Hey, 'Nineteen': Garth W. Caylor's instant classic

There didn't seem to be much risk involved in plunking down $21 for a copy of Nineteen +. A couple weeks back, my friend Stephen Buono tipped me off to this Wire news item concerning a book of interviews with jazz musicians that had recently been self-published by its author, Garth W. Caylor Jr., 50 years after its completion. (Caylor completed the manuscript in ’65 but shelved it after he was unable to find a publisher.) I took one look at the time frame, 1964–65, and the list of artists involved—Ornette Coleman, Bill Evans, Herbie Hancock, Milford Graves and Steve Lacy are five of the 19 names—and knew that I needed to have this. With those artists on board, Caylor's book had to be at least interesting.

I'm about halfway through Nineteen +, and I'm comfortable labeling it as an essential jazz book. Off the top of my head, my personal short list in that regard would look something like:

Valerie Wilmer
As Serious as Your Life

Ben Ratliff
The Jazz Ear

A.B. Spellman
Four Lives in the Bebop Business

Arthur Taylor
Notes and Tones

Graham Lock
Forces in Motion

Lock's classic Anthony Braxton tome is the odd volume out there, in that it focuses on one artist. The rest of these books are compilations of sorts, where each chapter concerns a different artist or set of artists. Nineteen + is of the latter type. Among those listed above, Caylor's book probably most closely resembles Taylor's classic collection of artist interviews: Unlike with the Ratliff and Spellman books, the chapters here are short (about eight pages on average, and the book itself is small: a paperback just larger than pocket-sized), and unlike with Wilmer's, the author doesn't seem to have much of an agenda in mind. I say "much of" because he does seem to be attempting to get to the bottom of the "inside"/"outside" binary that was a hot-button issue in jazz at the time and which is still a source of occasional debate/commentary; the chapters on Zoot Sims and Al Cohn (they're heard from together here, as they often are on record) and Bill Evans contain some fascinating insights in that regard, e.g., Sims and Cohn's complicated stances on Coltrane (they admire his technique but seem to find his aesthetics abrasive).

Caylor is more or less reporting what he experienced and recorded, aiming not exactly for a portrait of each artist he visits (he interviews the majority—all?—of the musicians in their own respective homes) but for a sketch of their personality and philosophy, aesthetic and otherwise. He uses the Q&A format occasionally and quotes large, sometimes pages-long, blocks of the artists' words verbatim. But these aren't mere transcriptions. Caylor frames the conversations with his own prose, and the effort is beautifully unobtrusive, like an expert lighting job. (In the introduction, Caylor describes how, at the time he was compiling these interviews, he was working as an architect, and the elegant yet unassuming way he structures his chapters seems directly related to that career.) He offers just the right scene-setting details—starting his Jaki Byard profile, for instance, by describing an interaction between the pianist and his young son, or his Steve Swallow chapter thusly:

Steve Swallow lives among tables and chairs of wood, shelves of paperbooks, and shelves of spools of colored yarn above that, all the way to the ceiling because his wife weaves things. They serve coffee with chicory, I think, from cups and saucers of baked earth. There is a bass fiddle, a piano, a loom and some cats in the tall room.

Or even transcribing bits of phone conversations he overhears: serendipitously, Mingus happens to ring Byard during Caylor's interview of the latter, and Miles happens to call up Herbie Hancock while the author is visiting. ("Miles said, 'So you're gonna take what all the musicians say and put it in a book and get all the money for it'—is that right?")

The pieces are far shorter and less commentary-heavy than Calvin Tomkins's wonderful New Yorker artist profiles, but there's a similar kind of sensitive mind at work here. The writing is musical but not gaudy. Caylor also includes complementary quotes from various texts by authors that either come up directly in the conversations or whose work is relevant to the topics discussed in the interviews. Interestingly, he often lets these authors have the final word in a given piece. Art Farmer mentions Ravel, for example, so Caylor closes that chapter with several apropos 1930s quotes from the composer; Caylor and Swallow discuss Zen Buddhism, so the author appends an excerpt from D.T. Suzuki.

