Cecil Taylor

A term applied to avant-garde jazz of the 1960s and more generally to experimental performance approaches that preceded and followed that decade. Free jazz is sometimes defined negatively, in terms of the conventional jazz features from which it may depart, including a reliance on tonal harmony, metrical rhythmic structure, sectional form and standard jazz instrumentation, instrument timbres, techniques and ensemble roles. This approach, however, glosses over the very different ways in which individual musicians altered, extended or broke down conventions, and it offers little insight into the music's underlying organization. Other definitions of free jazz situate the music within a tradition that has always valued experimentation, collaboration, improvisation and frequently a spiritual dimension to music. Far from operating without constraints, free jazz requires skill and communication to select appropriate constraints while developing both the content and the form of the music in the course of performance.

Essay on the poetry of Cecil Taylor in the Chicago Black Arts Movement issue of Chicago Review. (Chicago Review, 62.4/63.1/2, Summer / Fall, 2019) Accompanied by online playlist in CR's web companion to the issue: https://www.chicagoreview.org/cr-62-463-12-web-companion-the-black-arts-movement-in-chicago-2/

"In this piece I’d like to focus specifically on the importance of Voodoo to Taylor’s work – about which almost nothing has been written – and to suggest its importance for understanding Taylor’s theory of art, which is also a theory of poetry, gendering, racialisation, and social life. Like Anthony Braxton, Wadada Leo Smith and others, Taylor is a theorist of his own music, his writings dense and often idiosyncratic. Reading just one page of this work might send one scrambling to all sorts of dictionaries, encyclopaedias and esoteric sources, and the little attention that has been paid to these writings has tended to skip over the references they make to non-Western belief systems. While Voodoo was just one of the ways in which Taylor drew on an encyclopaedic knowledge of world religion to theorize his own music – Yoruba, Meso-American, ancient Egyptian and, particularly, West African mythologies, are all referenced in poems and in song titles – Voodoo histories and belief systems in particular provided a useful analogy, not only for his own practice of music-making, but for the suppressed, Afrocentric histories to which he had been denied access."

(This piece began as a paper presented at Unit Structures – The Art of Cecil Taylor, a conference organized by Michelle Yom and held at the Graduate Center, CUNY, and Brooklyn College in October 2019. Elements have also appeared in Chicago Review, Vol.62, No.4 (Summer-Fall 2019), as ‘“Everything you do”: On the poetry of Cecil Taylor.’ Many thanks to Dominic Lash and Bill Shoemaker for their assistance reading drafts, and to Bobby Zankel for an extremely helpful conversation on Taylor’s teaching practice.)

Paper delivered at Unit Structures: The Art of Cecil Taylor. The Graduate Center and the Hitchccok Institute for the Study of American Music at Brooklyn College, City University of New York. October 2019.

Conference report at:  http://streamsofexpression.blogspot.com/2020/02/unit-structures-art-of-cecil-taylor.html