Cecil Taylor

It slid along a bit.

I didn't really get so excited by Cecil Taylor and Archie Shep until later.

In retrospect, I miss them as they were coming through.

There'd be a certain point of discordance with Eric Dolphy, I suppose, which was the last person I really loved in that period.

And Mahler, who is the epitome of the most romantic harmony in the world of distended sevenths and tenths and fourteenths, is capable of doing that.

And even Cecil Taylor is probably capable of doing that to the right person at the right time.

So there's no... limit to the vocabulary in art, I think it comes back to that intention.

I mean, if you tend to communicate something and that audience person gets that communication, you've changed them.

Everywhere on the drums, just kicking our butts every which way.

Keith Godshow was banging out those blocky chord clusters straight out of Cecil Taylor.

Garcia was riding his wah-wah pedal into bizarre, growling crescendos.

The sprawling Dark Star explorations, the monster 73 jams where the dead... pushed further into dissonance than they ever had.

So I like how iTunes, the description of David, just let me read this real quick.

He played with jazz giants like Andrew Cyril and Cecil Taylor early in his career, but it was with his own groups that he fully incorporated the spirit of the 60s free jazz movement while pushing its boundaries into the 2010s.

I think that's a great description of David.

You know, you cut your teeth with Cecil Taylor and Andrew Cyril.

You come up learning that stuff and then you've got that background to go on and push yourself even further into the avant-garde free jazz movement.

Yeah.

I mean, I didn't like this album at all.

That's what I mean.

And he introduced me to a lot of just, like...

Yeah, like he knew Cecil Taylor, the jazz pianist-

Wow

... and would bring him in, or he was...

Yes.

And the next one was Wayne County, and then Carla Blair, or whomever, Cecil Taylor, or Tosh Mahal, or Lightning Hopkins, or Tom Waits.

So we were music fans.

We weren't punk promoters.

It taught me to listen to Sun Ra differently.

It taught me to listen to Cecil Taylor differently.

It taught me to listen to Ornette Coleman differently.

It taught me to listen to Booker Little differently.

It is available at a name your price feature on her band camp site.

Right now here is music from Cecil Taylor under the Cecil Taylor unit.

Recently unearthed recordings from 1979 live at the Chemo Theater in Albuquerque.

This comes out through the Black Editions label on October 16th.

¶¶ Leroy Jones, the poet and critic who would later take the name Amiri Baraka, wrote an essay called Jazz and the White Critic, collected in his book Black Music.

In it, he names Coltrane directly, grouped with Ornette Coleman, Sonny Rollins, and Cecil Taylor, as part of a current bringing back, quote, some of the anarchy and excitement of the bebop years, end quote.

There's that word again, anarchy.

It's the same root word Tynan used as an insult.