Cecil Taylor’s Monster Movie

I like to think of Cecil Taylor as someone whose art pushes the question of Afro-American identity beyond mortal ken. In this respect he resembles Jimi Hendrix and the Bad Brains. And of course, I’m not alone. Betty Carter, for instance, once told me that Cecil’s music wasn’t black because whatever thang it was black music was supposed to have, Cecil’s didn’t have one. Now, for a substantial portion of Cecil’s audience the blackness or non-blackness of his thang is probably, perhaps even properly, irrelevant. Only what keeps the subject at hand such a prickly matter is Cecil’s own demands that his black thang be given its propers. Not only through iconic identifications with Horace Silver, Bud Powell, Monk, and Ellington, but through speech, dress, and mannerisms which at times seem inherited from one of Miles Davis’s former incarnations. Further confusing the issue for some is Cecil’s apparently strange love for soul music and black social dancing—why just the other day someone I know saw him dancing to “Nasty Girl” on Channel 31, and freaked. Adding to the confusion is the maestro’s “Black Code Methodology,” a cosmology with Cecil at its infernal core.

Now, truth to tell, I find none of this odd at all. Recently a brother told me he thought Cecil’s identifications with black pop were nothing more than a pretentious apology for his music. To which my response was like, hey man, Cecil knows what’s hip—I mean, who is he supposed to identify with, Leonard Bernstein? (Later I realized the prejudices I’d betrayed pairing Cecil off, even ironically, with Bernstein. The noive!) And intellectually, Cecil seems to have resolved the question for himself 25 years ago: as far back as 1958, he would tell Nat Hentoff, “Everything I’ve lived I am. I am not afraid of European influences. The point is to use them—as Ellington did—as part of my life as an American Negro.” Now go on with your bad self Cecil.

Someone once said that while Coleman Hawkins gave the jazz saxophone a voice, Lester Young taught it how to tell a story. That is, the art of personal confession is one jazz musicians must master before they can do justice by their tradition. I couldn’t relate to Cecil’s music until I learned to hear the story he was shaping out of both black tradition and his complex “life as an American Negro.” The chapter on Cecil in A. B. Spellman’s Black Music: Four Lives attests to the maze of ambiguities. Solo, a record Cecil made May 29, 1973, in Tokyo at 2:30 A. M., makes of this labyrinth lucid, lyrical poetry. And poetry isn’t a word I drop in here simply because I like the sound of it. Because to make sense of Cecil’s music you have to consider the ways he masks allusion in rhetoric. One reason I’m writing about a record 10 years old rather than reviewing Cecil’s new Garden—as I’d originally intended—is that while I’ve heard Solo’s story so many times I could recite chapter and verse, I realized Garden’s four sides would require years of digging before I could hum a few bars. Solo is where I learned that Cecil’s music does not speak only for itself.

In Cecil’s music as in poetry, the game of allusion is played to give spiritual and historical resonance to a language of self-invention. Whether this is done consciously or instinctively doesn’t matter in the end. What does matter is how game playing nourishes both the poet’s iconoclasm and his faith in holy tradition—two character traits essential to any people whose artists must invoke release, revolt, and remembrance to survive a culture dedicated to the disposable—and dangerous, therefore, to those who love holding on to their own.

Only here is where the responsibility of the black artist to tradition becomes trickiest. Because for any black person to get over in this country the way Mahalia Jackson sang about getting over, they have to learn to play the game without fouling out. And then even learn the handy trick of going out of bounds to bring the ball back into homecourt. To my mind this is what black avant-garde music is all about—and in this league Cecil Taylor’s got my vote for MVP any season. What I learned from the performances on Solo may help to explain why.

