Architecture and explosion: Cecil Taylor, the composer

Chances are, if you're reading this, you wouldn't have too much trouble humming 10 or so compositions by Duke Ellington (whose birthday is today!) on command, just about that many by Ornette Coleman and Charles Mingus, and probably double that by Thelonious Monk. Ditto at least a handful by Charlie Parker and Wayne Shorter, maybe even a few by Andrew Hill or Henry Threadgill or Pat Metheny. But could you hum even one by Cecil Taylor?

An easy answer would be something like, "But he's a composer in a different class..." True, to some extent. But then we have something as direct (and great) as this:



Much like Cecil Taylor, the pianist, or Cecil Taylor, the poet, Cecil Taylor, the composer, is far too massive a creative spirit to be contained by any shorthand characterization.

The idea of who Cecil Taylor is as a composer has fascinated me for a long time. It's an idea that's clear in my mind but so very hard to quantify. He wrote—the term seems inadequate to describe what he achieved with his various Units; maybe "enacted" or "animated" is more apt—music as great as any of the figures above. But it's music that, in its totality, is generally much harder to grasp, and much more elusive than the great, memorable tunes composed by Ellington/Strayhorn, Monk, Ornette, etc. The below is my attempt to make some kind of sense of it all.

Having read a good deal of Taylor's thoughts on the subject of composition, I would go so far as to say that the idea of Cecil Taylor is as a composer has fascinated him, too—or maybe "plagued him" would be a better way of putting it. If you have time, I strongly recommend giving this transcript of a 1964 panel discussion involving Taylor and composer Hall Overton a close read, but for now:

[The example at hand is Lennie Tristano's 1949 "free" piece "Intuition," as compared to the works of Duke Ellington.]

Overton: What was the difference between what Duke and what Lennie did? Duke wrote it out, didn’t he?

Taylor: Oh…That’s another problem. What difference does that make? The only thing that we know about—the only thing that the listener knows about—is the sounds that he hears. I don’t think it makes any difference that the sound is notated because the symbol doesn’t make the music. It is the men striking the instruments, striking the pieces of wood or whatever. It's the sound that we're confronted with, not the symbol. Because in other cultures they don't use our symbols, but they make music, they make sounds.

Overton: I would disagree on that one point because I would make a distinction, Cecil, between an idea that's improvised and that just occurs at the moment, and an idea that is already arrived at, preconceived.

Taylor: How can an idea come, you know, into being without certain things happening?  I mean, if you write a composition—all the great composers that you were talking about which happened to be in a particular school—all the great composers have been improvisors…

Overton: That's right.

Taylor: Now, the only difference is that certain people wish to notate their improvisations. That’s all. And other people improvise—now what does that mean? It simply means that these people who choose to improvise utilize certain physical things in their characteristics and and transpose them to the instruments and, after a certain amount of years, these things take shape in a form…Like the Charlie Parker expression. He uses certain material, certain forms if you will, and he brings these to like his improvisations.

The topic is also covered extensively in the invaluable chapter on Taylor—probably the best single biographical/journalistic resource on CT that we have seen, or ever will see—in A.B. Spellman's Four Lives in the Bebop Business. I could excerpt about 20 pages here, but here are just a few passages that seem relevant to the discussion at hand:

"Stockhausen's menagerie of effects was, when they were translated [from a complex score, i.e.], just musical sounds, the way the notes you read from a Bach thing are musical sounds. In jazz, the cats don't waste their visual energy. They don't divide themselves, and they should divide themselves even less. You look at the instrument and you spend your energy creating sound with the instrument."

And:

"I've talked to British intellectuals, and they can tell you about Shakespeare, man... But they don't seem to understand that there's another English language, American, which has nothing to do with the King's English...

"But when you start talking to the people about what music is about, why, just what is it that makes Horowitz' touch superior, then I don't know on the basis of what presumption they're going to talk about Monk's limited technique. It always comes out to, 'Well, we've got this tradition' or some shit like that. I have a tradition, and my tradition informs me the way theirs informs them..."

And:

"I've had musicologists ask me for a score to see the pedal point at the beginning of that piece. They wanted to see it down on paper to figure out its structure, its whole, but at that point I had stopped writing my scores out. I had found that you get more from the musicians if you teach them the tunes by ear, if they have to listen for changes instead of reading them off the page, which again has something to do with the whole jazz tradition, with how the cats in New Orleans at the turn of the century made their tunes."

