[NewMusic] Fat New Explosion

[Matthew Goodheart]

On Mar 15, 2007, at 5:49 PM, Chris Broderick wrote:

> I'd say that Cecil is an iconoclast, in that his music was (and is) 
> percieved by some as an attack on jazz traditions. But I imagine he'd 
> be irritated to be thought of as such, and hardly thinks of his music 
> as attacking the settled beliefs of other musicians, institutions, 
> etc.  He's less interested in tearing down institutions than he is in 
> approaching music-making in his own way.  I doubt he's much interested 
> in shocking the prudes or raising the ire of critics.

I doubt this very much. Sorry for the length here, but. . .

During a panel discussion in 1966 Cecil asked for:

  “a boycott  by Negro musicians of all jazz clubs in the United States. 
  I also propose that there should be a boycott by Negro jazz musicians 
of all record companies . . . all trade papers dealing with music . . . 
and that all Negro musicians resign from every federated union in this 
county. Let’s take away the music from the people who control it.”

In the Unit Structure's liner notes he wrote:

"Time seen not as beats to be measured after academy’s podium angle. 
The classic order, stone churches with pillars poised, daggers ripping 
skies, castrati robed in fever pitch, stuff the stale sacrament, 
bloodless meat, for the fastidious eye; ‘offering’ sought the 
righteous; only found sterility in squares/never to curl limbs in 
reaction to soundless bottoms."

In article in the Village Voice in 1963 he wrote:

"Crtitics are sustained by our vitality. From afar, the uninformed egos 
ever growing arbitrarily attempt to give absolutes."

The comments I heard from him during rehearsals in the mid-90's were 
right in line with these notions.

 From the way I understand it, Taylor sees institutions as the ones who 
are attacking jazz tradition by destroying the creative forces that 
jazz represents: he is the one salvaging it/embracing it. He has said 
that “The greatness of jazz occurs because it includes all the mores 
and folkways of Negroes during the last fifty years.” The way I 
understand it, Cecil's "music" carries within it a rather radical (for 
the time) unification of history, individuality, spirituality, racial 
awareness, and cultural revolution. He is, in fact, extremely 
interested in tearing down traditional conceptions of music, technical 
practices, institutional authority, political-economic systems, even 
overturning the very language with which one talks about these things. 
It is deeply embedded in a philosophy that institutions and the "status 
quo" are corrupted things, and his practices represent a return to the 
deepest foundations of music; as Archie Shepp called his work, a 
"natural music." Here's a final quote from an interview with Len Lyons 
in the early 80's:

"I'm interested in the cultural importance of the life of the music.  
The instrument a man uses is only a tool with which he makes his 
comment on the structure of the music. That's why the evaluation of 
what a cat says about how he plays music is not too far from the 
noninteresting things he does when he is playing. That person wouldn't 
have too profound an understanding of what has happened in the music 
and the culture. We have to define the procedures and examine the 
aesthetics that have shaped the history of the music."