The basic building blocks to many a Cecil Taylor solo performance or improvisation (improvised composition) are two types of motifs I’ll label Figure A and Figure B. Figure A consists of randomly hammered discords which come off like beginner’s luck. Or maybe at best like 1930s monster movie music. Figure B is a variable-speed tone spiral usually shadowed by melodic variants. This figure I believe Cecil finds kind of romantic; I know I do. Initially, Cecil sounds these two figures out for their opposing emotional values. He also plays coy with them, like a child who’s discovered he can tease the cat with the goldfish bowl-reminding me more, in fact, of those manipulative scenes in monster movies where the thing grabs the girl. If Cecil’s music were in fact a monster movie I’d characterize Figure A as the Doctor Makes the Monster scene and Figure B as the Doctor Macks On the Girl scene. What Cecil does besides dress up these two figurines and set them on collision course is go off and speak in tongues. This scene is of course known as the Monster Speaks (on Garden, the monster literally even sings). What this monster be saying can be as frightening or as fascinating as that scene in Blade Runner where the replicant tells his manufacturer, “I want Life, fucker!” before smashing his brains in like they ain’t got nothing in ’em. To what degree you find this scene black humor or horrorshow depends on whether your heart is with the runaway slave or the slayed master. Or in the case of Cecil’s music whether you find the technique he’s using to wreak havoc on Western classical form blasphemous or some beautiful black magic. Perversely, it’s possible to do both, like the andro-erotic replicantist prior to Blade Runner this scene was made into an entire movie, I Loved a Monster. In a way this recurring drama helps explain why certain of Those People build Our Blacks up only to shoot them back down when they figure winning is too good for that No-Good Nigger. Which brings us to the heretofore unmentionable Figure C, a bluesy kind of gospel refrain Cecil likes to throw out every now and then (on Garden’s “Stepping on Stars” he throws down on it). His way of saying even though he’s gone clear when he’s out there whipping all that mumbo-jumbo on those black and white keys to the castle, he knows he’s still got to come back and taste those maggots in the mind of the universe, just like the rest of us because ain’t no rising above it all if you’re black and knee deep in this shit here. Moreover, this being the case, you best keep the blues as near and dear to your heart as your prayerbook. Which brings us, strangely enough, to the D and E sides of Cecil’s thang. Now, the D side is best exemplified by Air Above Mountains, Buildings Within, a marathon (52-minute) architectonic solo where Cecil designs a cathedral with one hand and hammers that sucker together with the other. Garden, by the way, offers three sides worth of these jackhammered monoliths, and Carlos Fuentes’s El Senor Presidente never had it so mad. E side Cecil takes place anytime he works in his ensemble context, Unit Structures, a calling together of the flock to chase the money lenders out of the temple. Or the L7s as the case might be.

I tend to favor Triagonal Cecil to Cecil Taylor: the Pentagon—with the exception of course of side two of Three Phasis where Shannon Jackson’s backbeat gave us C.T. Goes Barrelhouse and sides E and F of One Too Many Salty Swift and Not Goodbye with its bloodspurting Jimmy Lyons exorcism and tender violin/piano duet and Dark to Themselves which unleashed David Ware upon us and Akisikilah where Andrew Cyrille banishes Cecil to the nether depths and “Morgan’s Motion” where Tony Williams puts the clutch on Cecil’s motor and “Pots” which prefigured Miles’s Nefertiti in its use of pulse and percussion and “Communication #11” where Cecil engulfs the entire Jazz Composer’s Orchestra with a tidal wave of his hands and well, what I’m saying is that if I enjoy Cecil’s Solo stuff more than some of his other sides it’s because Solo has such Debussyan decorum and Chopinesque restraint going for it, such Ellingtonian sweep and Monkish symmetry, such Worrellian grace noting and Theraconian movement. Not to mention a quality of calm-in-motion akin to Aikido that may say much about being black and by yourself in Japan at 2:30 in the morning making music that does not speak for itself alone. Music that in its transmutation of virtuoso technique into articulate syllables and jabberwocky in the same breath reminds me more of Spoonie Gee and the Treacherous Three’s strafing and swooping rap-off “The New Rap Language” than any other music I can compare it to. If you think you’d like a more Germanic version of the same rush, check out “Introduction to Z” on Garden. Or for that matter Soul Sonic Force. (Same difference.)