Cecil Taylor

Unit Structures This interview took place at the Ann Arbor Jazz & Blues Festival, Windsor, Ontario, Canada on September 7th/1974. Bill Smith: Last night, I read in Leonard Feather’s Encyclopaedia of Jazz, that you played twenty years ago or more with people like Hot Lips Page. Is that true? Did you have any idea or conception about being different to other people at that point? Cecil Taylor: No, I don’t think you really have a conception of being different. What you have a conception of is listening to all the people that you think are very marvellous and adapting to your own language some of the more precious things that you find them doing. You don’t really get any insight into how your music is different till you hear your first tape or your first recording. And when that happened to me then I understood why certain musicians, or at one point, why most musicians really shuddered when I walked into a room. But when I was about twenty years old Mr. Page said to me one time, “Son, I’m going to teach you how to play the blues.” And one can feel honoured that this man who has known so much music would take the time to say that that’s what he was going to do. So that was certainly one of my most memorable experiences. BS: People idolise you now, I don’t whether you realise that piano players try to play like you and so on, did you try to play like certain piano players then? CT: There were lots of people. I would say at that time there were people like Erroll Garner, around 1953 — of course, Horace Silver was very important to me, of course Bud Powell was fantastically important. Monk was of growing importance. I heard him play in a club in Harlem, he used to play every Monday night, and I used to go there because they used to have sessions. And of course I used to watch the reaction, I’ve been aware of reaction, ‘cause sometimes… the marvellous thing about that place was that if people didn’t dig what you were doing, you’d know it. And I can remember one musician reacting to Monk at that time in that way, ‘cause he was the marvellous one, he just kept on doing what he was doing. BS: People thought Monk was weird, most of them, didn’t they, at that point? CT: They found it strange, I think. Or just didn’t like it. BS: So would you have considered yourself a bebop piano player at this point? CT: I would say no, I would not say that. See, because I was also very impressed with a number of people. Like Oscar Peterson, for instance. And you know there is a specific ordering of the musical language, and because I was never a part of any clique, the secrets always were filtered down to me rather from on high. And I didn’t mind that, because one of the things you find is made very clear at the earliest possible date in New York, is that the price for admission to a clique is, or was, a kind of subservient unquestionable behaviour that was not acceptable to me. And I think I formed an attitude or an attitude was beginning to come into my being, that would allow me to find excuses. For instance, in the same way that I would respond to Bud Powell in that the most important thing was not the duplication of phrases exactly, but what was the essence of the genius that motivated the thrust of the music, or in other words, what was the nature of the sensations which you would call maybe, or which we would respond to as feeling. And that’s more important it seems to me than the duplication of the note, because we understand more about the multitude of ways in which notes can be arrived at. Part of what this music is about of course is not to be delineated exactly, it’s about magic, and capturing spirits, and so that all of this music and all of the different types of music which are unfortunately categorised, creates artificial separation. It seems to me that music had different points of view, but at the source, the philosophy and religious source, those people really that understood it, are identical. BS: Do you think that a lot of the critics in the late ‘50s, for example, did a lot of damage to the music by simply calling it a name like avant garde? CT: I do not think of what you would call critics as being bad at all. I don’t find generally what they have to say pertinent to anything more than being pleased if you return a telephone call. I don’t find them, you know, really in love with the music generally. I find them, mostly as journalists who have evolved in the music to suit certain economic or career needs at the time. That’s why I asked you earlier about what happened to those journalists, because given the use-orientation, or supposed use-orientation, of certain cultures, the fact remains that if you want to be a great artist, if you want to be a mature artist, that doesn’t happen from those cards when you’re 16, 15, 20, it happens maybe when you’re 38 or 39 if you keep working. I’m really not talking about reviews in a sense, or peoples’ reaction, I’m talking about what a musician knows from his own most private investigation of the facets of his life that have determined the amount of energy and devotion that he puts into his own self divination through playing and loving and experiencing whatever poetic thing he’s doing. That has nothing to do with audience reception or what anybody says. It has to do finally with what is most meaningful to the person who is doing the creating. There is a lot of confusion, it seems to me, generated by the attitude of pleasing the people who have power; and say if you do this you’ll