It would be close to impossible to sum up all the issues raised in the quotes above, but for shorthand's sake: Taylor is essentially railing against cultural and musicological racism, the idea that the European classical tradition, with its emphasis on uniform technique and music written on paper, is inherently superior to the black American one, driven by improvisation and the practice of learning by ear—and, I should add, laying out the absurdity of that position with unique force and wit. In the Spellman chapter, Taylor, despite his own sturdy background in European classical music, makes it clear that he would much rather be associated with the Ellingtons and Horace Silvers of the world. (Not to mention the James Browns: "...when James Brown goes into his thing ... it's like a complete catharsis. ... Every fucking thing goes and there ain't no holding back. And it's beautiful. That's the technique of rhythm-and-blues singing, man, and no academy but the genuine tradition of a people can give it to you.") But, crucially, he doesn't want that association to ghettoize him as inherently non-"traditional" or non-schooled. Whether he's writing his music down or not, whether he's playing "jazz" or "classical," whether he's "improvising" or composing with paper (which, in his mind, may very well be the same thing), he wants to be considered—and he wants his black peers and forebears to be considered—as a serious composer, full stop.

Amen to that, of course.

[Note: Henry Threadgill has a lot to say on this general topic.]

But if I may just set aside the racial and cultural issues surrounding the idea of what a composer is, I'd like to come back to my initial rhetorical question: How many Cecil Taylor tunes can you hum? I'll leave that inquiry open, but I'll note some interesting trivia, for the record:

Cecil Taylor has been active as a pianist and composer for more than 60 years, and has released dozens upon dozens of recordings. In that time, his compositions have been recorded by other artists on, by my count, less than five occasions. Two would be ex-Taylor sideman Steve Lacy's recordings of "Louise" (published as "Little Lees" on CT's 1959 Love for Sale album) and "Air" (from 1960's The World of Cecil Taylor) on his 1961 album The Straight Horn of Steve Lacy, and, 40 years later, the Vandermark 5's recording of one of the themes from "Conquistador" (from the album of the same name) on their Free Jazz Classics set. Scanning Discogs, there are a couple other examples but none as straightforward.


I'm tempted to ask aloud why that is. At least one reason is simply that, seemingly, Cecil's music is meant for him to play, and is meticulously taught to his sidemen via the process described above, wherein Taylor is not just the author of his music, passively handing his sidemen a score, but is more accurately the teacher or reciter or oracle of it, teaching it to them by example in a sort of painstaking yet lovingly parental way. (Another reason Spellman's chapter is so great is because we get to hear directly from Sunny Murray, Jimmy Lyons, Buell Neidlinger and Archie Shepp what that's like; here's Shepp: "Cecil has returned to natural music. At that point, Cecil stopped writing his music out and started to teach the cats the tunes by ear. He would play the line, and we would repeat it. That way we got a more natural feeling for the tune and we got to understand what Cecil wanted.") I could of course be misreading the situation, but to me, CT doesn't seem terribly concerned with his music living in standard literature the way that the contributions of many of the artists named in the first paragraph above have. It's meant for him and his inner circle alone.

But another reason might be, and this is the real crux of where I was hoping to go with this piece, that concrete examples of Cecil Taylor, the composer, are relatively hard to come by on record—and I emphasize the word "relatively"; no absolutes intended here—especially after a certain juncture in his career (let's use 1978 as the point of demarcation).

Please understand, I'm using "composer" in a very straightforward and, I'm fully prepared to admit, facile sense. I have to admit that I side with Hall Overton somewhat in the 1964 debate. To me, composition is different from improvisation—very, very different. Not better; there's no hierarchy implied here. But yes, I would argue that creating in the moment, such as we heard Cecil Taylor and his collaborators do last Saturday at the Whitney, is a very, very, very different phenomenon from what you hear Cecil Taylor and his collaborators doing on the 1961 recording of "Pots" embedded near the top of this post.

To me, composition implies clear themes and clear arrangements, period, indicated by moments in an ensemble performance where you can hear a band playing, to use an extremely reductive term, a song. ("Theme" or "line" or "figure" would do just as well—really just a shorthand for an "intelligible nugget of composed musical information.") "Pots" is a song, the same way "Billie's Bounce" or "Evidence" or "In a Sentimental Mood" is. The same is true of countless Cecil Taylor compositions recorded between 1955 and 1978. Basically, throughout the Jimmy Lyons era, and on some select occasions afterward, you can hear Cecil's bands playing tightly arranged, obviously rehearsed music. (The presence or absence of a physical score is, as Taylor has often pointed out, beside the point; the point, at least as I see, is whether or not the band is working off some sort of predetermined compositional model that manifests in a kind of group arrangement that is distinct from straightforward improvisation, however dialed-in and cohesive that improvisation may be.) But from the '80s on, these occasions are rarer and rarer, and as a listener, this fact has always perplexed me a bit. I adore, for example, to put it broadly, Cecil's European work from '88 on, especially the overwhelming tactile thunder of the Feel Trio and its offshoots. But the Feel Trio did not do this:



