Mongezi Feza was one of the best trumpet player
to come out of South Africa. Born in Queenstown in 1945, he started studying
his instrument at the age of 8. In 1962 he joined pianist Chris McGregor, altoist
Dudu Pukwana, bassist Johnny Dyani and drummer Louis Moholo-Moholo in the Blue
Notes. Their first concerts, as testified by my
latest review, were an hommage to the flamboyancy of Charlie Parker and
bebop and the hipness of Thelonious Monk, to whom many themes of their original
fist compositions are paying openly hommage.
The Blue Notes played in different clubs and
venues, universities comprised, even if with great difficulties and always
clandestinely, being a racially mixed band. After 1964 and their appearance at
the Antibes Festival, they started to reside first in Europe and then in the
UK, where they had a huge influence both on the scene of improvised music and
of rock music. After playing together in a large ensemble called The
Brotherhood of Breath, Feza eventually died on December 14, 1975.
This album, For Mongezi, originally issued only
in 2008 and now reissued this year, comprises the music originally played at
Mongezi’s memorial service. The original music, here in this reissue completely
restored, was longer than 2 hours. It is useless to describe point by point
what this music sounds like. It is obviously vital, forceful, dense, intense,
of impact. Differently from the last record reviewed, this album is not devoted
to bebop or post bop music. It is, indeed, a session of music that is keen on
free improvisation and roots music, as Coltrane’s Kulu Sé Mama, if we want to
find out a far away relative.
On many occasions we can hear Dyani great work
on bass, pinched and arcoed, accompanied by drums and small percussions,
McGregor ability to play atonally, influences coming from the US more than from
UK anyway (The Blue Notes improvisations are never “non idiomatic”) and also
from South African folklore, mixed with Pukwana and Moholo-Moholo invocations.
Pukwana style on alto seems to have been developed from the original Charlie
Parker influence to that of the late great Jimmy Lyons, with that oblique
melancholy and bitterness who abruptly develop itself into a cascade of notes
without being a clone.
But this record is important, as it is the
memorial service for John Coltarne where Albert Ayler played captured in the
monumental box set Holy Ghost, because we can feel how much different for
African-American culture a departure is from European culture. It is not a
matter of believing in the spirits or in a different life, or maybe is, but
mostly is a difference related to agency. I remember you, so I’m here playing
for you. I’m not only feeling emotions, but I’m sharing those emotions with the
world, so maybe, I argue as a critic and as a listener, you are still alive
with us throughout our playing, as a source ofinspiration.
Music to be listened to carefully, music filled
with love and compassion, music that gives you at once that feeling of
intensity and those nuances of depth into the souls of the players involved.
If, as someone said to me, the Live in South Africa from 1964 showed us some
musicians in love with jazz and willing to recreate that music but not
completely mature, this For Mongezi instead leavea us listening the music of
four complete and original musicians.
One can hear how important this music was for
European improvisers, giving them that feeling of being rooted somewhere even
if maybe only technically. Possibly Evan Parker, Alan Skidmore and Mike Osborne
were compelled to develop their style incorporating that ritualistic element
you can hear through this record. I wonder, as an example, if the binaural
sound of Parker, that is his ‘playing through the void’ as he asserted during
one concert I attended in London, was influenced somehow by Pukwana and
friends’ way of creating music.
Obviously every music need an element of
grounding, every form of art. The Blue Notes developed an intense link with
ancestor’s rituals, stripped from their original believing – or maybe not? –
but dedited to create a sound and a meaning that is modern and ancient at the
same time. After all, music is still a ritual nowadays. For many people is a
way to meet their idols and the community of listeners to have some fun, for
others is a way to beign recognized by and recognize a community, for others
again is a way to develop human skills as compassion and brotherhood, but
always the spirit of the music is trying to uplift people outside of the
everyday problems giving you the opportunity to enter into another dimension so
that you can take it and bring it into the realm of reality. To make it better.
“The eye looks, mind deciphers, hands attack,
ear informs”. This
is one of the methodological indications the New York City-born pianist Cecil
Taylor gave the listeners through the liner notes to his 1966 milestone “Unit Structures”. Since his first 1956
recordings with his own band, and next year appearance at the Newport Jazz
Festival, the pianist stands up in his own right as one of the pivotal figures
of last century contemporary music.
