Brief Thoughts on Cecil Taylor's Dialectical Detail

'one mineral crystalizing / one mineral into another'

[Cecil Taylor, 'Chinampas', Leo Records CD LR 153. track 3]

The metamorphic dialectics of Cecil Taylor's pianism are pithily expressed by this line from his only piano-free recording, 'Chinampas', a studio session of poetry and percussion recorded in 1987. Like the crystallizing mineral, melodic and rhythmic shapes coalesce and emerge in Taylor's music from disparate material, pause, restate themselves, and somehow in the process become other than they were, propelling the performance along with an unmistakable momentum. Taylor's work has, since his earliest recordings (and increasingly so over the 50 years of his recording career), been based on energy, on its rise and fall (as Ekkehard Jost points out in his 1972 book, 'Free Jazz'). Energy is not a euphemism for loud, fast and undifferentiated ecstatic improvisation. It refers very precisely to the convergence (or crystallization, perhaps?) of dynamic, register, rate and density of activity and more in Taylor's work, a convergence whose rates of change are controlled with the utmost precision by the pianist - with the grace of the dancer or athlete, in fact, who must admit the spontaneous and the unplanned amidst their iron control. They must work with rather than against gravity or fall over, but to engage with this risk is where the beauty lies - as Taylor writes in the utterly extraordinary liner notes to his 1966 recording 'Unit Structures' (Blue Note 84237), 'ballet is the studied manipulation of extremities, a calisthenic procedure away from body center'. It is somehow characteristic of the range of Taylor's music that metaphors derived from chemistry and from dance seem equally apposite as routes into his work. And yet what has been underemphasised in discussion about Taylor is the importance of the hiatus in his work. In the 'Unit Structures' notes he says 'measurement of sound is its silences'. The pause between phrases is a moment of recovery that is also the moment of preparation, just like the dancer's pause and gathering of energy before the leap or the static build up in a chemical substance to a rapid change of state. This moment allows one to hear Taylor melodic 'cells' as just that; it is the space in which one moment can be heard to stand in relation to all the others, that allows one to hear the dialectical detail that drives his performances.

The Podewil, Berlin, is dark and silent. It continues to be so for what seems like an age. Even polite Germans begin to get restless - 'good show' shouts one, with heavy irony. Then an old man, vibrantly dressed (somewhat like a psychedelic aerobics instructor) hobbles onto the stage. He reaches the piano. It is the 7th November 2003. The first notes begin to sound and in the gloom we see Tony Oxley seated behind, and surprisingly high above, his drums. He seems disconcertingly nonchalant - bored even - in counterpoint to the utter precision of the sounds he is producing. The lights come up very, very slowly, matching the ascent of the music. Cecil now looks 20 rather than 70. Oxley smiles. The music fills the room, a maelstrom made up of pinpoints of sound, vibrantly weaving against and into one another.