August 1999 [b]

Alive & Well & Underground

The Rob Lo fidelity experience...

Cecil Taylor was a revolutionary, and remains one today, even after five decades of battling against the forces of conservatism. It took ages for him to reach the stage where he could fill concert halls and take pole position as the ultimate non-conformist jazz-not-jazz living legend of the millennium. It took years of doing menial jobs just to survive, being ordered out of clubs before hardly getting started, and generally being regarded as an absolute nutter before these days of respect and, finally, I guess, proper financial reward.

Back in '58, however, the picture of him on the cover of Looking Ahead! (Contemporary Records) tells a different story. He sits with his back to the upright piano, one arm resting on the length of the keyboard as if signalling his intent to finally cover every note available. In the hand of the other arm, a half-smoked cigarette has accumulated an inch of ash, denoting, perhaps, a lengthy spell of inner absorption. Is he thinking about those menial jobs he had to do to survive? Or his six-week residency at the Five Spot the year before? Now that he'd made an album, maybe he'd get some kind of success...

One track on the album, 'Excursions On A Wobbly Rail', would be a good sub-title for his life, his musical journey. We hear him moving towards the freedom, the conceptual leap that would release him from formal restraint into another world, a world of pure sound, complex patterns comprised of notes unleashed by both hands, ten fingers sounding like twenty, transforming the keys into, as Val Wilmer put it, 'Eighty-eight tuned drums'. But compared to future developments, this album is a breeze, a playful romp within the boundaries of acceptability.

Fast forward 30 years to Live In Bologna (Leo Records), and the man is Out There, having been AWOL from the regiment(al) for years. But the overriding impact of this concert is it's enormity in scope and the openness of what amounts to over 90mins-worth of music with no tunes, no titles, no easily digestible parts. Still, the quintet march to a very different drummer and, as such, attempts to travel from Side One to Four in one sitting place me in the position shared by those attending Taylor's festival appearances back in the days before all-seater reverence. I can understand their restlessness, their physical movement away from the intensity of the experience.

Taylor's 'live' music benefits from being captured on discs which allow the listener time to absorb, at their leisure, this un-easy, seemingly endless presentation of a unique musical vision. Looking back, Taylor achieved his kind of success through an almost perverse determination to never, ever compromise or concede defeat. Looking ahead, his music will always challenge the listener to do the same.

Jazz updated for the Now generation comes in the form of The Quartet's debut dble pack for a new label, Pivotal. It represents both the best and worst aspects of d&b in a jazzy mode, but overall, is a cut above most efforts in the genre. The opener, 'Apollo 486', is one of the strong tunes, combining a tough break with the funky upright action, horn chants, and a sci-fi b-movie sample. 'Nevada', though, is too lush for it's own good (cue the cheesy sax solo which producers believe to be 'sophisticated') ditto the string-laden 'Wind Parade'. 'Jitterbug' follows the same pattern as 'Apollo', but, again, the break is nasty and this time the upright is combined with a revival of the old sub-bass sound. It's 'Cops And Robbers', though, that interests me most, utilising what sounds like a snippet of Monk's piano-playing as a riff for a trip-hop-tempo trawl through imaginary crime noir alleyways.

Part Three: Dancefloor Jazz revisited courtesy of Crippled Dick Hot Wax, and the return to this dimension of Don Sebesky.

© Rob Lo 1999.