become successful. A group of people who are saying well, you know “We must communicate”. That, tome, is a specious position because how can you create art and not communicate, but you communicate first with yourself, on the most deeply and most profound level. Then the other thing that they don’t want to involve themselves with, is that if people want to be moved they do not only want to say they do the work, they have made their own commitment, and if they come to hear you and are moved by you, something in their lives makes you know that they, too, in some part of their being, have felt the need to reach that level of dedication. I’ve seen it in the faces of old and young people in Europe and America, so there’s nothing that some journalist can say to me or about me that in any way colours what I have perceived, because when someone walks up to you in Warsaw, a man 70-80 years old, and everybody is out yelling, screaming about what you’ve done, and this man walks up to you and says, “Aah”, that’s something you’ll remember all your life. Because you know what he’s heard. I mean, What’s a critic compared to that. BS: That’s what I meant, when I said that about what it means to you. You change your position on stage if a lot of energy is coming off an audience, does that come back to you while you’re playing sometimes? CT: The feeling process is primarily this thing between a musician’s playing, however, in a way, you become aware of an audience. The extent of their concentration of course immediately comes over, and then you really want to do it even more. You understand it, they’re there. They want it. And so it’s another level of the experience, not something that one says, “Now we’re going to communicate with them.” It’s really a sacred spiritual thing which you don’t talk about. The people coming there, they know. BS: So is there a preference in what kind of situation you play, like a theatre or a club or a festival ? CT: I would say that I don’t necessarily like large places. I don’t like large places outdoors, and I never go to hear people that I really love in large places indoors. Because you really can’t, I can’t, experience somebody that I like. It’s different in Chateauvallon or the Maeght Foundation. It seems to me that the best things that European art’s supposed to be about are that they are somehow civilised, like what Maeght has done in his foundation. In any case, to meet Moreau, and to have Moreau give you an original painting after he hears you play, is something that makes you know that if you’re asked to play in the situation for these kind of people then you’re on the right trail. So that can be a large situation, and there you try to create other interesting things to do in addition, but it’s not artificial, it grows out of the magnificences of all those artists, who have spent that lifetime creating something. Like you’re asked to come in, like wow, maybe this is one of the places you’ve been working, one of the situations you’ve been working for all those years when you’re not allowed to work in clubs. BS: Is there a simple way of explaining why in the United States, although the music is created in it, it’s the least propagator of the music? CT: Corbusier was not asked to build any buildings in France, he… BS: But in the United States such a large part of the total musical heritage comes from the same source and yet the more creative parts of it don’t seem to be recognised. CT: Hasn’t there always been a lot of confusion about what the different European countries have done with their most obvious beginnings, and didn’t the Spanish try to convince themselves at one time that they were really German? There has always been this desire in the West to be something other than what one really is. So that in New York for instance the most revered dance and drama critics are all imported from England. And in certain circles, people try to affect British accents. BS: So the ballet and the traditional classical music and so on is more acceptable to Americans because it isn’t actually theirs? CT: If you experience the Royal Danish Ballet dancing to Prokofiev or see the Leningrad company doing Swan Lake and see Balanchine do Swan Lake, in N.Y.C., or see the American Ballet Theater do Les Sylphides. I once had the opportunity to see Markova dance Les Sylphides in New York after she “defected”, and dancing on the other side of the leading man was Mimi Paul, who was one of Balachines’ leading dancers, from say around ‘55 - ‘58, until she left the company, and she was particularly effective, it seemed to me, in the slow movement of Bizet’s Symphony in C, she was a very striking dancer. Now when they did Sylphides, Mimi Paul was required to do the same movements in certain passages that Markova was doing. Mimi Paul who I always thought was very lovely, looked like a football player in comparison to Markova. And it was not a question of her lacking a very misunderstood concept called “technique”, because her legs were strong. I dare say, she was stronger. It was just that Markova was moving from inside of the music, being conditioned by a tradition which goes back maybe 150 years, so the music had a thing that was a part of the essence of her growing up, whereas Mimi Paul danced in New York City where those buildings are very high, the subways very rough, it’s a mechanistic society, and it’s just not there. If you want Mimi Paul to indulge in something that I think is equally fictional, what they call jazz dancing, Mimi