea at the time) that they are donations for the new library that is to be built (and of which Subercaseaux will be the head librarian).
On that night in the restaurant, rumor got out that the musical brain (which I had forgotten was even the title by the time we get to it, since everything else was so fascinating) is in the theater next door.
We get a lengthy diversion about his mother’s feelings about theater in general and then finally we get to see the musical brain. Oh but wait, there was a trip to the circus that evening as well. And the circus was especially interesting that year because of the massive controversy. There were three dwarves in the circus. Male twins and a woman. The woman was married to one of the twins, but was having an affair with the other. When she told her husband, the entangled dwarves ran out followed not to far behind by the husband, who was brandishing a gun.
The end of the story wraps up all of these wonderful threads together–books, dwarves, brains–but not before turning completely surreal. I can’t even mention anything that happens next because the wonder of the reveal is what really makes the story terrific.
“A Thousand Drops”
This piece took his fascination with tiny things to a crazy extreme. All of the drops of paint in the Mona Lisa have escaped and run off to live their own lives. I got totally lost in this one, as one One drop went to Japan and set up a factory making Minute Candles. Another had an affair with the Pope (they have anal coitus) (!). But I was more fascinated by this idea that he brought up in the story. The first is that the Mona Lisa is famous as it is for exterior reasons.
Some critics maintain that Da Vinci’s Lady with an Ermine is the most beautiful painting ever–better than the Mona Lisa. But this painting was in Krakow and the Mona Lisa was in the Louvre–so tourism made Mona Lisa more popular. Then, when Vincenzo Peruggia stole it (with the intent of selling io to the Uffizi Gallery justifying the robbery as a patriotic act), the theft put it on the front page just as photography and printing made it easy to reproduce the image easily
“The All That Plows Through the Nothing”
I loved the way this started. There are two ladies at the gym who are constantly talking. Every time he sees them, they are in th emiddle of a conversation. He sometimes sees them at the store and they are still mid-conversation. How can they talk so much? And then he overhears them and discover that during the middle of the day after talking for a while one said “They gave my husband the results of his analysis and he has cancer; we asked for an appointment with oncologist. The other woman didn’t cry out or faint. Had they discussed ten or twenty topics before this one? How could this not be a huge bombshell that you’d say first? He would like to follow them and make a list of al the things they talk about to see what other things they could possibly discuss. Then the story shifty abruptly to be about taxi drivers not allowing animals in taxis and then about taxi drivers finding suitcases with thousands of dollars in cash. And how often the taxi driver turns it on. It ends with him explaining that today he saw the back of a ghost–the most incredible thing ever. But as he describes it he slowly begins to be incapable of writing–why did he have to tell this story in chronological order? Now he’ll never get the most important part out.
“The Ovenbird”
I didn’t think that an ovenbird was a real species, but it is. (Aira apparently only makes up like 1% of his stories–the rest is all true). He wishes to apply reasoning attitude to animals. In this story, the ovenbird is watching humans and decides that their lives are so much easier. He is stuck doing what his genes tell him to do–where to build a house etc. Whereas humans seem to be able to decide to do what they want.
“The Cart”
This is one of the shortest piece in the book and I thought it was great. Sometimes it feels like Aira gets too invested in how far he can push an idea. This was straight and to the point. He is the only one who has noticed the shopping cart moving. It’s in a slightly different place and people assume it moved from the wind or an un-level part of the floor, but he can see that it is sentient. He leans in to talk to it and the “punchline” is awesome.
“Poverty”
He spends the first few pages complaining about how poor he is. How much he has done to be a great creative writer and yet Poverty stays with him and curses his life. Finally Poverty appears in front of him and yells at him for not realizing the gift that she has given him–the rich man gets everything ready made–the poor man has to be creative and use his brain. Poverty has never left him since.
“The Topiary Bears of Parque Arauco”
On either side of the mall on Avenida Kennedy there are topiary sculptures. One is of a bear and his cubs. The bear is holding a bottle of Coca Cola. It tells a story: in the first the papa shows the cubs what he has brought. In the second the cub is reaching up for the gift. Every morning at dawn young children approach the topiary with an empty Coke bottle and the bear pours Coke into the bottles.
“The Criminal and the Cartoonist”
A criminal holds a cartoonist at gunpoint and says that the cartoonist has given away too many details of the criminals’ activities. And as proof he shows off cartoon that the cartoonist owns. It was printed in the paper when the cartoonist was ten years old. How can this be and how can the cartoonist convince the criminal of his innocence?
“The Infinite”
This story appeared in the 2019 Short Story advent calendar here’s an abbreviated summary of what I wrote:
The unnamed narrator says that as a kid he played some extremely strange games. I love this line, “They sound made up when I explain them, and I did, in fact, make them up myself.”
One consisted of simply naming a bigger number than the one just named by your opponent, ” As you can see it was extremely simple.”
There were no levels or series or even rules. You just said numbers.
“Three.”
“A hundred.”
“A hundred and one.”
“A hundred and one point zero one.”
“Eight hundred and ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety nine.”
“Four million.”
They didn’t really know a lot about the higher numbers–like if a billion was more than trillion–and it didn’t matter. They were attracted to these big numbers anyhow.
Then they discovered that word: infinity. This was an a exciting concept–so hard to grasp. And it affected their game too.
“Two infinities.”
