“Jazz: The Experimenters,” a 1965 television broadcast of performances by the bands of Cecil Taylor and Charles Mingus, with commentary by Ralph Ellison and the jazz critic Martin Williams, currently on view at the National Jazz Museum in Harlem as part of an exhibition devoted to Ellison’s record collection, would be worth the trip, even in the absence of the enticing and evocative installation of artifacts, texts, and images that surrounds it. The broadcast is a major document in the contextualized history of jazz and its performance.
The program was recorded at the Village Gate, without an audience. Mingus’s group (two or three trumpets, alto sax, French horn, tuba, bass, drums) begins the broadcast, playing a sinuous slow composition, spotlighting a trumpeter’s silvery high notes over a dense orchestration, which in turn serves as a sonic backdrop for a voice-over that sets up the program’s axis of controversy—the reception and the significance of modern jazz, “often undanceable, unsingable, serious”—and introduces Ellison as the “host” and Williams as a commentator.
In his two appearances, Ellison—poised, formal, a little bit orotund—sketches a grand theory of jazz by which he frames what he considers the inherent problem with its modern varieties. He calls jazz musicians “practitioners of an outlaw art” that was the source of their artistic freedom—they could “create free of the concerns of status and respectability.” He cites the underlying premise of jazz as
an attempt to express with musical instruments the sound and the style of the Negro American voice as raised in prayer, protest, shout, and song. It was an attempt to humanize the world in terms of sound, an effort made with musical means to impose the Negro American sense of time upon the larger society and upon the world of nature.
As such, jazz has, Ellison says, a “highly conscious sense of its sources and its own traditions.” For Ellison, modern jazz musicians made the mistake of seeking “status and respectability,” and of seeking it as intellectuals and from intellectuals, predominantly white ones. Ellison blames these white writers for their inescapable evaluation of jazz and its specifically black American traditions in terms of their own Eurocentric tradition. For Ellison, the essence of jazz is a specific “reality of life and experience”—that of black Americans—“which nourishes the beginning of jazz and which will continue to nourish its future life.”
There’s much more to his remarks, which should be heard in their entirety and in the oratorical time of their on-camera delivery. With regard to the musical performances on the show, Ellison is able to find an angle from which to praise Taylor’s intricate, fervent, essentially atonal and rhythmically free (i.e., polyrhythmic, without a foot-tapping beat) music for its effort “to absorb, to Americanize the most recent developments of European classical music.” In the first of Taylor’s two numbers, the pianist indeed follows a practice of modern composed music, not sitting at the keyboard of the piano but plucking its strings and striking them with a mallet and a small metal basket, accompanied by the shimmery, skittering drumming of Sunny Murray (whose free sense of rhythm, devised in collaboration with Taylor, in the early sixties, is one of the key innovations in modern jazz).
As I write about the music in such relatively technical terms, I remind myself of Williams, who follows Taylor’s performance with a similar exposition. He offers his own thumbnail history of modern jazz in formal terms, speaking of the “freedom” that emerges from the musicians’ repudiation of such traditional frameworks as themes, chord sequences, and a steady beat. Taylor himself ups the ante with a philosophical explanation of his own work that is as much a sort of poetry as it is an analysis, but the performance that follows—with a quartet including Murray, the saxophonist Jimmy Lyons (who, until his death, in 1986, was a member of Taylor’s group), and the bassist Henry Grimes—has nothing of the academic or the theoretical about it. The music is certainly neither cold nor heartless, neither academic nor technical. Taylor was—and is—playing passionate, even furious, music that is no mere reflection or refraction of Schoenberg or Stockhausen. It’s highly combustible, body-shaking, joyfully virtuosic jazz that, regardless of the traditional forms that it shakes off or the new ones that it embodies, both honors and extends the sonic and emotional range of historical jazz. (Here’s a 1962 performance by three of the four musicians in Taylor’s TV appearance that’s similar in style to that quartet piece.)
The temptation to talk about modern jazz in technical terms isn’t a substitute for emotional exhilaration. It’s a way to explain the shape and the style of the music to readers or viewers who may not be familiar with it—to define it, even if negatively, in terms of a kind of jazz that is more widely known. Putting the excitement, the inner life, of modern music of any sort into words, whether it’s Cecil Taylor or Pierre Boulez, is hard, and therefore all the more worthwhile—and the continuities linking Taylor and Ellington, Boulez and Debussy, may be all the more apparent to musicians and listeners who came of age with the later, not the earlier, artists.
