Phil Freeman's "In the Brewing Luminous: The Life and Music of Cecil Taylor"

As of April 5, it's been six years that we've been living in a world without the titanic pianist-composer Cecil Taylor -- maybe the greatest musician of my lifetime (only Ornette Coleman and Pauline Oliveros come close, in my estimation). I only ever saw him play in person once, under suboptimal conditions (the contentious 1977 Carnegie Hall concert with Mary Lou Williams), but it left an indelible impression. 

Taylor worked the entire keyboard with an incredibly strong and percussive attack that involved both precise control and fierce abandon, unleashing crashing chords, dissonant clusters, and cascades of high register notes, riding a volcanic flow of energy. I was relatively new to jazz, but I didn't need to comprehend what I was witnessing to be affected by the intensity of the performance (people were standing up screaming in the balconies). At the time I compared it to being caught outside in a hurricane; only later did I come to realize that Taylor's prodigious technique was the result of a rigorous practice regimen, and that his compositions were highly arranged and rehearsed. The "force of nature" had intention. Over the years, listening to the records and reading A.B. Spellman, Amiri Baraka, Valerie Wilmer, Gary Giddins, and Greg Tate's scrawl on Cecil, I've come to understand a bit more about the artist and his process. But it still sounds like magic.

In his new book In the Brewing Luminous: The Life and Music of Cecil Taylor (due for publication later this year on a date TBD), Phil Freeman -- co-founder of Burning Ambulance and a scribe whose scrawl has appeared in The Wire, The Village Voice, and Signal To Noise (RIP), among other estimable journals -- trains an analytical eye on Taylor's art, with details of the artist's personal life only included when relevant to the main narrative arc. This is respectful and appropriate when dealing with a subject who inhabited a persona that he used, at least in part, to keep outsiders at a distance. Freeman's a good reporter and researcher, a fan for 25 years who spent a couple of days with Taylor in 2016, and wherever possible, his text is based on his own experience or interviews with Taylor's living familiars (notable exception: Andrew Cyrille). When the author draws on published sources, they are scrupulously credited. 

Freeman traces Taylor's trajectory from his earliest recordings (produced by Tom Wilson and Nat Hentoff); the historic '62 sojourn in Scandinavia, in company of Jimmy Lyons, Albert Ayler and Sunny Murray; the band with Lyons and Andrew Cyrille, from their '66 Blue Note albums through Taylor's interval in academia and his mid-'70s re-emergence; the '78 band with Ronald Shannon Jackson (which I love as unreasonably as I do the '64 Mingus band); his late-'80s residence in Berlin, his collaborations with Bill Dixon and Tony Oxley, and beyond. I am now motivated to investigate some of Taylor's '90s and '00s work that I overlooked. 

I was surprised to learn that the percussionist Andre Martinez, who seemed like excess baggage in the 1991 Burning Poles video (with William Parker and Tony Oxley), turns out to have been a key element in Taylor's '80s bands (particularly the Orchestra of Two Continents). You might quibble (as did I) with some of Freeman's critical judgments: Did Rudy Van Gelder over-record the horns and under-record the piano and drums on Unit Structures? Maybe. Was Ramsey Ameen the indispensable member of the '78 band? I beg to differ. Then again, having spirited disagreements based on having heard the music is part of the fun of reading books like this.

Taylor saw written scores in standard notation as an impediment to music making; he used non-standard notation for his scores and transmitted the information orally at rehearsals. While Freeman covers this, one would have liked to read a bit more about Taylor's process of  preparing his musicians for performance -- but then, that would make this a different book.

Personal glimpses of the artist are fleeting, but poignant. In his upper middle class upbringing, Taylor was not unlike Duke Ellington, whom he admired. The influence of Taylor's parents can't be overstated. Taylor appears to have acquired much more of the culture from living in his mother's house than he did in schools, including the New England Conservatory (I can relate). His father's acceptance of his queerness gave Cecil a level of comfort with his sexuality that was probably unusual for the time (although it didn't prevent him from bridling when Stanley Crouch casually outed him in a 1983 Village Voice article). Taylor liked to party, and had a preternatural endurance for night life, but seems to have put his art ahead of personal relationships throughout his life. His exploitation by a corrupt associate after being awarded the Kyoto Prize in 2013 is a cautionary tale of elder abuse (it was discovered and reported by an Australian filmmaker who was making a documentary on Taylor). 

Taylor died intestate, and the fate of his estate remains in suspense. His place in history is unassailable. His music remains magic. And Freeman has written a highly readable book, worthy of its subject.