“I immediately felt that I would be able to
figure out my own universe from his propositions: they were really brilliant;
his way to develop monumental improvisations from little melodic cells was
gifted with so much structural strength […] I sincerely think that Cecil Taylor
is one of the great geniuses of our times as the creator of a real synthesis,
as Anthony Braxton, between jazz and Western tradition” [Marilyn Crispell interviewed by
Stéphane Ollivier, Jazz Magazine, Dec. 2009]
Born in
1929 and active in R&B and swing bands before giving life to his first
quartet featuring soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy, bassist Buell Neidlinger and
drummer Denis Charles, whose concerts at the Five Spot Café in 1957 have been
taken as Ornette Coleman’s two years later as the beginning of the ‘free jazz’
movement, in 1964 Cecil Taylor also created with his alter ego trumpeter Bill
Dixon the Jazz Composers Guild.
Andrew Cyrille
“Playing with Taylor I began to be liberated from thinking
about chords. I'd been imitating John Coltrane unsuccessfully and because of
that I was really chord conscious.” [Archie Shepp, from the liner notes of 1964
Impulse! Record “Four for Trane”]. If
one listens to the ‘Involution/Evolution’
movement of Alms/Tiegarten (Spree)
recorded with a large ensemble in Berlin,
more than a relationship with Iannis Xenakis music can be found. Not by chance,
since Taylor’s
way to relate music to architecture is something he has in common with the
Greek born composer.
In 1961
Impulse! Records issued Gil Evans’ Into
the Hot, a record split between the two pianists bands and visions. For the
first time, Taylor
left off traditional notation and started to develop his own modus operandi.
With a band featuring Archie Shepp and Jimmy Lyons on reeds, Ted Curson on trumpet,
Roswell Rudd on trombone, Henry Grimes on bass and Sonny Murray on drums, on
rehearsals Taylor was repeating the lines for the musicians, so to prevent “western notation blocks total absorption in
the ‘action’ playing”. [from Unit
Structures liner notes]
In the few
years following ‘Pots’ and the other
compositions for the album, Taylor developed the rhythmic aspect of the music
thanks to drummers as Sunny Murray and Andrew Cyrille. Conscious of the
developments in Cage’s piano music, Taylor
imagined another way to step away from ‘classical’ culture. As in A.B.
Spellman’s Four Lives in the Bebop
Business: “[talking about David
Tudor, Cage’s main collaborator on piano] He's
so detached he ain't even there. Like,
he would never get emotionally involved in it; […] it's a mental exercise in
which the body is there as an attribute to complement that exercise. The body is in no way supposed to get involved in it.”
John Cage, David Tudor, Merce Cunningham, Barbara Dilley
Cecil
Taylor developed a music based on physical experience of playing, whose basis
are “regular and irregular” rhythms.
Rejecting the “transformed symbols thru
conductor” of the Western modern and contemporary music practice, Taylor practiced both the
reintegration of “all body’s limbs” and the “ultimate
communion” between human beings. Also a dancer, Taylor was conscious that
from the limbs all body movements emanate; "At
the controlled body center, motors become knowledge at once felt, memory which
has identified sensory images resulting social response." It’s the
same idea underlining Indian classical music and its philosophical premises,
Shivaism, as many other non-Western cultures and music practices.
Unit Structures, first Cecil Taylor Lp for Blue Note, recorded
in 1966 at Rudy Van Gelder studios in New
Jersey, and his first fully accomplished work, saw
the application of his creator’s “form is
possibility” program as rhythms, pitches, shapes and contents “arises through the individual experiences
of the performers, their personal history as contained in memory.” [Matthew
Goodheart, Freedom and Individuality in the music of Cecil Taylor]
Cecil
Taylor Unit is at that point in time composed by trumpeter Eddie Gale Stevens,
Jr., altoist Jimmy Lyons and multireedist Ken Mc Intyre, bassists Henry Grimes
and Alan Silva, and Andrew Cyrille on drums. The following Lp Conquistador! was recorded in October
the same year always at Van Gelder’s studios and issued by Blue Note; here
Jimmy Lyons’ alto sax is finally placed side by side with Bill Dixon’s trumpet
on a record. Actually collaborating with the pianist since 1951, and involved
during his career in projects involving many of Taylor closest partners such as
Archie Shepp, drummer Tony Oxley and bassist William Parker, in 1966 Dixon was
also issuing for RCA Victor his first accomplished masterpiece Intents And Purposes, starting the
recording sessions four days later Conquistadors!’s
.