The arrangement of "Petals," as a breathing organic thing is breathtaking to behold. This music moves like no other music. You have Cecil setting up these spiky, declarative intro figures and the band answering him with staggered fanfares. There is a kind of band intelligence at work here—the language is internalized, the "score" (again, not in the physical sense; I mean more the procedure or the method) is encoded so that the music can sort of auto-arrange. The chaos elements, in this case the piano and the drums, can exist in perfect harmonious tension with the ensemble themes.

This music is not the slightest bit "free," but it's also completely unorthodox, outside of traditional jazz or classical time and structure. It's clearly the kind of thing you only get to with intense, sustained group rehearsal. As I suggest above, this band is breathing the Cecil Taylor compositional method in and out of its collective lungs.

Cecil's bands in the mid-to-late '70s achieved a breathtaking degree of ensemble cohesion. I'd argue that this period, documented on Dark to Themselves (which features the same lineup of Taylor, Lyons, David S. Ware, Raphe Malik and Marc Edwards heard on the UMich recording of "Petals" above) and the rich flowering of 1978 recordings with Taylor, Lyons, Malik, Ramsey Ameen, Sirone and Ronald Shannon Jackson, represents the apex of Taylor as a composer and bandleader. (You'll want to read Phil Freeman on the '78 band, and watch Malik discuss his early encounters with Taylor.) Live in the Black Forest, in particular, is equally as staggering as "Petals" above.



That kind of auto-arrangement I mentioned before is in full effect here. In this and many other CT performances spanning the '60s and '70s, you hear Jimmy Lyons taking a sort of captain's or conductor's role, stating these gorgeous, dancing melodic figures that punctuate the ensemble statements and seem to cue and dictate the band's motion. The other players echo him, flank him, fall in behind him. Again, the tension of a fluid group sound clashing with the rumbles and swells of piano and drums. The music is playing itself.

One reason I treasure the 1961 recordings of "Bulbs," "Pots" and "Mixed" (collected on Gil Evans's Into the Hot and later the Impulse twofer Mixed) is because they have that similar hermetic cohesion; everything you hear on "Petals" and "The Eel Pot" above is here on "Mixed"—one could say in embryonic form, but then again, the Into the Hot recordings are in no way underdeveloped.



It's hard for me to get my head around how good this is. You hear all this talk of Third Stream, of jazz/classical fusion, whatever you want to call it. Taylor had it all down in '61. (Bill Dixon would pick up the thread on '67's awesome Intents and Purposes.) Trumpeter Ted Curson has the Taylor concept nailed, as does Captain Lyons, already playing the "section leader" role—listen to his heartbreaking line at 1:20—and the magisterial Archie Shepp, who knew how to inject old-school romance and swagger into even the weirdest settings. The swing begins around 2:45, Taylor setting up a sort of musical carousel that he can scamper on and around.

The Into the Hot recordings represent Taylor at his most Ellingtonian, painting for ensemble, juxtaposing lush creations of his pen (whether they're written down or not) with the inspired madness of his and his sidemen's improvisations. These three pieces ("Bulbs," "Pots" and "Mixed") represent a kind of road not taken for CT; his compositional sense would flower but it would never again be this orderly and lush and sort of romantic, for lack of a better term. I guess, again, it's really "Ellingtonian" that I'm looking for here, though there are of course parallels with Mingus' Elington-inspired works such as Black Saint and the Sinner Lady. I wish we had many, many more examples of Taylor in his full-flower Into the Hot "Jazz Composer" mode. I bet if we did, we'd see many, many more examples of other artists covering Cecil Taylor.

But as we see with the '76–'78 recordings, CT moved along to something even more personal. And of course we have the famed '66 Blue Note recordings—which, though great, I can't help but, given my obsession with what came before and after, view as transitional, a checkpoint in between the glories of '61 and '76–'78. Still, Conquistador!, especially, is a staggeringly great album, one in which the ensemble behavior of '76–'78, the breathing, the auto-arrangement, is already very much in evidence.



