John Cage disliked recordings. Glenn Gould gave up a lucrative concert career to devote himself to recording. John Cage favored the performance context where composer, musicians, and audience could be involved in a common experience. Glenn Gould was highly skeptical of the live performance situation, though not, perhaps, of the category of “experience” itself. The length to which Gould would go to avoid direct contact with other people has become the subject of legend, and certainly his departure from the concert stage cannot be understood apart from his hermit’s temperament. But Gould felt, and provided cogent arguments for his inclination, that the concert situation has very little to do with listening, and therefore not much to do with the musical experience as he understood it. Therefore he kept his music-making to his apartment, the recording studio, and perhaps to the solitary excursions that he would make to Canada’s desolate northern areas.
This is only one example that is illustrative of a paradox involving John Cage and Glenn Gould. The paradox is not that they held diametrically opposite positions on various fundamental issues, both musical and philosophical, but that they held these positions out of quite similar motivations. The question of the possibility of listening is fundamentally about the character of experience. Cage tended to be a very public person and yet his conception of experience is heavily indebted to Zen. The form of inwardness here is complex, and it might be argued that Zen is a form of radical empiricism without any need for a centered “self.” Experience just is, and experience of self is just one among all the other experiences—and not necessarily a trustworthy guide to reality. Put this way, Zen sounds like the philosophy of David Hume—one of the originators of the form of radical empiricism in the West that, in the more recent one hundred years, has been associated with diverse figures such as William James, Gilles Deleuze, and Richard Rorty. However, at least in Cage’s version, Zen is clearly not only about “pure, unmediated experience,” but also an attitude of acceptance towards whatever reality presents. (A detailed discussion of Cage’s interest in Zen is found in Revill, esp. pp. 110–18.) Here we find once again the paradox of intentionality in Cage.
Where do things stand on this score with Gould? First of all, especially for those readers who might not be familiar with Glenn Gould, we should mention that he was not primarily a composer. Gould did do some composing, most significantly of what he called his three “contrapuntal radio documentaries,” also known as the Solitude Trilogy. (He also wrote a string quartet and a choral work with the title, “So You Want to Write a Fugue?”) And certainly he played a role in breaking down the distinction between the “composer” and the “performer” or interpreter. Still, this deconstruction took place on the foundation of Gould’s skills as a pianist. That was the store of “street cred,” so to speak, on the basis of which he was able to get away with everything else. (If I may offer a disclaimer here, my intention is to deal with some of Gould’s ideas, especially his sense of what “interpretation” of a tradition entails. My aim is not to compare the particulars of Gould’s piano practice with those of other virtuoso interpreters of the Western classical tradition.) For sure, even Gould’s first and probably still most famous recording, of J. S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations, was immediately recognized as eccentric. The things that Gould would do to the classical repertoire, the “liberties” that he would take (in a moment they will be categorized), were tightly controlled, not the result of chance operations. Still, why not compare John Cage to a composer who, rather than having opened music to chance and non-intentional structures (or possible structures), went in the opposite direction, toward a kind of hyper-serialism where every element of the music is controlled with mathematical precision? That is a “next step” also, and the person with whom it is most associated is composer Milton Babbitt, who aimed to take the approach represented by Schoenberg’s twelve-note system into the determination of not only pitch, but also timbre, rhythm, dynamics, and so on (see Paul Griffiths, Modern Music and After, pp. 59–69). That step is interesting in its own right, but there is something about what John Cage and Glenn Gould did that not only seems more like two equally valid forms of deconstruction of the tradition they inherited (though as an American and a Canadian, not as Europeans; Babbitt was American also, but arguably more European in his approach to Schoenberg), but there is a further deconstruction in the way that they stand as antinomies to one another.
Gould’s post in the antinomy has been called “radical conservative,” a conservatism so deep that it is radical. This is the assessment presented in the film, Glenn Gould: A Portrait, a documentary made by the Canadian Broadcasting Corportation (1985). The approach of the film, however, is what I would call “conservative conservative,” a rendering of the nutty and eccentric Gould safe for the tea-and-biscuits-at-the-club set. (But then, the film is distributed by a company based in Long Beach, California, with the German name, “Kultur,” the sort of thing that led to the Dead Kennedys “uber alles . . . .”) The film is good, however, for the footage of Gould and interviews with his associates, as long as you can ignore the “august” tone of the narrator. Cage and Gould are both about “receiving” a certain tradition, but they both also appreciated the ocean that exists between themselves and the “centers” of that tradition. Cage was once asked by a European composer—and this became one of his famous, oft-repeated stories—how he was able to work, being so far from the centers of the European tradition. Cage asked in response how his interlocutor was able to work, being so close to the centers of European tradition. In the Portrait film, Gould remarks that, “in Toronto you can carve up your own musical space”—and, as I remarked already, Gould was fascinated by what he called “the idea of North,” meaning not only Canada, and Canada in relation to the United States, but also the northern reaches of Canada.
There a person could clear his or her mind, free from the chatterings of other people. Gould did enjoy conversations with animals, incidentally—birds, horses, elephants, dogs. Any reference to “chatter” after the late 1920s is also a reference to Martin Heidegger, who might also be called a radical conservative (which led him to an involvement with fascism and Nazism, as many readers will know, though there are some other elements in his thought that speak better of him). In his philosophy, most remarkably Being and Time (Sein und Zeit, 1927), one finds the notion of “das Man”—often rendered as “the they,” with the connotation of something like the “mindless crowd.” The main product of this crowd, qua crowd, is chatter. (Lest anyone think there is nothing more to this idea than pure condescension, Heidegger thought that most people spend most of their time on the level of chatter, and this applies even to deep thinkers—such as himself, of course—and it applies increasingly as society comes more and more under the sway of technology and mass media. On the other hand, one can easily find more than one’s share of condescension when in the company of what might be called Heideggerian camp-followers.) Certainly one can hear more than a little resonance of Heidegger in what Gould says about audiences. Here is an especially acerbic example quoted from the biography by psychologist and musician Peter F. Ostwald, Glenn Gould: The Ecstasy and Tragedy of Genius:
There’s a very curious and almost sadistic lust for blood that overcomes the concert listener. There’s a waiting for it to happen, a waiting for the horn to fluff, a waiting for the strings to become ragged, a waiting for the conductor to forget to subdivide . . . it’s dreadful. There’s a kind of gladiatorial instinct that comes upon the case-hardened concertgoer, which is why I suppose I don’t like him as a breed and don’t trust him, and I wouldn’t want one as a friend. (pp. 130–31)
Harsh stuff, and the word “breed” is troubling, too, in the context of Heidegger’s nationalism. If we can set these nasty associations aside for a moment (even if they cannot be dismissed altogether), there is a point here, and every person who attends musical performances with an ear toward listening knows this.
It is hard to imagine rock music without rock concerts, even though there have been periods or subdivisions within rock music that might have been more about listening to a record by oneself or with a friend or two (progressive rock or Nick Drake, or some of the recent women singers who mainly appeal to adolescent girls). Besides the fact that it can be an interesting experience to see musicians perform their music in a live setting, and the live setting can propel the music in ways that it would not have encountered in the studio, there is also the whole idea of the rock concert as “happening.” However, what does it mean when this experience comes to be about almost everything under the sun except listening—especially when, thanks to digital innovations, there may not be so much playing coming from the stage, either?
At some rock performances, too, there seems to be a strange new sound coming from the audience. What I am going to say here is a bit speculative, and I don’t quite know how one would go about studying the question more objectively. You can hear this sound when artists or groups are introduced on Saturday Night Live, or on many live albums (a recent example that I heard is Ben Harper, Live from Mars). There is something about this shrill and rising sound coming from a mass of voices that seems to say, “He is here! And we are not worthy! It is too good for us!” Perhaps the first time I noticed this was when the host on Saturday Night Live announced that “Cher is with us!”—as though the messiah had arrived. I once heard similar sounds at an Itzak Perlman concert, so this reaction is not confined to rock music. People are going nuts over something—it would be hard to say that it is music; instead, it seems that we are into a further stage of the society of the spectacle, with a more recent addition of what might be called celebrity messianism (even when the celebrities are throwaway, here today/gone tomorrow-types). None of this necessarily speaks against the music, but it doesn’t speak for the music, either.
