One Man's Cecil

On May 6th, I was at the Blue Note to see Cecil Taylor’s New Aha 3, with Henry Grimes on bass and violin, and Pheeroan AkLaff in the drum chair. Andy Bey was in attendance as guest vocalist, and the group played two sets, one at 8:00 and one at 10:30 P.M.

Since the late 1970s, the structured sections of Taylor’s compositions seem, in large part, to be built on repeated and arpeggiated intervals, replacing the more bare-bones chromaticism of Akisakila and Live in the Black Forest with lusher more harmonically driven gestures. Brief and exclamatory still, each phrase is connected to the last by a quasi-tonal motion, hanging just at the edge of ready comprehensibility and logic. By Garden, this approach was fully developed, occurring simultaneously at several transpositions. More recently, as with the Willisau Concert, tonal centers are briefly discernable, and this was the case on May 6th.

I am not certain that Taylor considers these triads in that way, serving those functions, but my classical training insists on separating the more clustered elements in any performance from their triadic counterparts.

Grimes and AkLaff were all over even the slightest changes as the first set, an extended piece of approximately an hour and a half, swelled, crested and ebbed in the now familiar arcs. Whether on bass or violin, which he played frequently throughout the evening, Grimes would shadow Taylor, picking up on a choice motive and subjecting it to the torrents of ideas issuing from his own inwardly reflective yet persistent imagination. Grimes and AkLaff, the latter exuding intensity and energy, almost seemed to be anticipating the arrival of each “tonal” moment, rendering them two of Taylor’s finest collaborators in some time. Several bells and other objects he had placed inside the piano modified Taylor’s playing, approximating a prepared sound in the Cage manner. When drums and strings were at their highest in volume and energy, such subtleties were inaudible, as the music washed over the crowd in the almost unbearable yet exciting pandemonium that it was so unnerving to experience live.

Andy Bey’s contributions were alternately thrilling and disappointing. His incredible ear sampled and held those moments where a note was repeated, and he hurtled around each harmonic suggestion with speed, drama and precision. Where the language veered into what I can only call abstraction, Bey continued in a vocabulary of precisely “Western” pitch, either unwilling or ill equipped to partake in the freedoms offered by piano or unfretted strings. Yet, the second set was a mellower affair, Taylor’s own playing subdued and concentrated; Bey’s appearance part way through actually enlivened the trio, bringing back some of the adrenalin without which the group seemed to falter.

Despite all manner of excitement, the most interesting music occurred at the beginning of the first set. Grimes and AkLaff emerged, playing soft repeating figures, non-tonally military invocations was how I heard them, and these wonderfully minimalistic utterances continued until Taylor entered, shaker in hand, and began to sing in his raspily alien voice. Off mic, it was strangely beautiful, almost resembling a bagpipe as Taylor added tones to the rhythmically textured angles of violin and drums. After some lines of poetry, Taylor began to work on the piano’s innards, as he did on his 1988 collaboration with Derek Bailey for FMP. It was as if an autoharp had been placed, softly, amongst rocks and crags, weaving velvet through a maze of metal. Without a change in the drum and violin patterns, Taylor began to incorporate the arpeggiated structures, and the effect was magical, two alien worlds, fully formed, colliding and somehow, miraculously, coexisting.

Given the grandeur of those opening minutes, I felt some considerable disappointment as the more familiar trio interplay took root. Exhibited on countless releases, the energy was something to behold in a concert environment, but the absolute beauty and subtlety of the opening’s timbral interplay was lost.

I was left pondering the question of development, of the artist’s duty to develop the language he/she invents, to modify it, expand it, and maybe, ultimately, to destroy it and begin again. This is by no means an imperative; just listen to Monk, for example, who found his voice by his thirtieth year, maybe even before, and spent his life honing his craft. The same might be said of Duke Ellington, whose radically differing versions of his standards, heavily reorchestrated, were as much refinements as evolutionary statements. Taylor’s forays into timbral glory at first set’s opener made me ache for him to continue along that path, to mine those freshest elements of what I was hearing, as he did with standards so many years ago. The opening of Student Studies hinted at similar tantalizations, and I was reminded of these by the Aha 3’s first 15 minutes on stage. It is obviously not my place to dictate how the master artist proceeds, but I felt that such a superb trio, capable of making such important music, might also have been used to realize the kind of discoveries upon which this music continues, I hope, to be predicated.

~ Marc Medwin

[apologies to Marc for being so dilatory in getting this piece up & thanks to Jeff Schlanger for use of the painting Mahattan Spaces 21, above, as visual preamble. DT]