After 1978, Cecil Taylor ensemble recordings that exhibit the alertness, cohesion, poise, command, intrigue, spark, magic, what have you, of classics such as the Into the Hot material, Conquistador!, Dark to Themselves, Live in the Black Forest, The Cecil Taylor Unit, 3 Phasis, etc. are rarer. Again, I'm a huge Feel Trio fan. Huge. But the Feel Trio is not where you hear the fullness of Cecil Taylor's creative genius. On the aforementioned classics, you hear Taylor the deep-feeling, deep-thinking, exacting-but-not-restrictive composer and his mind-meld link with his ensemble players, as well as Taylor the hair-raising, pugilistic yet extraordinarily dynamic and agile improviser. On the Feel Trio recordings, you hear mostly the latter—I think of Berlin '88, out of which the Taylor/Oxley collaboration grew, as sort of a "Beat the Champ!" scenario, in which the European scene's finest free-improvising drummers, e.g., Bennink, Sommer, Lovens, enter the ring one-by-one to trade blows with the visiting U.S. knockout king—with the added bonus of William Parker and Tony Oxley being some of the most sympathetic pure-improv partners Taylor has ever performed with.

(The Taylor/Lyons trio recordings of '62 and '73—released on the Nefertiti, the Beautiful One Has Come and Akisakila, the former with Sunny Murray and latter with Andrew Cyrille—represent an interesting midpoint between the two poles discussed above. The former in particular is an absolutely essential document that foreshadows some of the magical cohesion and chemistry of '66 and beyond, esp. as concerns the Taylor/Lyons hook-up, but both recordings are more about long-form small-group improv than they are about Taylor's compositional and bandleading vision.)

Again, I emphasize that my statements above about the general nature of post-'78 Cecil are generalizations. There are, of course, select other examples of the aforementioned spark/fullness to be found after that glorious period. Winged Serpent (Sliding Quadrants) is a beautifully recorded 1985 little-big-band album that exhibits many of the qualities of the best CT group recordings named above. I don't know the full backstory behind this hybrid American/European band—labeled as Segments II (Orchestra of Two Continents)—but you can tell they put in some serious rehearsal time:



Alms/Tiergarten: Spree is another extraordinary album—this time recorded with all European players, as part of the spectacular '88 Berlin blowout (Destination Out and Seth Colter Walls have you covered there)—maybe the best available recording of Cecil directing a true big-band-style ensemble. Grand, majestic themes ripple through the performance like weather events, as Taylor and drummer Han Bennink run glorious interference. CT Organic Auto-Arrangement at its finest. Again, rehearsals for this music must have been intensive.

Melancholy, recorded in '90 in Berlin and released in '99, seems like a sort of sequel to Alms. I'm just digging into this album for the first time, but it's obvious that this is an extraordinary example of biggish-band Cecil, and perhaps even a slightly sharper set than Alms, jam-packed with gripping themes and ominous dynamics, which is interesting given that the ensemble is made up mostly of unknown players—though, interesting to note the presence of Finnish soprano saxist Harri Sjöström, who played with Cecil twice at the Whitney and also appears on various '90s- and 2000s-era CT recordings, including the excellent Qu'a. (Evan Parker seems to be the one holdover from Alms.) Though we do get the treat of hearing the Taylor / Tony Oxley duo—as well as the Taylor / Oxley / Parker / Barry Guy quartet that recorded the astonishing Nailed just a few days before Melancholy was recorded—embedded within the Taylor orchestral concept.

My first impression of Owner of the River Bank, a 2000 set that teams Cecil with the Italian Instabile Orchestra is that it's very similar to Alms in approach but muddier-sounding and less confidently executed. Still, though: definite moments of CT compositional intrigue here. (On a first listen, I feel roughly similarly about Legba Crossing, a large-ensemble Berlin '88 offering on which Cecil does not play piano, though I'm digging the ritualistic percussion and voice episodes.) Re: other instances of CT working in this format, I recall missing at least one Taylor orchestra run at Iridium in NYC. Would love to hear from anyone who caught that group!

(Note: Alms and Melancholy sound similar to what I heard at Ben Young's fascinating 4/23/16 CT listening session at the Whitney, in which he played various unreleased Taylor recordings, specifically a sampling of early-'70s student-band tapes from, I believe, Antioch College, where Cecil was then in residence. Apparently tons of rehearsal recordings exist from this period, documenting a sort of CT intensive workshop ensemble that rehearsed constantly at the college. Judging by what I heard, these tapes are a treasure trove of large-ensemble Cecil.)

In a way, as Cecil's career has progressed, he's transferred his marvelously personal bandleading/compositional concept more to the solo piano setting, in which he simulates the organic auto-arrangement effects heard in his best group recordings with his own 10 fingers, employing many of the same organizational devices, specifically the call-and-response form so often heard on countless CT recordings; the sort of curlicued, repeating-yet-additive warm-up figures, which I've in the past quixotically attempted to transcribe as "bangada-bangada-baanga… bangada-baanga-baanga"; the declarative thunder in the low register echoed by the dancer-like trills in the high. He is very obviously an ensemble unto himself.

