BN-LA-458-H2

Cecil Taylor - In Transition

Released - 1975

Recording and Session Information

Boston, MA, September 14, 1956
Steve Lacy, soprano sax #2,4; Cecil Taylor, piano; Buell Neidlinger, bass #1-4,6,7; Dennis Charles, drums #1-4,6,7.

Bemsha Swing
Charge 'Em Blues
Azure
Song
You'd Be So Nice To Come Home To
Rick Kick Shaw
Sweet And Lovely

Nola Studios, NYC, April 15, 1959
Ted Curson, trumpet #4-6; Bill Barron, tenor sax #4-6; Cecil Taylor, piano; Buell Neidlinger, bass; Rudy Collins or Dennis Charles, drums.

Get Out Of Town
I Love Paris
Love For Sale
Little Lees (aka Louise)
Matie's Trophies (aka Motystrophe)
Carol / Three Points

Track Listing

Side One
Title	Author	Recording Date
Bemsha Swing	D. Best-T. Monk	September 14 1956
Charge 'Em Blues	C. Taylor	September 14 1956
Azure	D. Ellington-I. Mills	September 14 1956
Side Two
Song	C. Taylor	September 14 1956
You'd Be So Nice To Come Home To	C. Porter	September 14 1956
Rick Kick Shaw	C. Taylor	September 14 1956
Sweet And Lovely	Arnheim-Tobias-Lemare	September 14 1956
Side Three
Get Out Of Town	C. Porter	April 15 1959
Carol / Three Points	C. Taylor	April 15 1959
Love For Sale	C. Porter	April 15 1959
Side Four
Little Lees	C. Taylor	April 15 1959
Motystrophe	C. Taylor	April 15 1959
I Love Paris	C. Porter	April 15 1959

Liner Notes

CECIL TAYLOR

In a 1975 interview with the Canadian jazz magazine, Coda, Cecil Taylor was telling of an evening, twenty years before, when he first saw Carmen Amaya dance:

"It was as though everything stopped for me. I mean everything stopped. That, to me, is the highest kind of compliment that can be paid to another artist — [that he is able] to make somebody else lose all sense of time, all sense of his own existence outside [of the performance.]"

That, of course, is what Cecil Taylor does to people. He does it to more and more of them because finally — after a long march through hostility and indifference and incomprehension — Cecil, without having traded an inch of musical principle, has been ineluctably recognized as a member of the music pantheon that goes back to Louis Armstrong and includes, among others, Duke, Bird, and Coltrane. My own view is that Cecil has become the most consistently original and spirit-probing of all American musicians.

At first, however, the man's power was felt by many to be chaos. I have never known a musician who could so disturb other people, including other musicians. And for a while, I couldn't understand why they reacted so angrily to Cecil. My own musical training is fragmented, to say the least, but I've never had any trouble following the patterns of Cecil's playing. Yet thoroughly trained musicians would snap at me, "There's no sense to it. Nothing fits." In fact, in the late 1950's, Benny Green, a British musician who had become a critic (usually a very astute one), was trying very hard to prove to me that Cecil's work wasn't music at all. It was some kind of hammering, some kind of noise, but not music.

One afternoon I was thinking about all this inexplicable exasperation being directed at Cecil Taylor. It was just before he took the stand in 1958 at the Great South Bay [New York] Jazz Festival. I had heard him play before, but this set transcended what had come before. (He does that every year or two — breaking through yet another door of musical-emotional perception.)

Anyway, I was stunned at the music that day at Great South Bay. As Cecil had felt watching Carmen Amaya, so too I had lost all sense of time, all sense of myself except as that self was focused on the music, transfixed by the music. Later, it occurred to me — and often has since — that the main reason Cecil has so antagonized certain listeners, including musicians, is that he requires so much of those who hear him. I don't mean intellectually, although on one level, that's a demonically fascinating way to listen to him. I mean emotionally.

Don't we all listen to music emotionally? But how much music makes us clear away all kinds of habitual, internal, pre-set defenses if we are to be able to fully connect with that music? Listening to Cecil is a catharsis — an onrush of emotional hailstorms, sunshowers, great winds, cunning breezes, forest fires, avalanches. Forgive, if you will, the analogies from nature, but I wanted to emphasize the deep, exploding sense of natural forces at work. Natural forces, of course, crafted and redesigned by art; but nonetheless this is music based on elemental energy. Various kinds of energy, for that matter. As Cecil says, "Part of what this music is about is not to be delineated exactly. It's about magic, and capturing spirits.'