Paul does that a lot better than Markova. But still, now we’ve got Barishnikov, and the New Yorkers are having ecstatic reviews about the “new classicism “. Meanwhile, there are movements of dance going on in the States that are just so much more important, but they’re struggling along. Their own tradition has been there, but ignored. Balanchine got a lot more money doing what he did than, say, Martha Graham, for a long time. Balanchine got $6,000,000 from the Ford Foundation. BS: But there are people like Alvin Ailey and Martha Graham who in Europe are revered in certain circles, aren’t they as being contemporary? CT: Well, I don’t know. I’m very interested in Alvin Ailey, to see what’s going to happen, because certainly the company commercially seems to be one of the hottest prospects in America. And because of the ethnic point of view, perhaps the idea of the ethnic — it’s very curious to me, to see what’s going to go down. BS: In Sweden he’s even been able to have a film made of his dance. CT: We’ve had several films made. That can be a terrifying experience when you return to America after being celebrated in Europe. See, that’s another thing that I try to impress on the people who have worked with me; forget about what American critics say about you, just forget it. I mean Mr. Maeght asked us to come to play at the lOth anniversary of his foundation. There were a lot of rich people there, but there were mostly artists there. I mean he could’ve asked any number of artists throughout the world to do that. We made a film for instance in ‘66 for the Bureau of Research, which is part of the ORTF (French Radio/TV), and there were three other people asked to make films; one was Varese, the others were Messiaen, and Stockhausen. And Pierre Schaefer, who is an eminent composer in his own right, approved it. And at the same time, you have to live in America. And the rewards from the fruits of working in one sense come from places outside. BS: Could it be more satisfactory for you to live in Europe or Japan. Is that not something that has crossed your mind on occasion? CT: Oh, it’s certainly crossed my mind, but… Whatever it means, to be American, I am an American of African descent. And I was born in New York. And when I go elsewhere they know me as an American. We were in Cannes and there was a discotheque place that we used to go into. I was there already, and a couple of the members of the band came in, and the Europeans looked at them, and said — they didn’t say “Oh, the blacks have arrived”, or “the Negroes” — they said, “Oh, the Americans have arrived.” BS: That’s a whole other thing, it’s not like the American attitude. CT: Well, that’s what you ‘re not supposed to understand about, you’re supposed to be continually fighting the small areas of American thought regarding your import into the American culture. BS: What about things like the Guggenheim award; you’ve had grants. This acknowledgement by a foundation doesn’t attract all kinds of other interest to you? CT: Well, it’s very interesting. In dealing with the Guggenheim people, I said specifically that what I was going to attempt to prove, I was going to try in a way to define the Black methodological system of composing and writing. In essence, that’s what I said. When they approved the grant, they wrote “Experimental music”. I told them what it was. They didn’t want to deal with that. So they changed it, you see. It was fun on my part, because people said, “Well, why do you say ‘Black music’?” “Why do you talk about ‘Black music’, why can’t it just be…”. But we’re just playing a game. It isn’t even necessary if you’ve had philosophers to write grand looking phrases about Beethoven or Brahms. To say that this is even European music, much less white, they’re more apt to say that this is the ‘universal blah-blah-blah’. But you see if you examine the amount of writing about music that has its original source of inspiration in Africa, you don’t find many people to be most knowledgeable and most sympathetic to the non-comparative essences of music. See, when you have a musicologist trained at UCLA, it’s frightening to think about the comparative techniques that he uses when he starts notating down what his tape machine has experienced — from hearing somebody playing a drum. When you read what they have to say it just is not too meaningful. The reason that their information is just useless is because you see they don’t want to deal with the development or continuity of that music, that they have attempted to go back 300 or 1000 years to codify, when right in the next neighbourhood, they could go, if they weren’t so diseased, they could just see the relationship, right there. But I’m not concerned about that too much. Because I understand that that disease is there. And that’s their problem. BS: Would you object to someone promoting you on a star level? CT: Well, I’ve always been a star. BS: In your music you always have, but I’m talking about a level like The Rolling Stones. CT: I have no objection to that, because I think great artists… I mean the first time I saw Carmen Amaya dance, in 1955, it was as though everything stopped for me, I mean everything stopped. When you see that. Now that, to me, is the highest kind of compliment that can be paid to another artist, to make somebody else lose all sense of time, all sense of their own existence outside, like the perception of all of their energies on that figure. That to me is the greatest. So this other thing, oh, hey that’s