THE COMPLETE CANDID RECORDINGS OF CECIL TAYLOR AND BUELL NEIDLINGER
Damballah Wedo
in a single package, and so consistently astonishing, just overwhelms the
listener, who falls back over that overused exclamation. Wow indeed.
This box (four CDs or six LPs, plus booklet containing extensive liner notes,
discography and photographs, all done to Mosaic's usual high standards of
quality) documents just four recording dates: October 12 and 13, 1960, and
January 9 and 10, 1961. They yielded only the LPs THE WORLD OF CECIL TAYLOR
(Candid 9006), reissued in the 1970s as AIR (Barnaby Z30562); NEW YORK CITY
R&B (Barnaby KZ31035), reissued recently by the revived Candid label as
catalog no 9017; and CECIL TAYLOR ALL STARS (CBS Sony 01107), a semi-bootleg,
recently reissued as JUMPIN PUNKINS (Candid 9013).
The Mosaic package offers all the issuable music in chronological order, with
comments by Nat Hentoff, who supervised the original sessions, and very
detailed musical notes by Buell Neidlinger, the bassist and longtime Taylor
collaborator (the 1961 dates were actually under his leadership.) There
is also a Cecil Taylor discography, with LP indexing, up to and including
these sessions (but no later, regrettably.)
A note on the term "issuable" music: the producers have not included false
starts or incomplete takes. They have also not included "bad" takes; what
makes a take bad appears to have been decided by Neidlinger; Cecil seems to
have had little to do with the reissue. As such many takes of "Air" are
excluded: out of 29 total takes we get only takes 5, 9, 21, 28 and 29.
28 was the master, on Candid 9006. 5 is not too great; Archie Shepp is
still learning the tune and Dennis Charles is quite inflexible. By take 9
things are much better. The well known drum introduction has appeared,
though Shepp's theme statement is laid back. His solo is OK, but Taylor
burns, climbing all over Shepp till his comping has become a virtual parallel
solo. When Shepp ends Taylor intensifies things, spraying notes like
a speed demon, riding roughshod over Charles' oddly Latin syncopation.
Take 21 is perhaps the best from a band point of view. Shepp and Charles hook
up together in a wicked groove, followed by Taylor, who puts together a
short solo, laying and defining the parameters of the drum solo that
follows. Take 28 has some incredible Taylor; it's as if he has a single
hands with ten fingers. A pianist I know commented that he found it difficult
to believe that anyone could exert such touch control at that speed.
The take ends with Taylor saying "one more... one more for me." Which takes
us to take 29. Shepp has finally got it, and burns from the get go.
He is pulled into divergent directions by Charles' straight-ahead bebop
and by Taylor's deconstructive approach intent on imploding the music.
Starting long before Shepp is finished, Cecil roars, great waves of notes
rolling out of the right hand against pseudo-bebop (Bud Powell?) left
hand motifs. Wow!
One surprise is in the two takes of "Number One", both previously
unreleased. They are the recording debut of Sunny Murray. His looser
time is an immediate stimulant (presumably also to Dennis Charles, who
had to sit there and watch this upstart take over the drum chair for
these tunes.) Taylor's treatment of take 3 is revealing: it centers
around the same pair of four note riffs, each played twice, that forms
the core of "D Trad, that's what" from NEFERTITI, THE BEAUTIFUL ONE HAS
COME from 1962. Taylor uses them more for percussive content than for
melody. He creates endless variations, accenting here the first, there
the fourth, over there the second pair. over here deleting the third note
to leave a tension-filled gap. Murray's style is not yet fully formed,
but he is rearing to follow. Revealing, and revelatory.
And so it goes. The incredible "This Nearly Was Mine" is transformed by
Cecil into a great blues aria, in which he dances around and around, never
quite offering the resolving chord. Forget chorus structure: this is
a single long blues, with a shimmering sound quite different from the
violent percussiveness of, say, "Air" or "Section C". "E.B." offers
a duel between Taylor and Taylor. Not just conversations between left and
right hand, Cecil somehow (don't ask me!) succeeds in creating
separate stories in both hands, with part of the right connecting to part
of the left, and vice versa. All this at increasing speed until it's two
pianists, a ten fingered Cecil talking to another ten fingered Cecil.
They finish each other's sentences, but they can't agree. Just as we think
the piano is going to disintegrate, Cecil brings it all together into
a beautiful, shimmering, ending. Wow!
"Lazy Afternoon" has some great Archie Shepp, though his constructivist line
sounds pedestrian compared to the extreme compression of the piano solo
"Port of Call" is a long tune, with little improvisation. Several sections
are juxtaposed so as to appear seamless. At the Jan 10 date, several
musicians were added to the basic quartet, some of them quite surprising:
Steve Lacy, Roswell Rudd, Billy Higgins, Charles Davis (!) and Clark Terry (!!)
The program is Ellingtonian. We get two full takes of "Jumpin Punkins", and
two of "Things Ain't what they used to be". Charles Davis seems bewildered
and plays little music of consequence. Lacy blows solid on take 4 of "Jumpin
Punkins", despite some contrary comping by Cecil (Neidlinger reports that
this caused some dissension in the studio.) Shepp plays some tough Ben Webster
fills on the theme of "Things" and follows with an authoritative solo. Rudd
plays a huge solo on take 3 of "Things", in which he sets himself up as
worthy descendent of both Kid Ory and Tricky Sam Nanton. The real surprise,
though, is Terry, who serenely ignores the maelstrom brewing from the piano,
and plays sweet choruses, quoting from "Rockin' in Rhythm" on "Punkins".
Then there's "O.P.", named in honor of Oscar Pettiford. Take 1 is relatively
straightforward, which is a good thing because it allows us to hear Cecil's
approach to the 12-bar blues. By take two it is not so much an approach
as a chainwhipping! Neidlinger and Charles steadfastedly stick to the form,
though the structure gets increasingly difficult to follow. Taylor abandons
any structure as the term is known in Western music, offering the blues as
variations of time. His playing is jagged, savage -- as if he's wrestling
with the piano -- forcing Charles to feed him cross rhythms, which digressions
Taylor bites into so hard as to force the rhythm section to follow him.
Neidlinger quotes Glenn Gould as saying that "this is perhaps the most
formidable pianism these ears have heard; this is the Great Divide of American
piano playing."
For "O.P." and for all these recordings, the word is, simply, wow!
--
Marcel-Franck Simon min...@attunix.ATT.COM, attunix!mingus
" Papa Loko, ou se' van, ou-a pouse'-n ale'
Nou se' papiyon, n'a pote' nouvel bay Agwe' "
David Black
>Wow! That's the operative response to this record; so much music, concentrated
>in a single package, and so consistently astonishing, just overwhelms the
>listener, who falls back over that overused exclamation. Wow indeed.
And I say wow, too. For the recording and for the wonderful review
that he gave to it, I'm going to print it out and put it in the
album. Thanks - but I'm at work now, and it's hours before I can
listen to it again.
--
David Black
Storage Technology (Disk Division), Louisville, CO.
ncar!stcvax!dlb