Avant rock attempts to shift the focus back to the music, which is what Gould also tried to do by leaving the concert stage. The music most often recorded by Gould was that of Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, and Schoenberg. In the case of most classical musicians who emphasize such a repertoire (perhaps excluding the Schoenberg), we might find a mainly backward-looking sensibility. With Gould, the comparison that comes more to mind is when a philosopher such as Derrida reads Plato or Montaigne, or when Deleuze reads Hume, or when Antonio Negri reads Spinoza. The comparison is apt because Gould enters not only the sound-world of Bach, but also the idea-world, and he enters these worlds not only as an explorer, but also as an interlocutor, someone looking for a fruitful conversation. Gould’s solitude, finally, is not entirely that of the hermit or spiritual recluse (though, to be sure, he was as much of a hermit as one can be living in a high-rise apartment in a large, cosmopolitan city), but more that of the writer. At the piano, or with a musical score, whether in his apartment or in the recording studio, he was alone, but not alone—he had conversations with Bach and Beethoven, and he did not leave the transcripts of those conversations in a desk drawer, but instead prepared them for public release.
For Gould, then, the piano was an instrument of thought, of thinking. Heidegger connected the thoughtlessness of common chatter with the increasing domination of society by techné (akin to what Marxists call “instrumental reason”), which then led to a critique of technology. Gould, in turning away from live audiences, and instead toward making connections with individuals one by one through the medium of the long-playing record, embraced technology seemingly without reservation. Many sources could be cited on this question, but two in particular are especially interesting. First, let us turn to Gould himself, in a review of the record, Switched-On Bach, by Walter Carlos. Released in 1968, Switched-On is an interpretation of Bach on the then-new Moog synthesizer. Gould called it the “record of the decade.” (Many readers will know that, subsequently, Walter became Wendy Carlos.) Gould was a prolific writer of essays and reviews, and the following comes from The Glenn Gould Reader.
The whole record, in fact, is one of the most startling achievements of the recording industry in this generation, certainly one of the great feats of “keyboard” performance, and . . . the surest evidence, if evidence be needed, that live music never was best. (p. 430)
[T] he real revelation of this disc is its total acceptance of the recording ethic—the belief in an end so incontrovertibly convincing that any means, no matter how foreign to the adjudicative process of the concert hall, and even if the master is white with splicing tape, as this one surely must have been, is justified. (p. 432)
It would be fair to read the latter comments as saying that music-making that negates or stands against the concert hall is the way to go. For his views on technology, and the “recording ethic”—surely a notion that would appeal to avant-rock musicians—Gould was sometimes referred to as “Bach in the age of Marshall McLuhan.” The latter, “patron saint” of Wired magazine and of cyberculture in general, was also a resident of Toronto; Gould and McLuhan exchanged views on a few occasions, including twice in radio debates. McLuhan’s book, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man stands with another book from 1964, Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man, as quite fresh and illuminating, even in our postmodern times. One of McLuhan’s many terms that have entered popular discourse is “global village”—the new media makes such a thing possible, McLuhan thought. It is interesting to ponder what use Gould would have made of the Internet and World Wide Web. Clearly, Gould resonated with the idea of being in communication with many people even while living a physically solitary existence.
We can keep these themes in mind while turning to another source. Glenn Gould: Music and Mind, by the late University of Toronto philosopher Geoffrey Payzant is one of the really interesting books about music, I think, because it deals primarily in ideas. An entire chapter with the provocative title “Creative Cheating” is dedicated to the aforementioned “recording ethic.” Here are a few important passages:
In the 1960s Glenn Gould was frequently referred to, by journalists and publicity people, as “the philosopher of recording.” He does not speak of himself as a philosopher, but the expression “a new philosophy of recording” is his. It refers to what he saw as an emerging attitude toward recorded music and not to a philosophical system or discovery of his own. He has written numerous articles and scripts explaining how technological progress would make it possible for musical recording to advance from its early archival stage to a higher stage in which technology and technicians would participate in the creative process actively and in their own right.
In our European tradition, philosophical work is to a great extent done by the Socratic method of argument and counter-argument, by ongoing dialectical exchange. It is a contentiously cooperative activity. Since Gould is a solitary, and wants to be in complete control of all that he does, he is not in that tradition; he has no taste for dialectics. . . .
In his mid-twenties he told an interviewer that if he had not been a musician he would have been a writer. He said that part of the appeal of being a writer was that this vocation would allow him to set his own working hours. (p. 119)
A slightly different reading is possible here. Although, if one is fortunate enough to sustain oneself through writing, then there is a good deal of flexibility as regards working hours, there is also a sense in which writers write when something that needs to be written calls to them. That is where the dialectic (or at least the dialogue) is found, in a way similar to what I said earlier about Gould’s conversations with Bach, Beethoven, and other of his muses. Gould tested the limits of Beethoven interpretation; that is not the same thing as saying that anything might count as an interpretation of Beethoven. Likewise, though Gould certainly pursued an antiseptic regime with unending passion (he was an extreme hypochondriac, among other things), and though part of his “eccentricity” as a musician was the way that he would take great liberties with musical scores, he was not a free jazz musician after all, he was mainly an interpreter of Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, and others in the European classical tradition. He had to come to terms with the musical scores of these composers—but what I would propose is that, in keeping with his views on live performance, he came to these conversations in a way that can be called anti-authoritarian and anti-logocentric. That is, Gould approached the interpretive process as someone who also had rights in the conversation, and who did not take the presence of the voice—whether it was the composer’s or the audience member’s—as authoritative, the last word.
As for the particulars, there are four main ways in which Gould’s interpretations are “weird”—and I use that term because of its resonances with both the uncanny (or, better, das Unheimlich in German) and the “weirding ways” of those who practice witchcraft. These can be set out quite simply. First, Gould would almost always sing along with his piano playing, and his singing can be heard on most of his recordings. He refused to talk about why he sang, other than that it was part of how he played the piano—and, as such, he did not want the engineers to filter the singing out from the recording. (Once, in response to a question about why he sang, Gould mentioned the story of the centipede that was unable to walk when asked how she was able to coordinate her one hundred legs.)
Second, Gould would take liberties with musical scores, but not in the manner of past interpreters, who might play a baroque work in a somewhat Romantic style or something of that sort, but instead in a more systematic way. He would play passages upside-down, for instance. Or he would play passages marked “very soft” very loud, or vice-versa. Often there is an element of dialectical inversion, taking a passage in just the opposite way from what the composer instructs, to see if another and at least equal truth about the passage might be found.
The third and fourth weird things have to do with the recording situation more directly. As musicians who are reading this will know, with any instrument and even with the human voice there are pesky sounds that are supposedly incidental to the “true sound” of the instrument. For instance, if you play the guitar or bass guitar, you are well familiar with “string noise” that is caused by moving your hands up and down the neck. A piano, when you think about it, is a rather large, clumsy, and clunky instrument, and its hammer mechanisms are capable of making all kinds of little noises. As with his singing, Gould took these noises to be a part of the music—after all, the noises are part of the piano, and the piano is what is making the music, in collaboration with the pianist. Most classical recordings (or jazz and rock recordings, for that matter) have the “noises” filtered out. If anything, Gould went out of his way to have them present in the recording. There is a clear connection to John Cage’s understanding of “noise” here, but, just as clearly, Gould is different on this point. For Cage, the “nonmusical” sounds of the piano apparatus are “incidental,” but we cannot make a hard-and-fast distinction between what really belongs to music and what does not. For Gould, the sounds are not incidental, they are fully a part of playing the piano. Two different perspectives lead to a similar result.