Ellison’s skepticism regarding modern jazz may be, in large measure, a mark of generational conflict. The musicians he revered, such as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Jimmy Rushing, Mahalia Jackson, and Charlie Christian, were born between 1899 and 1916. Charlie Parker, whom Ellison admired despite his wariness about the historical significance of his musical style, was born in 1920; Miles Davis and John Coltrane, whom he actively rejected, were born in 1926; Mingus, in 1922; Taylor, in 1929. Ellison was born in 1913; the musicians he loved had their styles set by the time of the writer’s own maturity.
More important, the experiences and the traditions of later jazz musicians may have differed in crucial ways from those of Ellison’s generation and earlier. For better or worse, traditions shift and dissipate; they’re worn away by political and societal changes, they’re replaced by a more self-conscious composition of influences and a more self-willed construction of identity. Ellison may well be seen as a leading theorist of communitarian values and the culture that develops from them. What’s certain is that Ellison perceived, and was troubled by, a shift in the social function of jazz: it stopped being connected to the popular music that blacks listened to. Most of the spectators at the modern-jazz concerts that I’ve attended (and I’ve been going since the early seventies) are white; most of the musicians are black. Ellison extracted invidious conclusions from this fact—he assumed that the musicians craved acceptance by white intellectuals. What seems likelier is that, in some ways—despite incommensurably vast experiences of power and prejudice—the musicians were themselves essentially intellectuals, the musical peers of, say, Norman Mailer and Philip Roth, and had a similarly fruitfully contentious relationship with their own dispersing traditions. If Ellison saw the jazz of his youth as an effort to “impose the Negro American sense of time upon the larger society,” the jazz that followed was the living proof that their forebears’ efforts had, to a significant extent, succeeded.
Of course, Ellison was an intellectual—a supreme one, of profound insight—but he was also a product of places and times to which he remained deeply attached ever after. I wonder whether the struggle with modernity—with a spiritual Ship of Theseus that was having its boards replaced one by one with others of new and diverse materials—wasn’t part of the very torment that got in the way of his completion of a second novel.
Acrimony arose from the 1965 broadcast. As Arnold Rampersad writes in his biography of Ellison, Williams felt that Ellison had cast him as a villain of his narrative, and he sent a letter to Ellison in which he ascribes his conservatism to “ignorance of the facts and ignorance of the music … I don’t believe you know John Coltrane’s work.” (Rampersad reports that Ellison didn’t respond.)
P.S. As for the performances themselves, the churning, pulsating, seemingly biomorphic vigor of Taylor’s group—its thrilling blend of intricacy and power, of swagger and speculation—was captured in a pair of studio recordings from 1966, “Unit Structures” and (my favorite) “Conquistador.” For Taylor, the lengthy explanation, and the dance-like strumming and striking of the piano strings, suggested two key aspects of his later work: poetry and dance. There’s something operatic in his piano solos, a hieratic mystery of music that shatters the boundary of notes and forms that evokes a wider theatrical experience. Taylor isn’t just a pianist of genius; he’s a world-making artist.
Mingus’s two numbers—one an extended composition akin to the moody opening arrangement and a second on which Mingus plays piano and recites, as it bursts from melancholy peroration into a churchy stomp—mark a transition in his work. He was always a composer, whose written music was (like the compositions of Duke Ellington) as significant as his and his bandmates’ improvisations. But Mingus had also had, in the early sixties, several powerful soloists—the earthily wailing tenor saxophonist Booker Ervin, the multi-instrumentalist Rahsaan Roland Kirk, and, above all, Eric Dolphy, who played alto sax, bass clarinet, clarinet, and flute, and whose blend of vehemence and quasi-mathematical constructivism, a fierce vocality and a spontaneous complexity, made him one of the major creators of the time. When he was in Mingus’s band, Mingus gave him lots of room; the compositional element slipped away and Mingus turned his group into a freewheeling jam band. Dolphy left the band in April, 1964; two months later, he was dead, of diabetic shock, at the age of thirty-six. Mingus formed a new group (I wrote here in 2012 about the notable recent release of live recordings by these two bands, with and without Dolphy), but, soon thereafter, he turned back to complex composition, as heard on this broadcast. There’s a good recording of this group from U.C.L.A., recorded a few weeks after the Village Gate performance.
Photograph: Lebrecht Music & Arts/Corbis