fun. Hey, c’mon, that’s fun. Miles Davis has great presence on stage. I think Sonny Rollins at one time had great presence on stage. I think Billie Holiday was magnificent on stage. I think Betty Carter is fantastic on stage. Lena Horne is fantastic on stage. I mean, great artists are. It just takes the business boys a long time to catch up — “Oh, hey, we could make them stars.” But by that time… perhaps I think what I’m learning now is that they can do these things, but I can say to them without being offended, well that’s not exactly in taste for me. Could you cut it a little this way? Or have somebody else say it for me in a way that they won’t be offended. I don’t necessarily want to offend anyone by it. I want to continue living and doing as best I can what I spend most of my time doing. BS: Is this one of the reasons why you’ve got involved in producing your own music on record ? CT: I ran into a young student, and by accident, someone showed me some photographs that he’d taken. And the photographs just knocked me out. Young black man — I think at that time he was 18 or 19 — and I said wow, I think I should have that, I would like to have that picture on the cover of an album. And that’s the picture, the two pictures that are on Indent. And among other things, that guy played Fender bass and was studying to be some kind of sociologist. I saw there was homebody’s work that really excited me to the point that I really would love to give people who might be interested in the music an additional delight just to see that visually. BS: Have your experiences with record companies been unfavourable in general, where record companies have put out records by you ? CT: There are usually a lot of things that are unfortunate about those things. Especially when you don’t understand that they’re not necessarily devoted to aesthetic standards outside of making a buck. When you’re younger, you spend a lot of time being morally indignant over issues that are not meaningful or apparent to the system. BS: Have you found dedicated people, though, in any of those situations? CT: Well you see, most recently, dealing with some people that are in their mid-20’s, who say that they’d like to do this or that, what I found is that they’re really not equipped to do it. I don’t want to get into the business aspect of it at all, but at the same time, I do, just through having certain experiences. So I assume that for instance if you say that you want exclusive rights to distribute my record, you better know certain things, because that’s what you say is your business. And I’ve found them goofing. And then they say, “Well, we’re not in this for the business”. I said “well then, don’t be in it, because I’m not putting up the money necessarily with a complete business orientation, but I’m making a product available to your expertise. So I want you to cut it. If that’s what you do, do that, and do it as well as I play”. And so they say, “Well, we’re not…” And I find this curious ambivalence, when I say to them “Hey, you’re not doing something”, “well you know, we’re human beings”. I say “Hey, look, I would assume that that’s given, I think you’re using it to evade the fact that you ‘re not taking care of business”. People get very upset. But fortunately in the situation I’m in now, these people are older, and sometimes they get carried away and make these long speeches, and I just sit there and I listen and I say, “Well, that’s it, then”. And I’m going to the door, and they say, “Mr. Taylor, do you have a minute?” And I say, “Well, yes”. Now. Well the business point that we were talking about, could we just clear it up? What I realised was that they were clever enough to absorb that long speech that I made, then it might be more beneficial to me to pay attention to things that they were running down. In other words there’s a kind of equalness in input, and I think it ‘s much easier to thoroughly respect whatever a man is doing if you make a commitment to say, I want to get into this, if you find that guy really good doing it, that’s groovy. I think the other thing is that there are all kinds of ways to live a life. There are all kinds of attitudes that people could have. I mean I think that Herbie Hancock is a very clever guy. I think that James Brown, in the specific areas that his music covers, is absolutely incredible. Perfect, for that form, for what that is, and gee, I sit there, and it just knocks me out. I’m talking about essences. I love Billie Holiday and I love the way Stevie Wonder sang five years ago. I don’t any more. But I love Aretha Franklin, I love Sarah Vaughan. Can you get to all those places. And if you can, then you’re just really enriched. And you want to bring in a piece of that, because that to me is what living music is, the ongoing nature of life, the different manifestations of ethics as they are perceived in the special creations of individuals from different times. BS: But a lot of the reason that all those people are reaching out to a large number of people is because the record companies are taking care of a commercial situation. Isn’t it possible that it would be an advantage for you; financially, I mean? CT: Of course. But you see I’m not concerned about that, because l think that’s going to happen anyway. I think that the situation has sort of been set up that if that’s going to happen, you know… see, the thing is, I don’t want that to happen. See, that could have happened to me for instance eighteen years ago, after the first