Finally, and what was most controversial in the classical-music world, Gould never hesitated to employ tape splices to get the final sound that he wanted. A word of caution on this point: ever since such technology became available (now, of course, “splicing” is a whole other affair in the digital domain), classical musicians made use of it. What made Gould different was that he not only admitted to the use of splices, he championed the idea. As Payzant shows, Gould’s philosophy of splicing was integral to his recording ethic generally—the irony being that, if anything, this ethic was set against any notion of the “integral” or integrity that depended on a nostalgic organicism. As Payzant puts it, a common objection to splicing is that it “breaks the integrity and sweep of a performance” (p. 123). This objection “presupposes the existence of, as one pianist put it, ‘the sense of a long line stretching across the whole piece,’ which ‘can rarely be achieved unless the playing continues from beginning to end without stopping’” (p. 124). Gould’s response to this line of reasoning would appear alarming to anyone for whom some notion of “authenticity” is important, whether that be in music, life, or social institutions. “[S]plicing doesn’t damage lines; good splices build good lines, and it shouldn’t much matter if one uses a splice every two seconds or none for an hour so long as the result appears to be a coherent whole” (quoted by Payzant, p. 124; italics in original). One is reminded of Kurt Vonnegut’s famous statement that “we are what we pretend to be, so let us be careful what we pretend to be.” But doesn’t such an approach offend the idea of some core that individual human beings possess, a core that is then expressed by artists in their works? Here we again see Cage and Gould coming together from different directions. The position expressed by the pianist whom Payzant quotes is dependent on the idea that live performance is the ideal, and recording is parasitic upon this ideal, it is absolutely secondary. Gould flips this over even to the point of having little or no regard for live performance at all. I’m not sure we have to go to that extreme to see the deconstruction that takes place when the hierarchy is reversed—the situation here is completely reminiscent of Jacques Derrida’s famous argument about speech and writing, where he also reversed the hierarchy and argued that the “mediated” form, writing, comes before that which presents itself as fully present, speech.
Payzant approaches the question by an analogy to filmmaking—which reinforces the “Bach in the age of McLuhan” idea.
On the back lot of a motion picture studio we might find a street with, among other structures, a saloon, a bank, a saddlery and a funeral parlor, each with a hitching post in front. From certain vantage points we might not be able to see that these are façades, supported out of sight at the back by crude, sloping timbers. But we would not be tempted to hitch our horse and enter any of these buildings in the hope of doing our banking or buying refreshment, because we would know the rules and could not be deceived about actualities underlying “mere” appearances. The appearances are sustained not by actuality but by sloping timbers.
A piece of music in performance is . . . like the movie set . . . . It exists as and for appearance; the music is its own appearance. There is no actuality underlying it. Its coherence comes from the ways in which musical appearances in general are related among themselves, each to every other, each to the whole of a piece, and the whole to each of its apparent parts. It is entirely phenomenal, entirely separate from any noumenal ground. (pp. 124–25)
Yet again there is a Cage connection, and it has to do with the relationship between performance and emotion. The “live performance ethic,” as opposed to the recording ethic, is about emotion and expressivity. The artist, in this scenario, is expressing his or her inner core through music. The film analogy (which Gould was also fond of) is helpful here, because we do not really expect of the actor on the screen that she is really feeling, in the inner core of her “real” self, whatever emotional state is being portrayed on the screen. The performing musician is acting no less than the performing thespian. Of course, there is a big difference between Cage and Gould here. For the former, the aim is to create a music that is not expressive, and this means an active sense of letting the world speak through music, and getting out of the world’s way. Gould, on the other hand, is not anti-expressivity per se, but instead argues that, as far as the performance goes, as embodied quintessentially in recorded form (whether that be film, long-playing vinyl record, or data stream), there is no difference between the “real” and the carefully constructed “façade.” Indeed, the latter is often superior:
Gould: . . . I love recording because if something lovely does happen, there is a sense of permanence, and if it doesn’t happen, one has a second chance to achieve an ideal.
Interviewer: Then you have no objection to splicing tapes from several performances into one?
Gould: I can honestly say that I use splicing very little. I record many whole movements straight through. But I can also say that I have no scruples about splicing. I see nothing wrong in making a performance out of two hundred splices, as long as the desired result is there. I resent the feeling that it is fraudulent to put together an ideal performance mechanically. If the ideal performance can be achieved by the greatest amount of illusion and fakery, more power to those who do it. (Payzant, p. 125)
As always, Gould’s words are sharp and provocative.
Gould even goes so far as to extrapolate from the recording ethic to a larger morality: “I believe in the intrusion of technology because, essentially, that intrusion imposes upon art a notion of morality which transcends the idea of art itself.” The sensibility is not unlike that of Bach—the composer who could write the exquisite Suites for Cello as exercises for his students (Pablo Casals revived them, as “artworks,” in the twentieth century), and for whom aesthetic value, no matter how great, is secondary to awe at the greatness of God. Gould was similarly motivated by the values of transcendence and ecstasy. If new means have appeared that would allow the “ideal performance” to come closer to these values, then we are in fact obligated to employ these means, even if we are engaged at the same time in “creative cheating” or “illusion and fakery.”
What remains difficult is to square the critiques of subjectivity in Cage and Gould with the way that the commodity logic of postmodern capitalism whips people around into any old shape that suits its ends. Even without some overly Cartesian essentialism of the self, surely there is a difference between the person who has some sort of center and the one who has no backbone. Capitalism does a great job of taking what was radical at one moment and making the new things part of its own apparatus the next. One of the great examples is the way that educational reforms that were demanded by French radical students in the late 1960s later turned out to be useful, at least in part, to imperatives of industrialization and urbanization that the French economy needed anyway. This does not mean that the demands, when the students and workers made them, were not radical, but that the recuperative powers of capitalism, if it is not defeated, are immense and often overwhelming.
Finally, just a few stray thoughts about Glenn Gould.
Gould was blessed, but also cursed, with both a photographic memory and absolute pitch.
He was a high-school dropout.
His childhood was not happy; he felt that he had nothing in common with other children; he didn’t “relate well.” What happiness he did have as a child came from his pets, with whom he often had lengthy conversations.
Gould created three radio dramas, consisting primarily of overlapping conversations and soliloquies that he conducted with himself, through the device of multi-track recording. Among his writings are many self-interviews. Clearly this man contained multitudes, even as he isolated himself from most other people. There was something about the romance of radio that also linked Gould with Cage, and the Solitude Trilogy with works such as Imaginary Landscape #4 for Twelve Transistor Radios. Well, radio is not so magical these days, at least not in countries such as the United States, where all of the stations are owned by a handful of media conglomerates. It’s hard to hear that intimate voice late at night, whispering in your ear, revealing secrets. Art Bell, perhaps.
Gould did not record too many “out of the way” composers, but he was a champion of Schoenberg, and he recorded music by composers not very much associated with the piano—Paul Hindemith (sometimes thought of as the very antithesis of Schoenberg, but whose music was also banned by the Nazis for being “degenerate”), Georges Bizet (composer of the opera, Carmen), Jean Sibelius.
In 1962, Gould published an article titled “Let’s Ban Applause!”
On October 4, 1982, Glenn Gould died of a stroke. He was barely fifty years old, and was survived by both of his parents.
John Coltrane
Giant Steps (Atlantic LP, 1959).
My Favorite Things (Atlantic LP, 1960).
John Coltrane and Don Cherry, The Avant-Garde (Atlantic LP, 1960).
Africa/Brass (MCA LP, 1961).
Impressions (MCA LP, 1961).
Duke Ellington and John Coltrane (Impulse LP, 1962).
Coltrane (Impulse LP, 1962).
Afro Blue Impressions (Pablo LP, 1977; live performances from 1962).
John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman (Impulse LP, 1963).
The Best of John Coltrane: his greatest years (Impulse LP, n.d.; live performances from 1961–1963).
A Love Supreme (Impulse LP, 1964).