Yet there was something going on in the early part of his career, a concept he was driving at, and one that, as Ben Young put it, Taylor's own Johnny Hodges, Jimmy Lyons, was integral to and helped him achieve, time and again, in the glory years between '61 and '78. The result was a compositional concept as identifiable and indelible as that put forth by Taylor's own heroes such as Ellington and Monk. I might not be able to hum "Petals" or "With (Exit)" or "Taht" or "The Eel Pot" or "Mixed" on cue (well, maybe I could hum the latter, now that I think of it...), but I know and feel that sound of Cecil Taylor driving a band, infusing it with this kind of electric, three-dimensional vision, with layers upon layers of structure and engagement, an almost eerie sense of self-governance, self-organization, self-question/-answer, a play between frenetic ensemble density and confident solo melodic voices, cohering—held together by sturdy but invisible structural cables—and collapsing at the same time, architecture and explosion becoming one. The question, now and in the years ahead, and yet unanswered for the most part, is whether this Cecil Taylor concept can travel forward in time without Cecil Taylor being present. For now, the evidence is there, beautiful and resplendent, in the recorded archives.

/////

Postscript 1: My question to any fellow CT fiends who might be reading this: What are your favorite examples of Cecil Taylor, the composer/arranger/ensemble-directing oracle?

Postscript 2: One area of CT's career I didn't cover in detail above is the pre–Into the Hot phase, from Jazz Advance on. (Another plug for the Spellman: It goes back even further than that, and traces CT's entire history as a listener and player.) It's definitely relevant to the above to think about how Cecil got from, say, "Excursion on a Wobbly Rail" ('58) to "Matie's Trophies" ('59) to "Cell Walk for Celeste" ('61, nine months before "Bulbs," "Pots" and "Mixed," and a track that clearly advances a sort of a proto-Unit Structures sound).

Postscript 3: An album that has shot to the very top of my Must Hear list is Cecil's Dreaming of the Masters collaboration with the Art Ensemble of Chicago. Within seconds of trying out "Caseworks," it's clear that this is a document I'll be taking a long, close look at, a) in light of the above and b) just because it sounds awesome, and I cannot for the life of me explain why I haven't sought it out yet. Here's Joseph Jarman on the album, quoted in Howard Mandel's essential Miles Ornette Cecil: "Mr. Taylor's compositional process is to give you the pitches, you internalize the rhythm after he plays it several times, and he tells you he wants you in this section but not this one. Bounds and parameters are not defined by time, but by feeling, idea and awareness of his personality."

List-o-mania: 1996–2011

Over the past week or so, Pitchfork has been polling readers, staffers and contributors re: their favorite albums from the years 1996 through 2011, i.e., the 15-years-and-counting lifespan of the site, via a project called the People's List. My friend and former TONY staffer Colin St. John tipped me off to the project—check out his own list and commentary—and after a little procrastination, I began frantically compiling my top 100 in time for yesterday's deadline. You can view my list here, and those of other Pitchfork writers here.

Lists of this nature are strange; that fact is well established. They are strange because when it comes to such a vast and vastly diverse art form as music or movies or books, consensus is pretty damn near impossible. Phil Freeman wrote passionately and persuasively on this topic last January, with regard to his feelings of alienation from the Kanye-obsessed hordes of fellow Pazz and Jop voters. In one sense, I do not share Phil's feelings; I really enjoyed My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (the consensus critical pick for best album of 2010), and I included it on both my year-end top 10 list, and this most recent 15-year-spanning list. On the other hand, when I view friends' and colleagues' contributions to the People's List—here's a typically well-rounded one from another FAFTS ("friend and former TONY staffer"), Corban Goble—I can't help but feel a little apart from the Conversation at Large.

