Four Jazz Lives

I. Cecil Taylor

Cecil Taylor JEANNE PHILLIPS is a black woman who has devoted much of her adult life to modem jazz. She is particular and serious, and is frequently seen in her large, outlandishly tasteful hats at those coffee shops and concert halls, bars, basements, and lofts where that long, loud, discordant , often unmeasured but usually powerful jazz that the critics have named, in dismay, the "New Thing," is played. Jeanne is not one of those female camp followers who try to out-sit each other in the jazz clubs in the early hours of the morning for the honor of going home with the trumpet player but, rather, a committed woman whose opinions are valued and whose barbs are feared by those musicians and critics who know her. Miss Phillips is one of a relatively small number of people who have entry into the musicians' gallery at the jazz clubs. She exemplifies perfectly that growing group of new jazz loyalists who feel, with reason, that history has deposited the vital culture of these times in their comer. [ 4 ] Four Jazz Lives Miss Phillips was talking about the great interest that some of the more notable contemporary composers have shown in modern jazz, specifically in pianist Cecil Taylor. "It's sad-the only true history of America is recorded in its music. The music says what's really happening here. And now that the Negro has become more educated and the Negro musician has learned all the techniques of European classical music, then it's the Negro musician who keeps the culture of America alive. Because America doesn't have any other culture of its own, except what the Negro gave it and what it borrowed from Europe, and I think Europe is dead. All these cats with their electronic stuff-how the hell is a machine going to make music? No more than a washing machine does when it's operating. You hear sounds all day long, and unless they're incorporated correctly by men, there ain't no music. "As far as music per se is concerned, Cecil is one of the most prominent musicians that Western civilization has, and they know it. I go a lot of places, I always arrange to be around, and I listen. For musical stimulation and creatiVity, Cecil is where it is, and they're trying to find out about the music, how it's constructed. They want the key. Cecil has the key, that's who has the key. And it's the same word they use to describe music made by Muddy Waters. It's all blues, all of it. The classical music of our times is jazz." For "classical," read "serious," and we are into the growing polarization of interests that characterizes this era of overcommunication. Since the bebop revolution of the Forties, jazz musicians have been regarding themselves as something other than entertainers, which, apart from a displacement of the great body of jazz in the entertainment industry , has resulted in a forwarding by jazz musicians and the exponents of modem jazz of the principles and roots of Cecil Taylor [ 5 ] jazz improvisation vis-a.-vis the contemporary European techniques of composed improvisation by means of chance, graphs, electronic determination, etc. The incorporation of twentieth-century European techniques with jazz has been pursued chiefly by white musicians , such as Jimmy Giuffre, Paul and Carla BIey, Mike Mantler, and Gunther Schuller, with the result that the formal and technical problems of how to include improvised sections in a dialogue between jazz quartet and string quartet , or how to incorporate a blues line into an improvised tone row, could not be resolved within the old forms, and new forms, neither jazz nor Western, were not created. The black musicians, such as John Lewis and J. J. Johnson , who were involved in what has been called Third Stream music have been decidedly nineteenth century in their European derivations. They belong to a tradition in jazz in which one first proves oneself capable of playing classical music to show that playing the blues was a matter of choice. This tradition goes back to Jelly Roll Morton, James P. Johnson, and Willie "The Lion" Smith, who once boasted that he could "play Chopin faster than any man alive:' There is only one musician who has, by general agreement even among those who have disliked his music, been able to incorporate all that he...