Transition record was made, when a lot of people were very interested. But that isn’t as exciting as being able to gracefully accept all the love and adoration that people have for you, rather than the money that the industry might want to give you, then get involved in it, and then die, because you can’t handle it. Like Joplin, Hendrix. Or have all that sugar make you a diabetic. Or be like Oscar Peterson who starts playing because Norman Granz says “Do this”. Play all those tunes, destroy what was such a promising genius. And to be able to say graciously if it really comes to it, “Well, I don’t think I can do the Rodgers and Hart tune”, as well as say, “So-and-so could, why don’t you get him.” lam going to sit back, and just prepare myself to be very happy, and maybe very rich. But I hope no less beautiful. In a way that is most important to me. I mean Ellington was magnificent. He was just magnificent, he was not only a genius in music but he knew so much about life, he’ s beautiful. BS: That’s why I’m trying to find out if there are ways that you could direct not how you play, that’s got nothing to do with it, but if there are ways to make it come out on a larger scale. CT: A lot of musicians adored a very typical sort of figure in the ‘50’s and the ‘60’s and when that figure began to make, from my point of view, questionable choices musically he passed on that information to a number of very gifted young musicians. Those musicians who accepted that form of geniuses’ advice have really not developed. There are no Milford Graves among them, there are no Sonny Murrays, there are no McCoy Tyners. There are other people, and they are very accessible, but I think time will show that at best it will be music of a period. BS: Do you think that they will return? CT: Anything’s possible. But if you want to write scores for movies, on the basis of the energy that you have generated, and bring that energy to a movie like “Death Wish”, then from my point of view once again, although there may be one or two interesting musical passages, I think that a whole area of possibility of creative thought has been shelved. I would like to write for movies and I would like to write for theatre, mostly because I love theatre and I love the movies, and what’s so nice about it, ain’t nobody in Hollywood going to ask me to do a movie. But when they do, it’s because they know something about what I’ve done. Hopefully. And they’ll say “Hey, we’d like you to do this, and we can go at it as a team, and do something that can maybe be really fun”. And I think it should be fun. I don’t even think it should necessarily be work, it should be a kind of activity that when you ‘re finished, you know that you’ve really expended a lot of the life that’s in you. But then you’ve regenerated it. It shouldn’t be a task. After all, the Puritans were the lower classes, and they carried a particular kind of burden, but that had nothing to do with spiritual essences. That’s what I think. It’s so easy to adopt a socio-political idea when you talk about music, which is a nice way of avoiding what the artist does. BS: Two people have been with you a long-time, both Andrew Cyrille and Jimmy Lyons. Is there a specific reason why you have been associated with them for such a long period of time? CT: Well, you know, they’re awfully good. BS: I’m assuming that everybody already realises that. CT: Well, I wonder about that sometimes. Lyons interprets the music that is given him — which has been given to me, really — in a way that I don’t think anyone else can. And you see it’s not really understood about what composition is. Or what I think composition that stems from an African beginning is. It’s about community thought. It seems to me, it’s about you have maybe three or four different levels of musical activity going on. The alto saxophone has a whole tradition in this music of great men who, given three notes, interpret these notes in a certain way. It isn’t about how Cecil Taylor writes music. But Cecil Taylor is a vehicle for certain ancestral forces that this body has been fortunate enough to hear and pass on to people, and together in a community situation we exercise certain conversations, you see. And these men understand this. There are some. There are other groups of musicians who do the same thing. That’s what the tradition of this music is. It’s not understood essentially because in the drive to become successful, and there are so many pressures on musicians of this ethnic persuasion, there is no support for this particular kind of view anywhere, in any of the responsible areas that could make this point of view economically feasible. Because there is no cultural knowledge acting in those communities in America who, it would seem from a superficial level, would be the most interested in seeing this point of view being made. BS: The Layers of Indent for example, apart from being music that I’ve heard, does it have some other meaning as well? People write tunes, but you have layers of indent, lots of them. How do all those conceptions arrive ? CT: I’m writing a book about that. Hopefully. I ‘m not worried about when it’ s going to be finished. I don’t think it will be finished. I hope maybe sometime to put out the first volume. ‘Cause I like to write. I like to think about what are some of the possibilities, what are some of the things that you’re really working with. And what is musical sound, what does that really mean, you know. And I’ve been working on that for a