Again, this not out of hostility or reactionary-ness re: what I'll call the Indie-Rock Canon that has cohered during this Pitchfork lifespan (and which has in recent years expanded to included hip-hop/R&B—both mainstream and underground—as well as certain strains of metal, electronica, experimental music, etc.). I included quite a few records in that zone, including three Strokes albums, a bunch of Will Oldham selections, LPs by Sleater-Kinney, Elliott Smith, Dinosaur Jr., Battles, Dr. Octagon, Deerhoof and Sia, and a few more. And I like a lot of the other consensus faves, albums by Radiohead (I haven't listened to OK Computer in a good while, but I got really into it in college), Joanna Newsom (Ys is a beautiful, epic album), Built to Spill (ditto re: Keep It Like a Secret), Modest Mouse (the first song on The Lonesome Crowded West destroys me, but on the whole, I like This Is a Long Drive… better; didn't realize that was from ’96—probably should've included it!), Yeah Yeah Yeahs, White Stripes, Japandroids, Fucked Up, Wavves, the Flaming Lips, Animal Collective and on and on. But it would've been disingenuous for me to include any of those latter albums on my top 100, because none of them has captured my heart and mind the way that, say, Colossamite's Economy of Motion (to pick one great yet largely off-the-radar album from my list) has. So my list is simply what it is, all that it really could be, i.e., a totally subjective catalog of normalcies, idiosyncrasies and, in some cases, by virtue of what is not included, blind spots, one very major one being hip-hop.

Over the past couple years, I've definitely tuned in to hip-hop more than I had in the previous decade. But I'm still no expert, and that's much of the reason why even in the case of a lot of rap I know I like (Ghostface, Outkast, Eminem), I didn't include those records; I simply haven't put in the time that in and of itself is an indication of love for an artwork. That is to say, when compiling my year-end best-of lists each December, I try not to overthink them, i.e., I simply reflect back on what I spent the most time voluntary listening to throughout that time period. In other words, you don't pick your favorites; they pick you. Last year, the Frank Ocean was a no-brainer, as was the Francis and the Lights the year before that, and the Propagandhi the year before that (speaking of Supporting Caste, which came in at No. 5 on my People's List ballot, I've started to think of this as an all-time-great album, certainly the best new record I've heard since I started to work as a full-time writer-about-music). These are simply the newly released albums that demanded my sustained attention, obsession, care, zeal, etc. during this time period. And that is all I have tried to do with this 1996–2011 list: catalog, in hasty digest form, that sustained attention over these past 15 years. I speak for no one other than myself, which is why I prefer to consider lists of this sort as lists of "favorites" rather than reflections of some monolithic "best"-ness. Taken as honest reflections of a single person's tastes, they become a whole lot less threatening and a whole lot more fun. Coming upon a list like Colin's and Corban's, where in the case of about half the selections, I know them only by title or maybe a lone track, is a chance to know more. Conversely, if even one person who checked out my picks was inspired to take a first listen to John Fahey's Georgia Stomps, Atlanta Struts and Other Contemporary Dance Favorites (in TONY, I said: "During five lengthy ruminations, in which original and public-domain material mingles with Ellington, Artie Shaw and Bola Sete, you hear the haunted, heartbreaking sweep of American music as filtered through a single encyclopedic mind"), Tim Berne's The Shell Game, or anything by craw [sic], Keelhaul or Cheer-Accident, that would make me extraordinarily happy.

And that possibility, of turning someone on to something new, or inspiring them to reconsider something they thought they knew fully, is really the only reason I can see for this whole writing-about-art thing to exist in the first place. These albums speak for themselves, but for some reason, the babble of history drowns them out and we have to dig them up and praise them and let them reiterate what it is they have to teach us. Which brings me to Colin's final point, i.e., what are the sleeper 1996–2011 picks, the great albums, in any style, yet uncovered by any of the participants in this hive-mind People's List exercise? I'd be grateful for any readers' comments.

P.S. I'm already kicking myself over the purely accidental omission of Boys Life's Departures and Landfalls. I did include a record by the related Farewell Bend (Brandon Butler and John Rejba were in both bands), but Departures is a true all-time fave ’round these parts. And all of the following were records I intended to include but had to cut to get myself down to a nice, round 100:

William Parker Clarinet Trio Bob's Pink Cadillac
The Octagon Nothing But Change
Cannibal Corpse Evisceration Plague
June of 44 Tropics and Meridians
Behold… the Arctopus Skullgrid
Yukon Mortar
Territory Band–2 [Ken Vandermark] Atlas
Dan Weiss Trio Timshel 
Obituary Darkest Day 
Charred Walls of the Damned Charred Walls of the Damned
Ornette Coleman Sound Grammar 
Axis of Advance Obey

Also a shout-out to Nicki Minaj's mixtape Beam Me Up, Scotty, a shrewd selection by Corban that I totally forgot about.

P.P.S. The 1996 cut-off point was interesting for me, as it comes just a few years after the release dates of some of my favorite records of all time, albums that surely would've ended up near the top of the list had the initial year parameter been, say, 1993: two more masterpieces by craw (craw and Lost Nation Road), Morbid Angel's Covenant, Face of Collapse by Dazzling Killmen, Slip by Quicksand, Helmet's Betty, Death's Symbolic and many more.