“Two infinities and thirty million infinities.”
He speculates that this game had to do with childhood greed. They had nothing and expected nothing but they wanted things. For instance eight could be eights cars–one for every day of the week and one extra one with swampy tires for rainy days. But a billion could only represent money. Nevertheless, they never talked about that concept.
The last line is an interesting one and doesn’t really spoil the story (which really can’t be spoiled) so much as contextualize the narrator now:
Daydreams are always about concepts, not examples, I wouldn’t want anything I’ve written to be taken as an example.
“No Witnesses”
This is another short piece–one that works very well. The narrator has been reduced to begging in the streets. Then he hatches a very smart plan–one that will likely only work once, but if it does, he’ll be set. He sets out his plan, but instead of a person with money, a derelict guy walks up to the dumpster next top the narrator. He digs in the dumpster and finds a bag full of money–the narrator can’t believe it. As the man tries to flee, the narrator trips him thinking he’ll be fast enough to get money and flee. But the man turns oun him and stabs him. That’s not the end.
“The Spy”
This story begins with the narrator saying it woul dbe very hard for him to be in a play because he’d want to keep important secrets from the audience too. He’d try to hide from the crowd, but he’d never be able to get away. What if he were two people? Then he tells the story of how he left his wife and child and became an international spy. At a meeting twenty years later, his wife was there and he reverted to his old self to keep up her ruse. But then he started worrying about giving away secrets to an audience.
The last three stories in the book were quite unlike everything else. True, they followed Aira’s penchant for analyzing things in the most microscopic detail, but they were quite focused. instead of drifting from one topic or idea to another, these piece drilled down directly into one idea.
“The Two Men”
In this story, the narrator is the only person who is aware of two men living in a house. One of the men has hands that are the size of a human body and the other has feet that are the size of a human body. Otherwise they are physically normal. It’s unclear how the narrator became the one to look after them, but he started to visit them every day. He brigs them food and then leaves. They stand there naked and don’t talk to him. For the most part the narrator talks about how he could get compensated for what he does. He has sacrificed so much of his life for these men. He would never exploit them, but if he could somehow make art from them, it would be wonderful. He wants to photograph them but would never do that and he’s not good at drawing, As with most of his stories this one doesn’t properly end.
“Acts of Charity”
This story is remarkable. It’s over 40 pages long and it is singular in purpose. Basically, the concept is that priests who visit poor neighborhoods would be able to devote all of their time and money to the poor if they didn’t have to worry about taking care of themselves–if their needs were already met they could devote all of their efforts to the poor. On the other hand, if the the priest sacrifices everything for the poor, it would look like he was trying too hard to get into heaven, which would backfire. So a priest goes to a poor village and begins to make a house for the priest that will follow him. His idea is to make it as perfect as possible so that they following priest(s) will have no needs outside of the house. He will have all of his time to do good deeds. And so we get about 35 pages of house building–the detail is remarkable. Once in a while, the priest goes out into the village and sees just how poor everyone is. And he feels badly that he is spending so much (SO MUCH) on this house, but he knows that his follower will be able to help them so much more. When the priest dies and the next one comes along he realizes what the priest has done and he is grateful, and he wants to pay it forward by upgrading the house and adding more wonderful things–a heated swimming pool for instance. It’s a cycle of generosity in which the next priest will have the perfect place to reside so he can be the most generous to the poor who are now worse off and surrounded by opulence.
“Cecil Taylor”
This is a story, although it is actually a biographical story of jazz pianist Cecil taylor. It starts with the story of a prostitute. She is walking home, exhausted and she sees a group of men staring in a window. When she looks in she sees that a cat and a rat are in a standoff–nowhere for the rat to run and the cat is just waiting to finish him off. The men are staring intently. so the woman bangs on the window which distracts the cat and the rat runs away. The men are furious and “an act of violence will take place.” What that has to do with Cecil Taylor is unclear.
He begins the tale of Taylor by saying that biographies are always about successful people–child prodigies. Why should anyone care, they are not prodigies themselves. According to legend Cecil made the first atonal jazz record in 1956, [Jazz Advance] two weeks before Sun Ra independently came at the same result [Jazz by Sun Ra], They didn’t know each other nor Ornette Coleman who was doing similar work on the other side of the country.
Taylor played “tone clusters” and every time he played live, his set would either be cut short or he would be laughed off the stage with people asking if what he was doing was some kind of joke. There were even quotes like someone saying to him “I am a poor black autodidact, but I have a right to express my opinion, and in my opinion what you do isn’t music.”
I believe Taylor was still alive when he wrote this. This sort of biography ends very close to where it began, still in the 1950s, with this final sentence.
And they did pay him: twenty dollars on the condition that he would never show his face there again.
Table of Contents:
- A Brick Wall (2011)
- Picasso (2006)
- Athena Magazine (2007)
- The Dog (2008)
- In the Café (2011)
- God’s Tea Party
- The Musical Brain (2004)
- A Thousand Drops (2003)
- The All That Plows Through the Nothing (2003)
- The Ovenbird (1994)
- The Cart (2004)
- Poverty (1995)
- The Topiary Bears of Parque Arauco
- The Criminal and the Cartoonist (2009)
- The Infinite (1993)
- No Witnesses (2010)
- The Spy (1995)
- The Two Men (2007)
- Acts of Charity (2010)
- Cecil Taylor
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