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. (more…)
I Just Read About That... 