Let me put it another way. There is so much in Cecil's music, so much going on, so much connecting continually between where the music's been and where it's going, that you can't lay back passively. Well, yes, you can, if you want to, but you can't make real contact with it that way.

Back at the Great South Bay Festival in 1958 — a point in time between the two record dates in this album — the effect of Cecil's playing was distilled in a report by Whitney Balliett in The New Yorker as he described how part of the audience "fidgeted, whispered, and wandered nervously in and out of the tent, as if the ground beneath had become unbeatably hot." It you don't open yourself to the music, and join in the purgation, that's what can happen — acute though undefined discomfort. You sense that some kind of spirit-shaking is going on, but you've lost the way inside.

On the other hand, at the same conceit, as I wrote at the time, "a nucleus of intense" attentive listeners remained as if bewitched, and several ran — I mean, ran — to the stand after Cecil's performance to find out whether any of his records were available.

The nucleus has grown and grown until sizeable numbers of listeners are trying to get all his albums — far fewer than they ought to have been—so far. With a musician of Cecil's prodigious contributon, everything he's ever recorded becomes an important part of the historical record. And by my own criteria, everything he's ever recorded, whether he's been entirely happy with the date, or not, has intrinsic musical value on its own as well as being part of the Taylor continuum.

I am not going to try to annotate each track, remembering the lectures John Coltrane used to give me about that not being the way to write notes. The music, he would say, speaks for itself, and ought to be allowed to do that without verbal hindrance. I do want, however, to suggest that you listen to how brilliantly, subtly, and originally Cecil transmutes those tunes whose names you know but which you've never heard in these kinds of revelatory designs. Also, on both standards and originals, there is Cecil's formidable energy — an energy of ideas, of multiply intersecting rhythm waves, textures, timbres, emotions. And there is the constant sense of dynamic building. Everything — structure, feelings, rhythms — moving up and through space is bristlingly interconnected patterns until the closing climax which is felt, however. not as a definitive ending but rather as a pause in the history of Cecil Taylor's music As Duke Ellington said, no music ever ends.

The first two sides were recorded in Boston in September, 1956, for a label called Transition. The a&r man was Tom Wilson, then much absorbed in jazz. (Later, Tom's recording directions become more heterogeneous and he worked with Bob Dylan and a vertiginous variety of rock groups). Steve Lacy, the soprano saxophonist, originally came from a traditional jazz background but at this point had made the crossing into the modern scene. Since then, Lacy has become even more venturesome, working, in the process, in somewhat more hospitable places abroad than he has been able to find at home.

Dennis Charles was a self-taught drummer with unusual musical charm and wit. Born in Saint Croix, Virgin Islands, he came to America at the age of twelve. The key influence on his work was Art Blakey, but Dennis was decidedly original. "I try to play like a horn with my left hand," he once told me, "while the right keeps time."

Bassist Buell Neidlinger has impressive credits as both a classical and jazz musician. In the mid-1950's, and since, however, Buell has credited Cecil with being a primary force on all his work since they first met. In his 1966 book, Four Lives in the Bebop Business, A. B. Spellman wrote of Buell: "Neidlinger considers his entrance into Cecil Taylor's group the beginning of his serious musical education...he has experienced nothing in his tenure with Houston Symphony Orchestra conductor Sir John Barbirolli, or with Lukas Foss at the University of Buffalo, that is at all comparable to what Cecil showed him about the possibilities of music."

In 1975, Neidlinger said of Cecil in a Down Beat interview: "That man is capable of playing ten different notes with ten different fingers, ten different dynamics, ten different attacks, and at ten different tempi. He is phenomenal. There is no musician I've ever met, including Igor Stravinsky and Pierre Boulez, who comes anywhere near having the abilities that Cecil Taylor has. He has now fully developed his material. He has never copied anyone, He is a product of his own genius."

I cite this statement by Buell because he himself is so phenomenally knowlegeable musically. More than sufficiently secure in his own abilities, Buell has never been in the least trendy or idolatrous. Of all the musicians I know, moreover, Buell has the most thorough grounding in both classical music and jazz, and so his assessment of Cecil has instructive weight.

But, in any case, it's the music that tells. As in this set. First the Transition date and then the performances — sides 3 and 4 — that were made in New York in April, 1959, as part of Cecil's Love for Sale album on United Artists. (From that, released here for the first time is "Carol/Three Points.")

