Now in Astral Plane: Cecil Taylor (1929–2018)
At the end of last week, we heard the saddening news that poet, visionary musician, and artist Cecil Taylor had passed away at the age of 89. "His death was confirmed by his legal guardian, Adam C. Wilner. No cause was given, but friends said he had been in failing health for some time," reports Ben Ratliff for the New York Times. More from this:
For Mr. Taylor, a small and vigorous man who in his prime wore athletic clothing onstage — as if to confirm the notion that the audience was watching a physical workout — albums weren’t merely recording sessions and performances weren’t merely gigs.
At the center of his art was that dazzling physicality and the percussiveness of his playing — his deep, serene, Ellingtonian chords and hummingbird attacks above middle C — which held true well into his 80s.
But in concert he also recited his own poems, whose enjambed lines might describe Aztec architecture, paleoanthropology, crocodile reproduction or a woman’s posture. His motions around the instrument and the bandstand were a part of his performance too.
In his system of writing music, working with bands and performing, he was concerned with what he called, in a 1971 interview with the writer Robert Levin, “black methodology”: oral traditions, music as embodied celebration and spiritual homage.
Richard Brody writes of Taylor's "revolutionary genius" at the New Yorker:
For Taylor, music wasn’t a goal or a product, it was a part of a comprehensive personal and artistic experience. He wrote poetry, published it on album covers, recited it in recordings, and worked with poets who recited with his music. He worked with and was inspired by dancers. The theatrical element of his performances, such as his danced and chanted prelude to the mid-eighties recital, was as essential to his work as was his musical creation. His musical ideas and artistic ideals weren’t limited to sound and structure: he anchored them in and expanded them through, the full sensory and intellectual spectrum of modern art.
Some time in the mid-aughts, Taylor installed himself in the Iridium, a low-ceilinged basement space in midtown, with a big band: about fifteen wind instruments, plus bass and drums, and Taylor and his piano at the center of things. They played complicated compositions; the band’s musicians soloed with fury and improvised collectively, at full strength, raising quite a racket. Throughout the set, for ninety minutes, Taylor, who was in his mid-seventies, played without interruption, seemingly without even a pause. He performed with, or even against, the group’s massed fury, challenging the soloists and, above all, challenging and defying himself to find more music, more ideas, more emotions, more ecstatic sound, to pull it from the core of the body and the depth of the soul and break it outside the narrow bounds of the tight-walled concert hall and into the world at large.
And in years past, Fred Moten wrote about Taylor and the aural sphere of his work–which contains within it blur, ritual, idiom–in "Sound in Florescence: Cecil Taylor’s Floating Garden" (from the book Sound States, edited by Adalaide Morris, University of North Carolina Press, 1997). Taylor is present in much of Moten's work, particularly so in The Feel Trio, named after The Feel Trio that was Cecil Taylor, Tony Oxley and William Parker. From the essay:
Let Cecil's "musicked" 11l and illegible" words resonate and give some attention to their broken grammar, the aural rewriting of grammatical rule that is not simply arbitrary but a function of the elusive content he would convey: what's going on is either in an interstice or of the ensemble, either between professionalism and its other - music and poetry - or in the holism of a kind of everyday ritual. Cecil's poetry: the geometry of a ghost? The physics of remembrance? The architecture of the archétrace? Is there a continuity to be written here, or is the continuity in the cut of the phrase? I am preparing myself to play with Cecil Taylor: what is the proper form of my endeavor? Perhaps the transcription of an improvisational blurrrring of the word; perhaps an improvisation through the singular difference of the idiom and its occasion; perhaps an acalculation of that function whose upper limit is reading and whose lower limit is transcription -an improvisation through phrases, through some virtual head and coda. Cecil says to his interlocutor, "I'm listening" (Richards). Perhaps he will have said this to me or to the word: I'm listening, go on. Then perhaps the ensemble of the word, Cecil and I will have veered off into the silence that is embedded in the transformation, the truth that is held in the silence of the transformation, a truth that is only discernible in transformation.
Chris Funkhouser once wrote at Jacket2 of Taylor's readings at the Poetry Project during the 1990s, "phenomenal events that left a permanent impression on me, projecting language so intricately and musically, gathering forces and spirits to exalt 'the power of utterances / as system / as meaning.'"
Taylor's poems were voiced and recorded in his album, Chinampas (1987). A few poems in print can be found in the anthology, Every Goodbye Ain't Gone: An Anthology of Innovative Poetry by African Americans, edited by Aldon Lynn Nielsen and Lauri Ramey (University of Alabama Press, 2006). From that, the last stanza of his poem, "Choir":
of space particular node
betwix layers announce
savor'd victuals in rapped
basin resonate climbin' growth
salvage time establish'd
area agglutinized abyss
being Astral & all registers
between.