P.P.P.S. There isn't a whole lot of jazz or improvised music on this list. I'd attribute that to a couple of factors: I didn't start listening to jazz seriously till about 1999, and much of my jazz attention up through about 2005 was devoted to playing catch-up, i.e., schooling myself on the music's vast recorded history, a project that still persists: I'd estimate that older, non-contemporary jazz still accounts for about two thirds of my current jazz intake. Also, I'd say that on the whole, album-oriented lists favor song-based, i.e., largely non-improvisatory, music. It's a silly generalization to make, I know—I'm already second-guessing it—but it's the best way I can think of to account for the fact that there's nothing by, say, Joe McPhee, Wadada Leo Smith, Steve Lacy, Evan Parker, Henry Threadgill, Bill Dixon, Cecil Taylor or Anthony Braxton on my list. All of these artists have meant a lot to me over the past 15 years, but my high estimations of their work have formed from a composite impression of live performances I've seen, records I've heard new and old, interviews I've conducted  and just a general kind of "living with" the work and attendant philosophies of figures such as these. But on the other hand, the jazz records I did include—albums by Andrew Hill, Tim Berne, the Bad Plus and others—are all albums I've savored in much the same way as the mostly rock-oriented selections on my People's List ballot: via repeated, sustained, voluntary attention. I'd like to hear folks' thoughts re: great 1996–2011 jazz records I might have overlooked; I'm sure there are hundreds, if not thousands, especially from the period before ’05, when keeping up with current jazz releases wasn't yet part of my job.

P.P.P.P.S A running list of other worthy records from this time period, listed as I think of them:

Henry Threadgill Where's Your Cup? 
Anthrax Worship Music 
The Raconteurs Broken Boy Soldiers 
Weezer Pinkerton 
One Day as a Lion One Day as a Lion 
Björk Medúlla 
Xiu Xiu The Air Force
Coptic Light EP and LP

P.P.P.P.P.S Here's a great, jazz-heavy list by Destination: Out's Jeff Golick. Wadada Leo Smith's Tabligh is one of many shrewd selections here.

Sacred scrape: Stuck on Peter Brötzmann

Photo by Peter Gannushkin/downtownmusic.net.

[After-the-fact note: In the post below, I mistakenly ID'd two recent Peter Brötzmann records on Smalltown Superjazz, Sweetsweat and Wood Cuts, as studio records; it turns out that they are very much in-concert albums. I'm not sure where I got this erroneous impression—maybe it was from the fact that the recordings sound so damn great!—but I regret not verifying the info. In any case, I think some of the points below are of general interest—e.g., that free jazz should sometimes be documented in the studio, not just on stage—so I'm going to let the post stand. Maybe this is also an interesting illustration of how foreknowledge (even faulty foreknowledge) of recording circumstances can really color the way you listen. You do your best to square the sound with the story, or something. At any rate, I apologize for the misinformation.

The important thing to note is that these records rule, and I would recommend them to any Brötzmann fan, or novice, for that matter. This all brings up an interesting point, though: Aside from the obvious early triumphs—Machine Gun, e.g.—what are the great Peter Brötzmann studio sessions? Please advise, as I'm clearly not to be trusted on the subject! For that matter, what are the great free-jazz studio sessions? (Again not counting the ’60s, since many of that period's key statements (from Spiritual Unity to Interstellar Space) were studio documents.) I think of things like Cecil Taylor's New World records from ’78, where the fidelity is just marvelous and a real contrast to the live stuff from around the same time.]

I've been listening to little other than Peter Brötzmann lately. (The new Strokes album, which I'm really digging, is an exception—review in TONY next week.) I wrote here about a Tony Malaby/Paul Motian listening jag, and about how I often find myself thusly stuck, happily, in this or that groove. I tend to know what puts me there (in this case, it was Destination Out's posting of a fine Brötzmann solo album, 14 Love Poems [Plus 10 More], preceded by a flat-out incredible Brötzmann/Andrew Cyrille duo album), and to not know what'll get me out. I'm very much okay with.

Brötzmann is one of those periodically recurring jags for me. I can tell by my hard drive that I was on another PB kick not that long ago. What that tells you is that he's one of my masters. The pantheon includes Andrew Hill, the Wipers' Greg Sage, Morbid Angel, ALL, Fred Anderson, Bill Dixon, Cecil Taylor (of course), John Fahey and a lot of others. Roscoe Mitchell is a recent addition. These are inexhaustible bodies of work. Anyway, I was thinking about how the Brötzmann jag is like the pleasurable (at least for me) part of visiting the dentist, the part where they more or less sandblast your teeth with salt water and you bleed quite a bit, but afterward you can feel new regions of your teeth that you couldn't before since they'd been obscured by build-up. Apologies for the gross simile, but it's appropriate. I think of the phrase "sacred scrape." Brötzmann has an album with those words in the title, but I haven't heard it. Still, it gets to what I'm saying. His playing is like a scouring pad—you get addicted to the sting.