Bill Dixon in Italy, 1980
His wide
intervals, not implying a specific key or mode while relying on timbre and
tone-colors – Dixon was also a painter, as many album covers can directly testify
– were the perfect counter altar for Taylor’s dense cluster, percussive
figures. And while the two basses (Silva’s bowed lines, Grimes lower registers)
generate contrasting parts instead of dictating a pulse whose sense is
suggested through contractions more than using a ‘rhythm section’, Andrew
Cyrille’s textures and Jimmy Lyons rooted in bop melodic phrases are completion
for a music that through the following decades is still at his creative peak.
This is
highly exemplified by a series of astounding, beautiful records that, since the
1970s, Taylor released for labels such as Arista/Freedom
and New World in the US,
Black Saint in Italy and FMP
in Germany.
While attaining a wider popularity through the praise of the critics, a concert
for Jimmy Carter on the White House Lawn, and then a Guggenheim and a McArthur
fellowships through 1973 to 1974, the albums Cecil Taylor issued in this period
are highly explicative of his musical practice.
Some
notable releases are 3 Phasis (New
World, 1979), featuring again Jimmy Lyons, Raphé Malik on trumpet, Ramsey Ameen
on violin, Sirone on bass and Ronald Shannon Jackson on drums, the two-Lp set Historic Concerts recorded at the
Columbia University in 1979 with Max Roach and released in 1984 by Black Saint,
Alms/Tiegarten (Spree) recorded in
Berlin in 1988 and released on FMP featuring the Cecil Taylor European
Orchestra – Enrico Rava on trumpet, Hannes Bauer and Walter Wierbos on
trombones, Louis Sclavis and Peter Brotzmann on reeds, Tristan Honsiger on
cello, Peter Kowald and William Parker on bass and Han Bennink on drums amongst
the others – while the solo practice is widely witnessed through records as Silent Tongues (Arista/Freedom, 1974),
recorded at the Montreux Jazz Festival and exemplifying perfectly Taylor’s
percussive approach to piano, once described as a Santeria’s altar, and 1987 For Olim on Black Saint, that is one of
his most lyrical statements.
William Parker
While
containing a dedication to Julian Beck, For
Olim – Olim being an Aztec hieroglyph meaning movement, motion, earthquake
– as 2004 Algonquin, issued by Bridge
and featuring Mat Maneri on viola, suggests a direct connection with ancient
cultures and rituals. Joseph L. Enderson, follower of C.G. Jung and author of
one chapter of his mentor’s The Man and
His Symbols, talks of the Algonquin archetype of Red Horn, a semi-divine
character usually associated with a thunder bird as the main figure of some rites
at the end of which the beginner was becoming a fully responsible human being. Archetypes
are predictable patterns of inner conditioning that lead to essential changes
and shows between individual development and the ancient initiation rites.
In the
1990s, Taylor activity sees the preponderance of the Feel Trio with long time
associated bassist William Parker and drummer Tony Oxley, beautifully
documented in the 2 T’s for a lovely T 12
Cd FMP box set, without dismissing his larger ensembles and solo performances.
Matthew Goodheart issued a beautiful essay on how the music of Cecil Taylor is
going to develop through rehearsals. But it is also possible to listen directly
to Taylor’s own
words on documentaries such as 1981 Imaging
the Sound, directed by Ron Mann and digitally restored in 2007, or Chris
Felver Allthe Notes, released on DVD in 2006.
“I was young when I met Cecil Taylor: 24 years!
[…] For me, he was an intellectual as much important as James Baldwin. He
opened my eyes on the meaning of black music: our music was something more than
dance, vaudeville music, our music had a history, it was coming out of slavery,
from struggle.”
[Archie Shepp with Samuel Thiebaut]
Bibliography
Nat Hentoff Jazz Is, New York: Random House, 1976
Amiri Imamu Baraka Black Music, New York: Apollo, 1968
