Cecil Taylor dances to...

Passion for music is one facet common to both its practitioners and their audiences. If not passion, at least its overbearing presence in our daily lives. In jazz, with so many giant innovators and because its history has often been told as a relay race where the baton would be "influence", there has always been some interest in knowing what our idols listen(ed) to. We know that Miles Davis would listen to anything, including a lot of jazz —as shown in his various blindfold tests— or that Coleman Hawkins hardly listened to any other music than classical at home.

One of those giant innovators would be Cecil Taylor. Admittedly, not everyone's cup of tea, but I think we can agree that he was a monster pianist with an unassailable artistic and personal integrity.

Roaming around the internet, I have found these two photographs, taken by Deborah Feingold:

(Source)

(Source)

Taylor seems to be dancing—which he would do in his performances—in his music room, where besides the piano and a conga drum (under his right arm), there can be seen a lot of LPs, among which three covers can be made out.

November 26, 1945 at Savoy Records

(Image from London Jazz Collector)
"Hen Gates" is Dizzy Gillespie

Monday, November 26, 1945. Just another day at the office for the small independent Savoy Records label from New Jersey, for which they booked WOR Studios in Manhattan. First on, Don Byas and his quintet:

Benny Harris (trumpet) Don Byas (tenor sax) Jimmy Jones (piano) John Levy (bass) Fred Radcliffe (drums)
   S5845    Candy
   S5846    How High The Moon
   S5847    Don By
   S5848    Byas-A-Drink

Next up (note the consecutive matrix numbers), the quintet lead by Charlie Parker, in his first ever session as a leader:

Miles Davis (trumpet) Charlie Parker (alto sax) Argonne Thornton (a/k/a Sadik Hakim, piano) Dizzy Gillespie (trumpet* and piano) Curley Russell (bass) Max Roach (drums)

WOR Studios, Broadway, NYC, November 26, 1945
   S5849-1  Warming Up A Riff
   S5850-1  Billie's Bounce
   S5850-2  Billie's Bounce
   S5850-3  Billie's Bounce
   S5850-4  Billie's Bounce
   S5850-5  Billie's Bounce
   S5851-1  Now's The Time
   S5851-2  Now's The Time
   S5851-3  Now's The Time
   S5851-4  Now's The Time
   S5852-1  Thriving On A Riff
   S5852-2  Thriving On A Riff
   S5852-3  Thriving On A Riff
            Meandering
   S5853-1  Ko Ko * 
   S5853-2  Ko Ko *

Listen to the music on YouTube or Spotify (below).

 

SALT PEANUTS!!! SALT PEANUTS!!! – Massey Hall, 60 years after

Bud Powell, Charles Mingus, Max Roach, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker
Massey Hall, Toronto, May 15, 1953
Photo by Harold Robinson

Sixty years ago today, at about 20:30, Toronto time, everything was ready for a historical evening. The best quintet in history, reuniting the founder fathers of bebop, a bunch of jazz revolutionaries, were going to play together in a summit meeting of music. This is the infamous night when a plastic sax had to be borrowed for Charlie Parker, because he hadn't brought his instrument. The night when he and his former soulmate, Dizzy Gillespie, exchanged musical punches. The night of Bud Powell's first appearance after his release from hospital.

You probably knew that. Every jazz fan knows that. However, half of the paragraph above is untrue. Of course, we've read that story many times, and it's very likely that we will read it again. But it is essentially false. Untrue. Even so, it's a story that has been repeated over and over again in the media, either general or specialized, in Spanish and in English.

RIP Federico García-Herraiz

For those of us who got into jazz from a small village in a remote corner of Europe, before the internet, cheap flights, and other luxuries we now take for granted, the bi-monthly arrival of Cuadernos de Jazz to the local public library was something we awaited anxiously. Reading it, like listening to the few records we could afford, was a process as fast as the disappearing of water in dry land.

In those years when learning about new music was not only a musical but also a sentimental education, Federico García-Herraiz's was one of the bylines I mulled over in great detail. Although we would, in time, be colleagues in the same magazine, I never met him. I did see him several times, always with his  walking stick despite his apparent youth, but that was before I joined Cuadernos and I was too shy to walk up to him, say hello and thank you.

Federico left us just about a week after Raúl Mao. I don't have any pictures of the latter, but I've found this one with Raúl, taken at Jazzaldia in 1999. In many ways, those were happier days.

With Max Roach and Raúl Mao in San Sebastián, July 1999

Musicians' quotes: Max Roach on historical perspective

Some of the records were done 'under the table', because you were fined and thrown out of the union if you did record. It was always a hustle and a rush. Much of the music written by Charlie Parker was written in taxi cabs on the way to the studio [...] It was get in, get out immediately, because the union was always lurking around the corner. And it's amazing to me, when I remember how it was done, how today it is considered so profound.

Max Roach on the sessions recorded during the 1948 Musician's Union ban, which include Charlie Parker's "Parker's Mood", quoted on Geoffrey Haydon's Quintet of the Year (Aurum Press, 2002).