number of years. Fortunately I’ve had a lot of years playing music and grew to a certain level of understanding, so that I had a chance to be more than a person who just played, I had a chance to be something spiritual who had been touched by forces that defy actual description. And it had nothing to do with any academy. It had something to do with traditions. BS: Not spiritual and religious beliefs, you don’t feel spiritual that way? CT: Well, I think that music is of course natural and spiritual. I think that the conception that gave birth to Jelly Roll Morton or Fats Waller or Charlie Parker or John Coltrane was among other things a religious one. But then I don’t know that religious means you know… I think that it has to do with recognising the greater creative forces and understanding that every living thing is a part of that garden of nature’s activities. To celebrate life means that you recognise the beauty of life as it exists in all things that hopefully you can see the life in. BS: Do you think that it’s possible to teach people enough musical knowledge to bring out a possible creative force in someone else. Among all the students that you had at Antioch and Madison, were there some that had special qualities which came out while you were teaching? CT: I think everyone has a special quality. BS: Were there some musical creators amongst those people who are going to be very special people ? CT: You’ll hear them. BS: Do you think it’s possible to teach your art to someone else ? CT: Oh, I don’t think that at all. The exciting thing about being in that situation was really I had a chance to learn so much. I had a chance to make a lot of mistakes, and live through them, and to really learn. When I was at Glassboro State College, this past year, I began to really understand what it was that I was doing, that was I think very good. A lot of brilliant people I think are just generally stomped, crushed because of the nature of the way the music is taught. I was very fortunate that the people who, for instance, made up the ensembles that I had, were really gifted people. And what you try to do is to create a situation in which the nature of their gift is allowed to flower. What you try to do is to create a situation in which they realise the beauty of all the other things that those traditional concepts have attempted to hammer out. The most beautiful situation would be when young people begin to be led in on the beginning of their own awareness of their own uniqueness and their own music talent. Almost like watching a birth, being part of giving birth to something. And I had two people in Glassboro who were really gifted. To see them get into it, to get into that especially when you’re young and when you’re very vulnerable. In all of the places I’ve been in I’ve seen most of the teachers kill them, quite deliberately. “Hey, you’ve got to practice your exercises! You’ve gotta do this, you gotta do that!” I think it’s a reflection of the political climate in one sense. BS: Is a situation like Berklee part of that? CT: I think so. BS: Doing it right, making it fit in, is that one of the reasons? CT: Well, I don’t know, I don’t want to make a generalisation. We gave, you might say, a brief seminar one afternoon at Berklee when we worked there, it turned out to be from a certain point of view one of the instructors said they had never seen anything like it before. Oh, they got very upset. But I thought it was very interesting, I thought it was sort of a plus. I mean there are a lot of presumptions that are going down there. People got really upset. A lot of “Did you think that they were right there… “ BS: But at Antioch you got quite a few musicians with you that you liked. Didn’t you perform in fact with some of those young musicians at one point? Wasn’t there a New York concert? CT: I had a relationship with musicians. A lot of the musicians at Antioch came from Wisconsin, I met some others at Antioch. As a matter of fact Arthur Williams, the trumpet player, is going to play with us tomorrow. He came out to Antioch. Fantastic. BS: Were most of the students at Antioch technically competent in the traditional kind of way when you arrived there, were they already top musicians? CT: What do you mean by technically competent? BS: Well, in the traditional sense of the word that they did all of the things they were supposed to, like sight-read and all of those things you’re supposed to learn. CT: Why should they sight-read? I mean we could go on talking about things like this for a long time. I have some ideas about music that are extremely painful to the academies that I’ve been in. They’ve been rather painfully received. BS: Would this be true of the European situation too, if you went into a European university ? CT: I’d hate to think what would happen if I went into a European university. Part of the novelty of going to Europe is that there aren’t too many Negroes that are committed to make a lasting statement in Europe in terms of being incorporated into the European situation. BS: So it’s not very different in reality to the United States. CT: It’s because the United States attitude was nourished and fed by the Europeans. And the United States became more powerful, there were certain things the United States gave back. BS: I happen to have a record by Andre Watts; one of him playing Chopin. CT: Oh, yeah. That must be lovely. Well you know, he’s a man who’s furthering what I would assume at least to be right, it’s a European