Ascension (Impulse LP, 1965).
Kulu Se Mama (Impulse LP, 1966).
Interstellar Space (Impulse LP, 1974; recorded February 1967).
Cecil Taylor
In Transition (Blue Note LP, 1975; recordings from 1955, 1959).
Jazz Advance (Blue Note CD, orig. 1956).
Looking Ahead (Fantasy LP, 1959).
Nefertit, the Beautiful One has Come (Arista LP, 1975; live performances from 1962).
Silent Tongues: Live at Montreaux ’74 (Arista LP, 1975).
Air Above Mountains (Buildings Within) (Inner City LP, 1978; live performance from 1976).
Cecil Taylor and Mary Lou Williams, Embrace (Pablo LP, 1978; live performance from 1977).
Cecil Taylor (New World LP, 1978).
One Too Many, Salty Swift, and Not Goodbye (Hat Hut LP, 1980; live performance from 1978).
Three Phasis (New World LP, 1979).
Max Roach and Cecil Taylor: Historic Concerts (Soul Note LP, 1984; live performances from 1979).
Calling it the 8th (Hat Hut LP, 1983; live performance from 1981).
Segments II (Orchestra of Two Continents)/Winged Serpent (Sliding Quadrants). (Soul Note LP, 1985).
For Olim (Soul Note LP, 1987; live performance from 1986).
Live in Bologna (Leo Records LP, 1988; live performance from 1987).
Tzotzil Mummers Tzotzil (Leo Records LP, 1988).
Cecil Taylor and Derek Bailey, Pleistozaen mit Wasser (FMP CD, 1989; live performance from 1988).
In Flourescence (A&M LP, 1990).
Cecil Taylor and Dewey Redman, Elvin Jones, momentum space (Verve CD, 1998).
Blues into fragments: John Coltrane and Cecil Taylor
The thought that forcefully asserts itself when I listen to an extended work by John Coltrane or Cecil Taylor is, What minds these are! Coltrane and Taylor ought to be especially appreciated by Marxists, for what they demonstrate is the materiality of mind, the co-implication of mind and matter in the material parameters of musical sound. Theirs is no reductive materialism, but instead a magical one, perhaps best represented by the recording of the children’s song, “The Inchworm,” from the 1962 album, Coltrane. Trane unfolds the simple melodic material of the song into near-infinite harmonic and rhythmic space, underscoring the profound message of this seemingly innocuous little tune:
Inchworm, inchworm, measuring the marigolds,
You and your arithmetic will surely go far.
Inchworm, inchworm, measuring the marigolds,
Seems to me you’d stop and see how beautiful they are.
Unfortunately, many Marxists are precluded from understanding this truth by their hang-ups with what they think of as a “scientific worldview.” I think there is something better, and perhaps it is all encapsulated in something that Mao Tsetung said: “If you want to make revolution, it is good to know some poetry.”
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, when Coltrane and Taylor were first being recognized for their innovations, their music was described with such terms as “sheets of sound” and “energy” and “fire music,” more positively—and, negatively, as “anti-jazz,” “noise,” “ugly.” Their music still has the power to shock and rattle (the nerves, the eardrum), perhaps in a way that Mozart’s or Beethoven’s does not anymore. It may even be that Cecil Taylor’s music will never be “normalized,” its harmonic and rhythmic complexities never assimilated to some more standard conception of “swing.” When Beethoven’s music becomes “easy” to listen to, we might say that in fact no one is hearing it anymore. Still, musical innovations tend to “trickle down” by and by, and we stretch our ears to accommodate and normalize what had earlier sounded strange to the point of being “unmusical.” Even a few minutes of Cecil Taylor’s music is difficult for many people to deal with, and the same could be said for Coltrane’s epic improvisations, from the longer versions of “My Favorite Things” to the raucous duets recorded with drummer Rashied Ali not long before Trane’s great soul passed into eternity.
Whereas Cage’s music conjures “possible logics”—of the moon, the stars, and the sun, of branches and pinecones and sea creatures and tidal forces—what I hear in Coltrane and Taylor is an extraordinary line that leaves no doubt as to its logic. For sure, every possibility of the chord is pursued. Coltrane’s sheets of sound, especially as he moved into improvisations that lasted ten to twenty minutes long and longer, really are a way of saying that there is an entire universe in a musical grain of sand. Coltrane’s music is science, really, a material demonstration that what appears at first to be “chaos” is instead a complexity that defies comprehension. What are the “proper” notes that may be harmonically associated with the root notes of the chord? Can one get there from here? The longer improvisations seem to demonstrate that one can in fact get anywhere and everywhere from “here,” if one builds the right kinds of roads and bridges.
The best demonstration of this aspect of Coltrane’s playing—and I have mentioned the harmonic and rhythmic dimensions of his extrapolations (and not forgetting the contributions of the other musicians in his groups), but there is also his use of tone color (timbre), and even the almost “athletic” way that he could do seemingly impossible things with the tenor and soprano saxophones, not unlike Michael Jordan’s unbelievable feats on the basketball court—is arguably to be found by following the trajectory of his recordings of “My Favorite Things.” For those who are not familiar with Coltrane’s music, this is indeed the song by Richard Rogers and Oscar Hammerstein, made famous by Julie Andrews’s performance in The Sound of Music (1959). Coltrane’s 1960 album, named for the song, began to show what he was capable of with the soprano. Before Coltrane, the soprano saxophone was most famously used by the great Sidney Bechet—a New Orleans musician of the generation before Louis Armstrong, and a friend and promoter of Josephine Baker—and Steve Lacy, Coltrane’s contemporary and fellow avant-jazz artist. In fact, it was after hearing a performance by Lacy—whose vita also contains a stint with Cecil Taylor—that Coltrane was inspired to take up the soprano. Lacy is still with us, and long may he remain so, and he has made a goodly share of important recordings over the past forty and more years. On My Favorite Things, Coltrane’s recording of the song is adventurous for its time, and yet it sounds tame against the background of the extrapolations and fragmentations that Trane would generate in the seven years that were left to him.
When a jazz musician or group states the main theme of a piece at the beginning of a performance, that is called playing the “head.” In most jazz before 1960 or so, the general rule was that the musicians would come back around to the head on a regular basis, and most improvisations never get too far from the head. Put in a disarmingly simple way, the story of blues into fragments is one where this “rule” is progressively tampered with or broken. In the last recordings of Coltrane and his group, live performances in Japan and at the Village Vanguard in New York City, only a fragment of the head is stated in the versions of “My Favorite Things.” Only fragments of the well-known melody appear thereafter. And yet, as with Glenn Gould’s deconstructions of Bach, or Jacques Derrida’s of Descartes for that matter, the weight of accumulated historical practice hovers over the performances. Gould, Coltrane, and Derrida hear those voices and translate them into a different space—but what about other listeners and readers?
This last question is raised because, especially in the last three or four years of his life, Coltrane was increasingly charged with obscurantism. This went beyond what might be called Glenn Gould’s eccentricity for the sake of eccentricity (not that I agree with this view, but some hold it). Coltrane, it was said, was intentionally making his music hard to follow, and taking obscurity as an end in itself. There is perhaps one kind of “avant-garde” sensibility that might respond to this by saying, “so what?” But there is more to the story than just the inability or unwillingness of some people to follow musical explorations wherever they may lead. And the “inability” does not necessarily have to do with some sort of mental incapacity, but also the question of having the time and energy to devote to the kind of music that makes extreme demands.