What strikes me is how freely Caylor gets these musicians to speak. The insights pour out. After reading each piece, I really do feel like I've spent an hour in the company of the artist in question. I've already dog-eared this book to death. A few excerpts:

[Playing with Paul Bley] was an overwhelming experience—I got physically sick afterwards—I stayed in bed for three or four days and thought and thought… Playing with Paul Bley was the first wholly musical experience I'd had—it wasn't recreational and it wasn't social. It had an awesome effect on me.
—Steve Swallow

So really Charles Mingus's band is about the only group I can think of that I could play for and be able to play every thing I know on piano.
—Jaki Byard

The kind of group I want is say a quintet where each piece is a composition by all five players. I want to get an interaction of sound caused by an interaction of minds. I want everybody to be playing together, not necessarily all the time, but maybe so. Maybe two guys will solo at once. Maybe more.
—Herbie Hancock

…[Going] to a museum clears my head—I get a lot of inspiration looking at pictures, and I don't make literal associations. I don't compare it to what I'm doing—it makes me feel much "braver" about my own playing and writing.
—Jim Hall

So you see what I mean. Caylor gets these artists talking about what matters, which is the music. If you, like me, have an endless thirst for this kind of primary-source interview material (the phrase "Musicians on music," which John Zorn employs in the subtitle of his Arcana volumes, seems apropos, although in Caylor's book, the musicians are just as often talking about literature or visual art), you're going to gulp this concise book down.

I should point out that the Milford Graves conversation is especially valuable. We're lucky to have a thorough documentation of Graves's current viewpoint, but I don't think I've ever read an interview with him from the mid-’60s, when he was making so many indelible contributions to jazz, drumming and music in general. The Graves interview is a torrent of ideas, free-flowing but absolutely coherent. Caylor sees a handwoven basket (presumably Native American, since he includes a picture of a Washoe basket in the text, one of many tastefully incorporated visual aids in Nineteen +) on the floor in Graves's home and asks about it. Graves replies:

It's sort of an environmental thing for me, first of all it makes me think of a snake, you know; it keeps my coordination together when I think about it. An object that I can look at for a while sort of helps me inside, edifies me, builds my mind and makes me comfortable.

Funny, because Graves drumming does all those things for me. At another point, Graves provides an eerily apt description of his musical asethetic:

…[My] thing is not to capture sound, you know. My feeling is just to move along with it, just to get into the sound, to make myself a part of it and just move along without making any stops.

I'm reading this book and I'm underlining incessantly—consuming these marvelous first-person insights in a state of joyous disbelief. For jazz people, the publication of Nineteen + is a major event. I'm confident that if it had come out 50 years ago, it would be held up as an all-time classic in the field. As far as I'm concerned, the book attains that status instantly. It's an invaluable work of artists-on-art scholarship—as WKCR taught me, the hierarchy goes 1) the music itself, 2) the words of the people who made it (i.e., the majority of Nineteen +) and 3) everything else—and my only wish is that there were several more volumes of Caylor's conversations to follow. Purchase immediately.

P.S. In terms of musicians-on-music, I've also become an avid fan of Joe Wong's drumcentric podcast, The Trap Set. Try the Drumbo, Dale Crover, Ndugu Chancler interviews.

Rudness and rigor: The Miles Davis Quintet, Live Europe 1967

I'm glad that Nate Chinen took the time to make a methodical, emphatic case for why the forthcoming Miles Davis archival release, Live in Europe 1967: The Bootleg Series, Volume 1, stands way out from the Miles-box-set cottage industry. By year's end, I'm guessing we'll all be a little sick of hearing about this one, but let me just say this: It's major, and the hype is and will be justified.

This weekend, I've been hung up on the first version of "Footprints" from disc 2 (11.2.67 in Denmark). The point has been made countless times about how much leeway Miles afforded his sidemen, but this track (and this box set in general) really drives the concept home in a new way. Tony Williams and Herbie Hancock are absolutely romping here. They edge in as much wildness as they can during Miles's solo and then blitz out even more during Wayne Shorter's feature. Williams, who had spent several years playing borderline free jazz with Shorter at Blue Note (I think of Grachan Moncur's Some Other Stuff, from ’64, and Williams's own Spring, from ’65), seems to consider Shorter an ideal partner in crime. On this "Footprints," Williams keeps tossing out splashy explosions during the saxophonist's solo, as if he were throwing Snap-N-Pops at Shorter's feet. Around 3:40, his wildness infects Herbie Hancock, and the three players swirl around in a turbulent incantation. It's so fascinating to hear a band that's so tight and disciplined (throughout all of these concerts, they flip into each new piece in lockstep, without pausing, and on the DVD, you can see the sidemen responding attentively to Miles's hand cues) but that also rages against this authority whenever it gets a free second.

Miles was clearly on to something here, i.e., how amok can we run within a "jazz" format? I.e., this was before the bellbottoms and the scarves and wrap-around shades, before Miles's sets became orgies of pure, psychedelic, funk-driven catharsis. This is about affecting that "cool" pose, that aura of decorum that always clung to Miles—and has become a tedious kind of shorthand for how he's been represented since his death—and that still clings to many who play what I like to think of as jazz-club jazz (more on that concept here), but then inviting the chaos in and letting his co-conspirators raid the mansion, turn a "polite" medium into something warped, impulsive, fucked up. Chinen was right to point out that these men are all wearing tuxedos throughout these performances—putting their audiences in that "America's classical music" frame of mind even as they're assaulting their ears with information overload, some of the most busy and vibrant small-group interplay ever.