We are lucky that Peter Brötzmann is extremely well documented on record. You can hear the marathon, wild live shit if you like. There's so much of it. Lately, I've been feeling the Unheard Music Series reissues Fuck de Boere (featuring a whole bunch of trombones and some deeply grimy Derek Bailey guitar) and Alarm (another large group blowout featuring some demonic Alex Von Schlippenbach piano work and a multisaxophone cast including the Reverend Frank Wright). (Note: I actually bought both of these in MP3 form from the Amazon store; it's a clunky purchasing/downloading process, but not a bad option if you really need to hear something.) I've also been thinking about how important it is for free jazz, which in the mind's eye often appears like an exclusively in-the-wild sort of thing, to sometimes be documented in the studio.

There's something beautiful about the idea of hiring engineers, meticulously setting up mikes, checking levels, etc., not so that you can document what you've been doing, but so that you can document what you are going to do, right now. And for there to be a label that sees fit to be, like, "We're going to treat this like an album, for real," and bestow upon it beautiful cover art, a track sequence, etc. It's not so much this idea that every utterance of an improviser as great and committed as Brötzmann is to be treasured; it's more that you want to have these points of contrast in the discography. For many great free players, much of their recorded oeuvre is live (think of Cecil Taylor, whose studio sessions have grown rarer and rarer over the course of his career). If they're recorded well, live albums can be great. But they can also feel sort of second-hand, i.e., you weren't in the audience that night, so the musicians weren't playing for you. You're eavesdropping. With studio records, and I'm thinking particularly of two recent Smalltown Superjazz (update your site, guys!) records, Sweetsweat and Wood Cuts, both of which document the duo of Brötzmann and Paal Nilssen-Love in gorgeous, singing, close-up fidelity, the musicians are more or less playing for you, whoever you happen to be, whenever you happen to be tuning in.

You often hear of the "sterility" of the studio, but with "just go, now" improvisers like Brötzmann and Nilssen-Love, that's not really a factor. They're used to manufacturing energy, to just starting up the engine and seeing what might result. It's a wonderfully lavish treat to hear them so clearly, on great-looking, thoughtfully programmed records (on these two albums, the moods and textures vary a lot—from hurtling and abrasive ("Burnt Sugar" on Sweetsweat) to subtle and ornery ("Knucklin" on Wood Cuts, where Brötzmann whips out his trusty tarogato)). It's not so much that these are definitive performances, more true or worthy of documentation than the zillions of live recordings you can hear these musicians on. It's that they are keepsake presentations, meant to be heard and re-heard on whatever listening medium you prefer. We need to make sure that all our great improvisers, young and old, are documented this way.

It's a different story, of course, when you can actually attend the gig yourself. Peter Brötzmann is the honoree at this year's Vision Festival, taking place from June 5 through 11. Go here for the schedule. The Brötzmann evening includes both familar settings (a quintet with Nilssen-Love and some Chicago Tentet types) and unusual ones (a duo with vibist Jason Adasiewicz, which I can't wait to hear). I'm not sure if I'll still be sandblasting my ears with Brötzmann 24/7 at that point, but there's no way I'm missing that gig. Long live the sacred scrape.

P.S. Wow—I didn't know till just now that the man has a very nice official website. There's also the great discography, which I employ religiously.

P.P.S. Forgot to mention the Chicago Tentet, other than in passing. Some of these records are great. In keeping with the theme above, I'll recommend a studio effort: Broken English, from 2000, on the great Okka Disk label. This is exemplary large-group improvising. I'm not sure what kind of premeditated scheme is at work, but the players pay close attention to dynamics, to subgroupings, to diversity of texture—the kind of things that make listening to a sizable improvising band like this pleasurable rather than numbing. (And to be fair, the Tentet can at times be numbing.)

P.P.P.S. What incredible graphic sense the man has. It blows my mind each time I go back to Brötzmann. I think the way his records look is absolutely integral to his music. (Same goes for the titles—MACHINE GUN, BALLS and a thousand other great ones—which are among the most punk, not to mention apropos, word-to-music assignations of all time.) (ONE IDEA, THREE WAYS, people!) The cover of Alarm is a masterpiece.