In his earlier recordings, Cecil Taylor was more “in” than he was later on, but he was basically “out” from the start. (In these scarequotes there is a certain irony that will be understood by readers who are familiar with Taylor.) In the early 1950s Taylor was still using chord changes and standard 12- or 32-bar structures, but by 1957 he was playing in the “experimental” session at the Newport Jazz Festival. As the subtitle to her pathbreaking book, As serious as your life, Valerie Wilmer gave “John Coltrane and beyond.” It is easy to forget that Coltrane and Taylor were contemporaries—the former was born in 1926 and the latter in 1929. Taylor’s recording career began with Looking Ahead in 1958, and that same year he recorded an album with Coltrane, Hard Driving Jazz. Unfortunately, Taylor was overshadowed in the early sixties by another great innovator who was born a year after him, Ornette Coleman. Perhaps the idea was that free jazz could have only one major voice at a time. Indeed, the 1960s, especially the first five years, were lean times for Taylor, and he spent much more time playing the piano at home than he did in concert venues. One might wonder if the elevation of Coleman (for instance, Leonard Bernstein took Coleman to a rehearsal of the New York Philharmonic and introduced him as “the future of jazz;” on the other hand, Coleman’s brilliant symphonic composition, Skies of America, was only released in a much-abridged version by Columbia in 1972), and the relegation of Taylor to years of struggle and obscurity, might have had to do with the intensity, fire, harshness, and anger of the latter’s music.
Incidentally, and perhaps surprisingly in light of what was just said, Taylor was influenced in his early years by Dave Brubeck. The latter was treated as some sort of “great white hope” for some years, especially thanks to a Time magazine cover story. The same issue had a little story in the back about a nutty pianist named Thelonius Monk. About Brubeck there was the whole air of “jazz goes to college,” not unlike the way that Gershwin was said to have “made a lady out of jazz.” That’s a lot of racist crap, of course, and as a result the pendulum went the other way for some years. The Rough Guide to Jazz, for instance, barely gives Brubeck the time of day. What was lost in this is that Brubeck never asked for the great white hope mantle (nor did Gershwin or, for that matter, Larry Bird in the NBA), and he is a fine musician. Besides the great music in odd time signatures (especially 5/4, 7/4, and 9/4), Brubeck stands out for his strong left hand, placing him in the company of other great “two-fisted” pianists such as Mary Lou Williams and McCoy Tyner—and Cecil Taylor, of course. Another major contemporary figure who admires Brubeck is Anthony Braxton, which does tend to reinforce the “college” bit. Other influences on Cecil Taylor were Duke Ellington, Bud Powell, Erroll Garner, Horace Silver, and Thelonius Monk.
Starting in the early 1970s there was a succession of books on free jazz—it took ten to fifteen years for writers (of book-length studies, at any rate) to catch up with what was also called the “New Thing.” In 1971, A. B. Spellman published Black Music: Four Lives in the Be-Bop Business. One of the four musicians discussed was Cecil Taylor. Free Jazz, by Ekkehard Jost, first appeared in 1974, followed by Valerie Wilmer’s As serious as your life in 1977, and John Litweiler’s The Freedom Principle: Jazz After 1958 in 1984. A crucial gap is bridged by David H. Rosenthal’s Hard Bop: Jazz and Black Music 1955–1965. Taken together, these books articulate what is even today the most recent significant trajectory in jazz—against the background of which occurred other important developments, such as interaction with rock music (for example, Miles Davis) or a turn toward more “European” structures (for example, Anthony Braxton).
Perhaps another way of making the point about hard bop is that the crucial bridge is John Coltrane, who had his first “big-time” gigs with Dizzy Gillespie (first the big band, then the sextet, where Coltrane finally made the permanent switch from alto to tenor), then with Miles Davis. Coltrane’s first recordings with his “classic quartet” (McCoy Tyner, Elvin Jones, Jimmy Garrison), as well as Giant Steps (1959, a year before the formation of the quartet) are still in the be-bop universe, though progressively harder and more intense. The increasing intensity certainly owes a great deal to drummer Elvin Jones—here’s a great line from the Rough Guide to Jazz: “The driving, and psychologically driven, quality of his work was especially appropriate to the emotional climate of the new jazz in the 1960s, and it is difficult to imagine the eviscerating explorations of mature Coltrane without Elvin’s percussive outpourings playing a simultaneous, indeed equal role” (Brian Priestley, p. 338). Indeed, in live performance, Coltrane would often have the bass and piano sit out for a spell, and duet with Jones—the point being freedom from chord structures and, ultimately, to make a statement about freedom itself.
This “psychologically driven” intensity, even when formally still within the structures of be-bop, broke through more and more toward the “new thing”—and the new things in jazz were motivated just as much politically as aesthetically. This is made clear in the title of another work that crosses over from bebop to new thing, Max Roach’s We Insist!: Freedom Now Suite. Consider the resonance of this title, from 1960, with Charlie Parker’s “Now’s the Time.” First recorded in 1952 (with Max Roach on drums), the record company would not release it—the title by itself was too inflammatory. Then, however, there came a point when freedom could no longer be contained. Does this mean that the difficult changes of bebop gave way to pure wailing? It sounded that way to some; the rebuttal is that the changes in the music were both political and structural. While not focusing on the political questions, Ekkehard Jost’s remark at the beginning of his chapter on Coltrane says something important about what it meant to come out of the background.
At the end of the Fifties, Ornette Coleman made the programmatic statement, “Let’s play the music and not the background.” By “background” he meant the general framework of jazz improvisation which had established itself soon after the birth of jazz as a more or less incontestable norm. With an aura of inviolability, it had survived all the stylistic upheavals that followed—swing, bebop, cool jazz and the rest. This framework consisted of a code of agreements which made up . . . the “musically universal” in jazz, and remained constant throughout the years of jazz evolution, while the “musically particular” changed. Earlier stylistic upheavals in jazz were triggered primarily by the extension of technical resources, or else by increasing complexity in the structure of the background. Around 1960, however, the background itself started to disintegrate. The evolution of jazz, which until then had followed a straight line, took a sudden turn. (p. 17)
Now, I don’t know if it is quite right to say that the development of jazz until that point “had followed a straight line.” Certainly figures such as Louis Armstrong and Sidney Bechet, Duke Ellington, and the pioneers of bebop, had each represented qualitative changes in the music, and in each case the politics of race had played a significant role. Even so, as Jost argues, the idea of having musicians “comp” behind the soloist was done with when the new thing emerged. Indeed, we can take this “sudden turn” as also being emblematic of what occurs in a good deal of avant rock. The rock music in which a soloist or singer performs on top of a “rhythm section” (bass guitar, drums, perhaps “rhythm guitar,” perhaps some keyboard instruments and/or a horn section) will tend to be both tied to blues form, and not liberated, not free. Perhaps this is why avant rock today finds its opposite in a pap culture that is completely oriented toward singers—singers who must be photogenic before all else.
As Jost explains, Coltrane played a dual role in this emergence of freedom. First, Coltrane encouraged the rising generation of formal innovators who, arguably, were starting at a place that he was still working toward. Not only did Coltrane make a record with Cecil Taylor in 1958, in 1960 he recorded a piano-less quartet album with the other members of Ornette Colman’s group (The Avant-Garde). Then, after bringing along the “second generation” of free jazz, as Jost puts it, “from 1965 on—at the latest—he was regarded as ‘head of the school’. . . ‘the central figure of post-1965 free jazz’” (p. 11). These giant steps were not taken in isolation; in particular credit has to be given—and Coltrane gave it—to Miles Davis. The irony of this where free jazz is concerned will become apparent in the next section. When Coltrane rejoined Davis’s group in 1958, the latter was in the midst of a shift from chord-based to modal improvisations. Except for the troublesome fact that these developments occurred at the same time, it would make sense to say that Davis played “Schoenberg” to the “John Cage” of Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Albert Ayler, and the later John Coltrane. (If you consider Coltrane’s “world music” dimension, especially in albums such as Africa Brass and Kulu Se Mama, and in his admiration for Ravi Shankar—after whom Coltrane named one of his children—then perhaps Stravinsky is there as well.) John Litweiler writes of two “transitional generations” in jazz, the first being the bebop innovators of the early 1940s.