On this date, as well as on the preceding session for Transition, the emotional impact is strong and incrementally sustained. Though there are now two horns (trumpeter Ted Curson and tenor Bill Barron) and a firm rhythm section (bassist Chris White and drummer Rudy Collins), the molten core of excitement in these performances is the piano. And in the piano solos, it was clear then — and is all the more clear now — there is a further dimension of imaginative force in Cecil's work that does not exist in that of the others, though the latter are certainly competent.

Here, then, is an added value in these recordings — listening to Cecil, in the Boston and New York sets, you hear an utterly singular source and shaper of energy. He relates to his colleagues and yet, in the quality and obdurancy of his originality, he is simultaneously by himself. It's like listening to Dizzy Gillespie in a swing band as he was coming up, or Bird in a Kansas City band. And once you know how far a distance they came after these earlier associations, it's all the more revealing to be able to listen back and hear how boldly nonpareil they were when many of their contemporaries considered them only eccentric, or incompetent, or both.

Another continued point about these sessions is the quintessential primacy of emotion in Cecil's work. Listening to the music here, keep in mind this Cecil Taylor observation from a Village Voice interview in 1975 with Gary Giddins: "One of the things that turned me off European music is that I'd get the scores by Boulez, Stockhausen, Pousseur, and Ligeti and I would look at them and say, 'My, this is interesting.' And I'd listen to the music and it didn't sound particularly good. I don't listen to artists who only want to create something that is interesting. To feel is perhaps the most terrifying thing in this society. This is one of the reasons I'm not too interested in electronic music: it divorces itself from human energy, it substitutes another kind of force as the determinant agent for its continuance," (Emphasis added: N.H.)

It is this breadth and depth of human energy that most strongly characterizes Cecil as musician and Cecil when he's not playing. I knew him before I knew his work. It was in Boston around 1951, I was working in a radio station, where I had a jazz show, and Cecil was attending the New England Conservatory of Music. There was a reasonably hip record store near the Conservatory where I used to hang out, and Cecil began to come around. His conversation was unfailingly arresting. He knew about all kinds of music as well as a lot about the dance and poetry. His was a far-flung but intensely focused curiosity, and as he talked, he somehow transfused some of that probing energy into me. Because of him, I started to listen differently and to hear more. Then I heard Cecil's music, and it was not quite like anything I had ever heard before. The tough, sinewy intelligence was there but also an unending volcano of feeling that I then realized was always just barely compressed in Cecil when he was not at the piano.

I have been turned around and inside out by that music for some two decades, and I've never had enough of it. Nor, at any performance, have I felt let down. Sure, some have been more wildly beautiful than others, but it is apparently impossible for Cecil to ever be just routine, no matter how bad the ambience of any particular session may be. Very few musicians are able to sustain so well, and I suppose that, in Cecil's case, the energy is always running so high that it never lets him down too far.

As I wrote at the beginning, for many years, just being able to get to play his music has been frustratingly difficult for Cecil. For a long time, gigs were very, very infrequent. I remember him telling me once — after he had been out of work for months — that he had been playing in his room for an imaginary audience. He needed that contact, even if it was just in his head, to re-energize his will to keep on keeping on.

During the past couple of years, the worst of the struggle appears to be over. In the past, for instance, only the most alert and open musicians were aware of Cecil's enormous value. Now most of the younger players recognize him as a force, an influence, a key regenerator of the language. Audiences have come along too, and they are growing.

But still there are the obtuse. Buell Neidlinger tells of a Cecil Taylor concert at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium a couple of years ago: "I watched over 3,000 people jump on their feet and scream several times during the course of the performance — the music was felt that deeply." But what did the critic for the Los Angeles Times write? "Something to the effect," Neidlinger adds, "that 'anyone working with a jackhammer could get the same musical results.' " But that kind of dead-ear, dead-feeling response doesn't matter any more, for Cecil has triumphed. Musically, he had already triumphed during the years he was making the recordings in this album. The difference is that more people know it now.

We are in the presence here, and in all his work, of that rarest of phenomena — a genuine creator. And once you absorb his music, you will never quite hear the same way again. The man actually can change your musical life.

NAT HENTOFF

Notes

September 14 1956 Session originally released as Transition LP Cecil Taylor Quartet - Jazz Advance (TRLP 19)
April 15 1959 Session originally released as Cecil Taylor Trio And Quintet - Love For Sale (UAL 4046)