methodological camouflage. So that doesn’t threaten anybody. BS: But you’ve been accused by so many people of being a European-influenced piano player. CT: Oh, I know. It’s easy to do that, because at the same time what they’re really saying is that absolutely there is only one kind of musical order that we recognise, so if you do such-and-such, it must be European. BS: Could it make a difference if improvisational musicians were made more aware of people like Harry Partch and Edgar Varese. Could that develop another kind of situation. Do you take anything from those people sometimes? CT: I’m still involved with the conception of a particular tradition. And it must be in terms of getting the world history in its more proper perspective. We have to understand that what is considered the dark continent and all the not too subtle uses of the word “black”, “dark”, you know meaning some kind of ignominy, you must begin to understand that the word “arab” as applied to Europeans meant “place of darkness” at the time when Africans had a very great civilisation. And that comparatively speaking, the European ascendancy is the most recent in the evolution of man. But don’t tell that to any American. Don’t tell it to any American. And I can understand why. Why? Because in America, great country that it is, you understand, we’ve only had our consideration of art for under lOO years. It’s a most recent phenomenon. Give us time. BS: But jazz music comes with all the stigmas, doesn’t it, for the white audience? And yet its audience is mostly white, why is that? CT: You see, if you ‘re going to call it jazz… I understand what you mean, but dig what I’m saying. I’m saying that James Brown is Jazz. What we ‘re talking about is the methodology that determines how musical architectures are set up. Hey, the bulk of the black population loves James Brown or Aretha Franklin or whatever, now if you separate it and say hey, that’s soul, everybody needs soul. Milford Graves! What is that? But that’s something we have to live with, and understand that’s part of the division that is perhaps desirable from those people that control. They’re not interested in Milford Graves and Cecil Taylor. They write stories that will sell a million copies of Ebony and, from the business point of view, perhaps they’re right. After all, they’re involved in business. But you know, it’s fun once again, if you make a commitment to art, beauty. You can watch that as you grow older and say that is the way it goes down, but it doesn’t have to affect any personal choice that I might have. And maybe that’s a sign of fast approaching old age. I feel that I can understand even a man like Sammy Davis. BS: That’s a long way from Andre Watts, though, isn’t it ? CT: Not really, all the same thing, just a different view of different style of accomplishment. BS: Andre Watts never made all those rash public statements, though, did he, like… CT: He makes it every time he touches the piano. BS: But most people are insensitive to that, they wouldn’t know it anyway. CT: We ‘re not talking about most people we’re just talking about at most three of us here. For instance, this guy is going to play in New York, the opening concert at the Lincoln Center, and Pierre Boulez is going to conduct, and they’re going to play Liszt, and they’re going to play somebody else. I wouldn’t go, I’d like to say I’d like to go, ‘cause I’ve never heard him play, and I’d like to go see it, but you know I’ve heard certain people play that way of playing and I always said, there’s nothing about Mozart and Bach, to me, the answer is that all these children play it. I was playing Mozart when I was ten or eleven years old. When I saw Emil Gilels play Mozart, at Carnegie Hall, I had the same kind of sensation. I went to that concert, and then went down and heard Coltrane who was appearing at the Half Note. And I have to say after just about 30 minutes of Coltrane that they had expended more energy, played more notes, created more music, in maybe two minutes than Gilels spent in an hour and a half. You realise that these cats have always said in jazz there’s that beat, beat, beat… well, even at the same level of perception, I could say that Bach inventions and Mozart’s piano, had the same kind of thing. After you’ve heard one of them, you’ve heard them all in terms of structure, in terms of more subtle things like timbre, what happens in different registers. The same thing happens from piece to piece. It took me 40 years of life and 25 years of involvement to understand the lies that have been perpetrated culturally to deny first, black America, not because it’s dealing with black America but simply because they cannot face Africa, what Africa was, that Africa resulted in the wealth of the British Empire, that the slaves made the British and the Dutch wealthy, created the concept, afforded them the money that allowed manufacturing, mechanisation. So I’m saying that’s ok, that’s your problem, because if I live through the thing where they said I’m European, I don’t have anything to deny, I was only a product of the European nation, I went to the conservatory, and I must admit that when I first — and I’m not ashamed of this — when I heard Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring at Symphony Hall in Boston it was a devastating experience to me. And you know it’s very cool, see? I admit I’m rather hard on European musicians, I wouldn’t walk across the street to hear most of them, right? But that’s ‘cause I’m a musician.