The second transitional generation appeared twenty years later, when young musicians followed the lead of Miles Davis into modes. They subjected Free discoveries to the perceptions of hard bop and at times almost managed to bridge the two idioms. But modes were only a step toward something new and different, whereas the Free directions of Coleman, Dolphy, Cecil Taylor, and Coltrane were a leap into the unknown. So modal musicians and Free musicians did not, as a rule, perform each other’s music.
Instead, in the sixties modes became a parallel idiom. (p. 105)
Indeed, as Litweiler argues, the modal turn was “to some extent . . . a reaction against Freedom” (p. 105). For Davis, freedom from regular chord changes allowed the development of long, melodic lines:
When you go that way, you can go on forever. You don’t have to worry about changes and you can do more with the line. It becomes a challenge to see how melodically inventive you are. When you are based on chords, you know at the end of thirty-two bars that the chords have run out and there’s but to repeat what you’ve just done—with variations. (Miles Davis quoted by Jost, p. 20)
It is not hard to see that, for Davis, modal playing represented the next step in form, while free jazz would seem to be the refusal of form. Certainly many post-Schoenberg musicians (Glenn Gould would seem to be among them) had a similar view of John Cage. To be sure, it could be argued that part of what Cage was saying is that it does not matter, at least as a question of musical intention, what note is played and what note is played after that, and so on.
Is this what “freedom” means to Cecil Taylor and the later Coltrane? Certainly freedom for either does not mean the refusal of form. Perhaps though, and this applies more, I think, to Taylor than Coltrane, there is an energetic interrogation of form and the meaning of form. (This goes for Cage as well.) Even in the final years, Coltrane was relating, even if in an extremely abstract and complex way, to chord changes. This does not mean that he was following the changes, necessarily! But they are there, at least in the distant background, and their faint echoes can be heard. Coltrane and Taylor can both be ferocious, but their music is not one unmitigated wail. And in fact a substantial part of Taylor’s music is either notated or at least planned out in some fashion.
For something more like the “wail,” there is Albert Ayler. Even here it would be wrong to say that the music is formless, whatever that means. It is common in the analysis of very abstract poetry or song lyrics to say that these words are simply taken from the “stream of consciousness.” Similarly, it is sometimes said that words or sounds “well up” from the subconscious (or unconscious, but I don’t want to get into a discussion of psychoanalytic ideas here). With Albert Ayler (1936–1970; he died under mysterious circumstances), certainly one feels that the connection between his inner being and what becomes manifest through the tenor saxophone is very direct, unmediated. But why are these particular sounds coming out, even if they are manifestations of something subconscious? Coltrane admired Ayler, and, after recording Ascension, he told Ayler “I found I was playing just like you” (Rough Guide, p. 23).
Ayler came from a church and gospel-music background, and indeed returned to this background in the last years of his life. This raises an interesting point, which also goes to the roots of rock music—given that figures such as Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis also came from charismatic and Pentecostal backgrounds. We might consider the relationship between free jazz, especially at the more “unmediated” end of the spectrum, and speaking in tongues. If free jazz (when it is working, let’s say) seems to depart from structure, perhaps it is attempting to speak a language from beyond. I would argue that this form of the “break” with structure as was hitherto known is once again political as much as it is “spiritual” or “aesthetic.” The politics of this break are somehow both sheer negativity and utopianism. Bebop also began as a desire to speak a language that had not yet been assimilated by the system, and especially the system of white jazz musicians who had recuperated swing as the feel-good music of World War Two and its aftermath. Charlie Parker and company wanted to leave the feel-good swingers in the dust with complicated chord changes. Part of the impulse behind free jazz was that the bebop revolution had run its course, and now it was time to inject yet more fire into the music. That’s the negativity. But anyone who rejects this world—or perhaps anyone up until Johnny Rotten sang “I don’t know what I want but I know how to get it”—also longs for another world, a world quite unlike this one. And the language for that world does not yet exist, and therefore one must reach beyond and listen at the limits and try to give some form to what comes through. To me that is the essence of free jazz, keeping in mind the particularities of the politics of race and the history of Black music, especially in the United States (but very quickly reaching out beyond American borders). Free jazz claims the right to attempt to say some things that perhaps cannot yet truly be said, and this attempt is what structures the music.
One of the things that Coltrane and Taylor have in common is epic scope. With the latter this comes through whether the format is solo piano, duet (for instance the extraordinary Historic Concerts that Taylor performed with Max Roach in 1979), trio, small group, or orchestra. The ten to twenty minute journey that Coltrane could take you on, with “My Favorite Things” or “Impressions” becomes an hour or more with Taylor; when you listen to a highly complex work such as 3 Phasis, you will be taken to many places, and, for sure, you will be exhausted at the end of the trip. Though it is very hard to choose, among my favorite Taylor recordings are the aforementioned 3 Phasis (sorry, I don’t know the story behind the spelling) and For Olim. The former features a sextet, the standout members of which are, in my view, Ramsey Ameen on violin and Ronald Shannon Jackson on drums. Jackson had previously played with Ornette Coleman, and he would go on to play with James “Blood” Ulmer and in a quartet with Bill Laswell, Sonny Sharrock, and the frightening tenorist Peter Brötzmann. Though certainly capable of subtlety and a light touch, what is especially stunning is the way Jackson begins the second part of 3 Phasis with a hard-rocking backbeat, really whomping along in a way that no Taylor group or record had before.
For Olim is a more mature solo piano recording, beyond even the great solo performances of 1975 and 1976, released as Silent Tongues and Air Above Mountains. Olim is a good example of where you might think, on first listening, that there is a good deal of “random” playing going on, but, on the tenth, or the fifteenth, or the twentieth listen, you realize that, instead, there is an immense order.
Musicians such as Ornette Coleman, and Gerry Mulligan before him, formed “piano-less” groups in part to avoid the strictures of Western tonality. (“Piano-less” came into common usage in the early 1960s, just as “acoustic piano” became a term in the later 60s when Bill Evans, Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock, and others began making much use of the Fender Rhodes electric piano. More recently, “guitar-less” came to be used to describe groups such as the Ben Folds Five.) With the piano, it seems that you can only play the notes that are right there in front of you. Cecil Taylor’s mode of dealing with this is to understand the piano for what it is, namely a percussion instrument. “Eighty-eight tuned drums” is an expression often applied to Taylor’s approach to the piano. This does not mean that Taylor is always banging away. Though no one can play harder, there are also delicate and airy ways of playing the drums, and Taylor’s albums have many moments of lightness and space. But, to say the least, this is not the norm:
“In white music the most admired touch among pianists is light. The same is true among percussionists,” says Taylor. “We in Black music think of the piano as a percussive instrument: we beat the keyboard, we get inside the instrument. Europeans admire Bill Evans for his touch. But the physical force going into the making of Black music—if that is misunderstood—it leads to screaming.” (Wilmer, pp. 49–50)
It is telling that Taylor has often struggled to find drummers who could really play with him, perhaps because there is already a “drummer” in the band, and the great drummers who have managed to fill the bill, such as Dennis Charles, Andrew Cyrille, and Sunny Murray, have transformed their playing in the process of coming together with Taylor (on this point, see Wilmer, pp. 160–61). But it was also exhilarating to hear the recordings of Taylor’s duets with the great Max Roach, because here Cecil also had to come to terms with another major voice and to make a few adjustments of his own—and what he showed was that these adaptations could be made without compromise of any sort.
Unfortunately, another pairing did not go as well, the performance with Mary Lou Williams. She was a great pianist with a great spirit, someone who lived through many eras in jazz and made herself at home in almost all of them. (If you have the good fortune to be able to listen to the often-excellent radio program, Piano Jazz, with Marian McPartland, the program with Williams is one of the best, as is the program with Alice Coltrane.) Of her later recordings, 1975’s Free Spirits is wonderful, with a fine rendering of Miles Davis’s “All Blues,” and the very subtle and sweetly-titled “Baby Man.” The duet (with double-bass and drums accompaniment) with Cecil Taylor, however, despite the best of intentions, does not really come off, except perhaps as a study in extreme contrasts—not even ships passing in the night, more like a submarine and a flying saucer. But they tried; they tried.
