Cecil Taylor

"The first level or statement of three; an opening field of question: how large it ought or ought not to be.  From anacrusis to Plain, patterns and possibility converge, mountain sides to dry rock beds, a fountain spread before prairie, form is possibility; content, quality and change; growth in addition to direction found.  Third part is area, where intuition and given material mix group interaction.  Simultaneous invention heard, which these words describe.  The paths of harmonic and melodic light give architecture sound structures, acts creating flight.  Each instrument has strata.  Physiognomy, inherent matter-calling, stretched into sound (layers) in rhythms regular and irregular, measuring coexisting bodies of sound.  Measurement of sound is its silences.  Acknowledging silence, its definition in absence.  Reactive occult, in action unknowable – detached – rationalization of inaction and detachment, mathematical series, permutation and row-underlying premise = IDEA PRECEDES EXPERIENCE. 

The player advances to the area, an unknown totality, made whole through self analysis (improvisation), the conscious manipulation of known material; each piece is choice; architecture, particular in grain, the specifics question, layers are disposed, deposits, arrangements, group activity establishing the plain. 

Rhythm is life, the space of time danced thru.

Rhythm then is existence and existence time, content offers time quantity to shape: color mental physical participation."

                                                                              -Cecil Taylor (Unit Structure Liner Notes)

Cecil Taylor once said that he received more gratification looking at an architectural drawing by Calatrava than he ever did from a musical score (Brown, xviii).  Taylor was and is one of the most confusing jazz musicians.  He often stated that the audience should study music so that they would be responsive to his work, a statement which the saxophonist Branford Marsalis later labeled "self-indulgent bullshit" (Burns, Jazz).  From my perspective, my thesis is essentially the reverse engineering of his album Unit Structures, where he attempted to make jazz improvisation architectural.  "Rhythm is life, the space of time danced thru" . . . holy shit that is cool.