On this 11.2.67 "Footprints," the band quiets down a bit during Hancock's solo, but on the out head, Williams is absolutely destroying his kit. Hancock follows suit with these blurred, splatter-paint runs, some definite Cecil Taylor shit. This foreground/background tension/obliteration, when the band is executing a theme as one (or more) members just cuts loose in opposition, is what has drawn me to this quintet ever since I heard Nefertiti (still my favorite Miles album, with this band or otherwise) for the first time about a decade ago. I couldn't believe that a jazz drummer could have the balls to explode so rambunctiously on what was essentially a ballad (I'm speaking of the piece "Nefertiti"), or, moreover, that his employer (a firmly established star by that point) would actually invite that sort of thing. We've all heard the stories about how Miles didn't want his sidemen to practice during their off time: He wanted all that nervous, explosive energy to come out onstage. It's not just an idea or a liner-note cliché, this thing of "giving your sidemen space." It's absolutely demonstrated in the music, and nowhere more vividly than on this new set of 1967 live material.

What I love too, though, is that in addition to the wildness, you also get the control, the pacing. Before his death just a few months prior to these Miles performances, John Coltrane was obviously going way, way out, spilling his guts for hours at a time, he and his sidemen equating length and relentless intensity with transcendence. There was no "jazz" left in it, no "cool," no decorum, no ting-ting-a-ling. Which is totally great and vital. I love Interstellar Space as much as the next guy. That said, there's something marvelous about Miles having been able to open and shut the air lock so to speak, to invite the horror of deep space in and ALSO to block it out when needed.

Take, for example, the way the sets on this 1967 set are constructed. Chinen sharply points out the inclusion of many more original pieces here than on the 1965 Plugged Nickel recordings (which I've enjoyed in the past, but not half as much as this new set), which lean primarily on standards. The effect is that when the standards do arrive—and since there's no stopping between pieces, they arrive pretty abruptly—they feel revelatory. As opposed to looking at your watch ("Oh man, they're playing another jazz-club jazz selection?"), you're grateful for the respite. Check out the "’Round Midnight" that comes right after the "Footprints" described above (11.2.67, disc two). The turbulence and insanity melt away, and it's Miles and Hancock alone in a gorgeous reverie. This duet isn't a rigorous reading of the theme; there's some impressionism to it. But it's so gracious, spacious, the kind of thing that, yes, the average jazz-club patron might expect. Recognizably a ballad. Miles was not about exploding form entirely—he was about letting it expand and contract. Rein them in with something decorous, nakedly beautiful, and then put the screws on. Case in point, this same "’Round Midnight," which quickly becomes an uptempo romp after the kick-in, with Hancock prancing down the keyboard and Shorter summoning steely abandon. (Later in the set, we're back on the gorgeous/turbulent fault line, in the form of Shorter's "Masqualero," which has these remarkable trumpet/piano cutaways, with Williams surging periodically forward to add Latin-style thrust.)

It's not fair or useful to sit here 40 years later and lament the current lack of bands like this, so committed on one hand to rigor (which comes, and this is another cliché that's just straight-up true, from WORKING, from playing gig after gig with the same personnel and a consistent repertoire over a period of years) and to explosive freedom, where the form ("Jazz") is paradoxically strengthened via the relentless inquisitiveness and sometimes, for lack of a better word, rudeness of the performance. No need to compare this to what anyone else is doing or has done. Better simply to say that this is conceptually what we want out of jazz: to set up exquisite sand castles and to augment or knock them down as we see fit, as long as we have a reason for doing so and promise to build them back up again at the end.

Compare this with, say, Coltrane's late music, in which there's really no accountability; you've gone so far out that there's no reference point. And again, I'm not dissing that music, not diminishing the value of that kind of solar catharsis. Rather, I'm celebrating the Miles version of "free jazz," where the construction and the demolition commingled in each piece, where you ask that your sidemen wear tuxedos but simultaneously invite them to go absolutely apeshit on their instruments (I'm listening now to Shorter and Williams kicking up a mighty dust cloud at 6:54 in "No Blues"—total sickness). As Chinen describes, that tension was at its apogee within the Miles Davis Quintet circa 1967, and here you have abundant illustration of it. Buy this box set!

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P.S. Disc one is streaming at NPR.