The “eighty-eight drums” idea conjures the image of a percussion orchestra, and the technique that Taylor brings to this symphony is scary and comprehension-defying. For this reason, as much as I like many of Taylor’s group projects—the more recent (1988) duet with someone who might even be called his British counterpart, Derek Bailey, is fascinating, as is a trio recording from 1998 with Dewey Redman and Elvin Jones—on the whole I prefer the solo piano albums. If there are others who agree with me on this point, we will have to think further on how this would make Cecil Taylor different from other major jazz musicians. Taylor can do great things with a group, but there is a sense in which he does not need anyone else, because he is a group all by himself—to paraphrase Walt Whitman, he contains multitudes.
Of the five musicians discussed in these sections devoted to European and African-American classical musics, only Cecil Taylor remains among the living. As far as I know, he is still going strong. Let us treasure him.
Miles Davis, electric period (and a few from before)
The Complete Birth of the Cool (Capitol LP, 1950).
Kind of Blue (Columbia LP, 1959).
Miles Smiles (Columbia LP, 1966).
In a Silent Way (Columbia LP, 1969).
Bitches Brew (Columbia LP, 1969).
Jack Johnson (Columbia LP, 1970).
Live-Evil (Columbia LP, n.d.—early 1970s).
On the Corner (Columbia LP, n.d.—early 1970s).
At Fillmore (Columbia LP, n.d.—early 1970s).
Big Fun (Columbia LP, 1974).
Get Up With It (Columbia LP, 1974).
Water Babies (Columbia LP, 1976).
Agharta (Columbia LP, 1976).
Tutu (Columbia LP, 1986).
Some critics and other listeners thought that Coltrane and Taylor had gone into outer space, as far as jazz practice is concerned. Jazz, in their view, has to riff off of certain structures, and those structures ultimately have to find their grounding in the blues. After Cage, we might question what a “structure” is, exactly, and argue that, in fact, the music of Coltrane and Taylor is indeed grounded in the blues, at least somewhere down the line, just as Cage’s and Gould’s music is “grounded” in the Western classical tradition. One can just as well argue for this proposition negatively: to think otherwise is to reject the “next step,” which in turn is to claim either that the jazz and classical traditions are exhausted or that, in any case, it would be better for these traditions to become museum cultures than to develop in the directions set out by the aforementioned. In terms of these mentalities, the music of Cage, Gould, Coltrane, and Taylor is in fact anti-music, a traitorous assault on music—and certainly there have been those among critics and other listeners who have claimed this. Now we will turn to a fifth “traitor,” Miles Davis in his period of using electric instruments, from the late 1960s until his passing in September 1991. What Mr. Davis did with jazz bears some relation to Coltrane, of course—the latter was part of the group for the great Kind of Blue (1959), where Miles introduced modal structures. Davis did not have much good to say about Cecil Taylor. (It is easy to forget that all three men were contemporaries: Davis and Coltrane were born in 1926, and Taylor in 1929.) Downbeat magazine created a famous institution known as the “blindfold test,” where musicians are challenged to guess who made a certain recording and to comment on it. (The Wire has a similar institution called “Invisible Jukebox.”) In his biography, Miles Davis, Ian Carr reports on the blindfold test of June 1964, administered by jazz critic Leonard Feather.
And finally, when Feather plays him a Cecil Taylor piece, Davis says: “Is that what the critics are digging? Them critics better stop having coffee. If there ain’t nothing to listen to, they might as well admit it.” (p. 141)
Noting that, of all of the offerings in the test, the only one that appealed to Davis was “Desafinado” by Stan Getz and Joao Gilberto (from the same session that produced the hit record, “The Girl from Ipanema”), Carr continues,
Miles is generally disgusted with his contemporaries, and also totally disaffected by the avant-garde. At the same time, there is no doubt that during this period, he was equally dissatisfied with himself. The reexamination of his own immediate past. . . had not yet resulted in any new vision. Meanwhile, retrospective views of him were starting to classify him as a man of the 1950s. (p. 141)
The period of flux lasted for several years, and its resolution took place in two stages.
The first of these has to be associated with Herbie Hancock. The groups that Miles put together in the mid-1960s contained some of the great young musicians of that period, including drummer Tony Williams (who would later form the fusion group Lifetime with John McLaughlin and Larry Young, and who would do some of his final work with Bill Laswell), bassist Ron Carter, and tenor saxophonist Wayne Shorter. Pianist (and later, “keyboardist”) Hancock was tremendously broad in his musical interests. As Carr puts it, Hancock “was, for a jazz musician, remarkably unprejudiced and never made a generic condemnation of music of any kind, preferring to listen to and judge any piece on its own merits.” Thus, while the Miles Davis group that made the mid-1960s albums ESP, Miles Smiles, and others was still somewhat more in the vein of “straightahead” jazz—with, however, the startling rhythmic complexity that came from Williams’ innovative “free drumming” and with basic departure from chord structures—Hancock introduced Davis to musicians ranging from James Brown, the Beatles, the Byrds, and the Fifth Dimension.
The second stage occurred when Miles Davis, having had his head turned by the psychedelia and funk of the Beatles, Jimi Hendrix, and Sly and the Family Stone, jumped ship, so to speak, and became a traitor to “jazz”—at least to the jazz of a certain critical establishment. Perhaps the final lines in the entry for Miles Davis in the Illustrated Encyclopedia of Jazz (1978) tell this story well enough:
Miles’ new conception was derived from West Coast acid rock, riff dominated with the trumpeter more economic than ever over a brocade of electric ripples. Using an enlarged personnel, Hancock, Chick Corea, and Joe Zawinul on electric pianos, Dave Holland on bass, John McLaughlin on guitar, Shorter on soprano saxophone and Tony Williams on drums (all of whom went on to lead their own units), Miles cut what, from the jazz fan’s viewpoint, was to be his last album (In a Silent Way). Although labels are arbitrary, Miles Davis’ subsequent output is of little interest to the jazz record collector. (p. 59)
One cannot help but get an image here, of the purely “archival” personality, some sort of jazz librarian who is almost certainly white and who has formed an academic, museum-culture notion of what jazz is and should be. Miles Davis’s sensibility, in his new direction, was formed by something else.
By the middle sixties, jazz seemed to be faced with two possibilities. One possibility went in the direction toward which avant-gardes typically go. The parameters of the existing music are pressed to the breaking point. This sounds rather formulaic, and so one might ask what is “avant-garde” about this—but the “parameters” of any reasonably sophisticated music leave lots of room for expansion, and avant-garde gestures bring about transformations of quality to quantity. This reworking of the received material of a tradition describes, in oversimplified terms to be sure, the music of Cage, Gould, Coltrane, and Taylor. Another possibility is to open the music to “outside” influences. (Certainly there is some element of this in the other four as well; the conceptual connection is that musical traditions pressed to their limits generally encounter ideas that have been developed in other traditions.) Miles Davis took this path, at a time when labels were being made arbitrary not first of all by innovative artists, but rather by history and society. Social upheaval led to category flux, and Davis rode that wave.
One thing that is funny, I suppose, though perhaps only in twenty-twenty hindsight, is that it is not as though Miles Davis moved over from jazz encyclopedias to similar compendia of rock music in the late 1960s. Nor does the term “fusion” entirely describe what Miles was up to, though a good deal of jazz-rock fusion was to come from the musicians involved in the seminal Bitches Brew (1969)—the Mahavishnu Orchestra, Weather Report, Return to Forever, Lifetime, and Herbie Hancock’s “Mwandishi” sextet and, later, the Headhunters. Miles gravitated toward rock music, to be sure—it has long been rumored that Davis’s hope was to record with Jimi Hendrix and Sly Stone; when the former died suddenly, his replacement was John McLaughlin—but in the process of linking up with rock, Miles created his own milieu. The best music from the aforementioned groups was generally closer to rock than what can be heard on the Miles Davis albums of the Bitches Brew era, with perhaps one exception, the very groovy and rocking Jack Johnson. This album was named for the first Black heavyweight boxing champion—in fact it was the soundtrack for a film, Tribute to Jack Johnson. Significantly, it was Johnson’s ascendancy to the heavyweight title that gave rise to the racist term, the “great white hope.” Paradoxically, just as Miles was bridging jazz and rock in the late sixties, and playing with various non-Black musicians, he was also creating a current that linked up culturally with Black nationalist aspirations in the United States.
Although there are brooding moments in the electric period, most especially the haunting “He Loved Him Madly” from Get Up With It (the “him” is Duke Ellington, who passed away earlier that year, in May 1974), there is also a brightness that stands in contrast to Davis’s trumpet on the phenomenal Kind of Blue. There Davis used the Harmon mute to create a lonely, existential vibe; heard late at night, it brings tears to your eyes. If there was any other color than black in this music, it was blue; the later, electric music is every color, and especially bright, splashy, funky colors—red, green, yellow. Some, such as John Litweiler, argue that this expansion of instrumental colors has the contrary effect of actually narrowing the emotional range of the music.
Thus the content of his music declined to a search for the new idea or effect, and innovation became valueless. It is ironic that having chosen to play trumpet through a guitar amplifier, with a consequent narrowing of sound, in pieces such as “Ife” [from Big Fun] he further alters his sound with a wah-wah pedal—this device had been invented to enable guitars to imitate plunger-muted trumpets! In 1975, after the vamping backgrounds of percussion and electric instruments were dominating his music completely, he retired from performing. (p. 224)
This is an assessment from the perspective of the early 1980s; I wonder what Litweiler would say now. The reason I raise it this way is that it took a good twenty years for some people to get in the groove with what Miles was doing in the period from 1969 to 1975, and now there are many listeners who tell me that they like this stuff more and more. Bitches Brew was the turning point. Until then, Davis might have made an electric record or two, but still gone back to playing in acoustic, modal bop groups. It’s interesting that Litweiler focuses on the “Fender bass” as the dominating feature of the electric groups—sure, blame the bass player! (I think the two main bass players in Davis’s groups in that period, David Holland and Michael Henderson, did actually play Fenders—sometimes that term is used generically.) Litweiler’s charge is that the bass guitar, as Davis employs it, provides a thumping, thudding continuo that is mindlessly repetitive. Again, I wonder what he would say now, because it seems to me there is a bit of it-all-sounds-the-same syndrome here, which is sometimes overcome with hindsight. And, using a wah-wah pedal and amplifier to imitate the sound of an electric guitar imitating a trumpet, well, that seems kind of ingenious to me.
If I may interject a little personal history: although Bitches Brew was the turning point, the electric Miles album that first pulled me in was At Fillmore. To be honest, something about the album cover pulled me in. This was one of the gigs where Davis and group opened for rock groups, in front of large audiences. Reportedly, when it was first suggested to Davis that he could enlarge his following by supporting rock groups, he was outraged. He accused the people at Columbia Records (in particular, vice-president Clive Davis) of racial bias, and threatened to break off relations with the company. In the end, however, Davis got hooked up with concert promoter Bill Graham, and played at both the Fillmore East and Fillmore West, supporting such artists as the Steve Miller Blues Band, Neil Young and Crazy Horse, and Laura Nyro. (Later he also opened for The Band and Santana—those were the days, incidentally, when concert bills were put together with little attention to musical coherence. For example, in 1974, I saw Poco—the country-rock group—open for King Crimson. But then, coherence isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, either.) At Fillmore was based on four nights at the venue, with each side of the double album representing a slice of each night. As a result, there is a beginning-and-ending-in-the-middle feel to each side, which works with that music. The album was one of perhaps ten in that personally-formative period (the early 1970s) that changed not only the way that I heard music, but also the way I understood life and tried to live it. (A very detailed account, which I draw upon here, of how Davis moved toward not only rock music but also rock audiences, can be found in Miles Beyond: The Electric Explorations of Miles Davis, 1967–1991, by Paul Tingen.)
Not all of the albums from Miles Davis’s electric period are uniformly good, and some of them are not good at all. Three that simply continue to gain in reputation are Big Fun and Get Up With It, both released in 1974, and the live album, Agharta, from 1976. There is a good deal of excitement to this music, largely because of its brassy, big sound, but there is also harshness and a sort of burbling swampiness to a good deal of it. It isn’t quite the case that this swampy background is just there for Miles and some other horn player (such as Steve Grossman, Wayne Shorter, Dave Liebman, and Bennie Maupin) to solo over. Often the horns (I mean trumpet and sax, or, in the case of Maupin, bass clarinet) are down in the swamp also. Sometimes there is no guitar, and sometimes there are three guitarists—which must have been the inspiration for Lynyrd Skynyrd. Kidding aside, I could see the three-guitar set-up in “He Loved Him Madly” as inspiring some of Sonic Youth’s more meditative work, such as the haunting title track from the recent nyc ghosts & flowers. There is always a lot of percussion, and, yes, there is that bass, and sometimes more than one bass (sometimes both bass guitar and double bass). The structures remain modal, and the lines tend to be very long.
After Agharta and the similar Pangaea, and after period of retirement lasting about five years, Davis released a number of real duds, what seem to be blatant attempts at commercialism. Among these are The Man with the Horn, Star People, Decoy, and You’re Under Arrest. The period was the early to middle 1980s. I remember something funny that a critic said at the time (what I cannot remember is which critic). This critic pointed out that Davis had said that one of his hobbies at home was to listen to white people on the radio and make fun of them. With these new records, the critic said, it seemed that Davis had now moved on to listening to Black people on the radio and making fun of them. I suppose there were two good sides to this period. First, even if it was not a good comeback, at least Miles was on the scene again; many did not expect to hear any more from him. Second, the live album from that period, We Want Miles (1982), is actually pretty good, especially the twenty-minute long version of Gershwin’s “My Man’s Gone Now.” Part of what made the album worthwhile was the bass playing (yes, Fender) of Marcus Miller, and it was Miller who helped, perhaps led, Miles Davis into a final fruitful period, beginning with the 1986 album, Tutu. Miller played many of the instruments on the album, which basically consists in electronics plus trumpet. The structures are very “blocky,” and the trumpet parts are often simple, but the album anticipates some of the experiments with techno and electronica that would heat up a few years later. But it is the period from Bitches Brew to Agharta and Pangaea that is animating many musicians now, from the remix projects of Bill Laswell, to the recent offering from Tortoise (Standards, discussed in the final chapter), to young people just coming to experimental rock. That six-year period, very fruitful for Miles Davis, may very well continue to be fruitful for experimental musicians well into the twenty-first century.
A stray comment: it is interesting to contemplate Cecil Taylor’s response when told of John Cage’s view of jazz and improvisation: “What does John Cage know about Harlem?” (Also recall Taylor’s comment about “white music.”) Apart from the derision evident in Taylor’s comment, we might also take it as a warning that music does not come from abstract principles alone, but instead from localities, traditions and counter-traditions, and real people who live their real lives under definite social conditions. Music theory will only take you so far; you have to live, and live with music, and live musically, too. Theory in general will only get you so far; on the other hand, it would be a big mistake to try to do without it.
What kind of narrative about rock music goes from Yoko Ono to John Cage to Cecil Taylor? The answer has to do with both earth and sky. If we are going to be able to understand the experiments that have taken place in rock music, if we are going to be good listeners, and if some of us are going to contribute experiments of our own, we need a good grounding, and a good grounding for an experimental rock musician means one that is not only in rock music itself. We can also think of Yoko Ono, John Cage, Glenn Gould, John Coltrane, Cecil Taylor, and Miles Davis as a six-stage booster rocket that will take us toward the stratosphere of experimentation.
So, let’s turn to some grounding in rock music.