Interview with pianist Cecil Taylor, by Chris Funkhouser:
Funkhouser: Let's explore the literary side of the work that you do. With the exceptions of people like Sun Ra, Archie Shepp, and a few others, there aren't many jazz players who choose to work with words as a mode of expression. I wanted to ask you about your poetry, where you're coming from when you write it down or are presenting it vocally. Taylor: Well, I don't know what jazz is. And what most people think of as jazz I don't think that's what it is at all. As a matter of fact I don't think the word has any meaning at all, but that's another conversation... It seems to me that one of the things that is true with every--oh, for instance--like this Irish writer, William Kennedy. In reading some of his stories about life, his family members in Albany--the thing that struck me, the similarity, and the things that makes human beings who are vital electric, is the way they use language to manifest their live responses to the culture that they are in. So I got that from that. In a way, in its own way, it's like when I was very young I read Langston Hughes' Simple stories and it whetted my appetite for the possibility of using language to move outside of the self. One of the most important things that happened to me, really--I've always had difficulty with teachers in school. Right after Pearl Harbor I wrote this poem about December 8th--I don't even know why I remember this--and the teacher said, "Oh, that's a very bad poem." Well, I knew that I should write poetry then. If she said it was bad, then it must be okay. When I was in the Conservatory, there was a Southern woman who taught English the first year that I was there. English--well, English--American language is quite different, actually. She was talking about Tennessee Williams, and she was talking about Streetcar, and she said, 'The language in that play...there are sections of that play that are so good,' she said,'...that I could actually taste it.' And that was one of the most remarkable things that happened to me in the whole four years that I was at the Conservatory. Cause I only had three teachers, really, that were interesting, and all three of them were women. I was sixteen when that was said to me, and I remember of course when Streetcar was on Broadway--I certainly didn't see it, but I did see Talleulah Bankhead do it years later--this was a time when I was in a new environment for me. A new musical community environment, The New England Conservatory [laughs], and whatever that was about. But I was also at that point beginning to construct certain things musically. I was beginning to. And because what was important about this English woman--this English teacher--I wish I could remember her name cause I can see her--and what she gave to me--because she gave it in a not punitive way. Mother always had me reading. Mother spoke French and German and brought Shopenhauer to me when I was eleven years old, but that was something else--that was-- you didn't have a choice there with mother. Boom! That's the way that went. But here was this woman who just said this, and it I heard it. And her emotional dedication to a word--I said, "Wow...that's my dedication to music...you mean it is possible to have that kind of dedication to another art?" So, that. I never understood how musicians could play music for poets and not read poems. I don't understand musicians who can play for dancers and not know how to dance. I mean, it's very interesting to me, you were talking about your research; well, one of the things--before I put words down, I probably have read a thousand words. I have a lot of interests. Dance is certainly one. Architecture, particularly structural engineers. I look at basketball. I'm not interested in it though. I love horses, horseracing. I've never seen a horse race. I can remember Sea Biscuit and those things, though. I used to run when I was young. I do all these exercises everyday. I did write a poem about Nureyev, when I saw him dance. I also wrote a poem about Albert Ayler, too. I think that for me the idea is to--I mean it changes, you know, every ten years or so--but right now I'm going through this whole thing about making these belated discoveries about mother dear. And what that really means is these few years that I have left here to really deal with a certain kind of upward- mobile bourgeoisie nonsense that entrapped a lot of--but anyway, the poetry saved my life, actually. If you have the opportunity to play for people all in different countries, one of the things you begin to discover is that people are--you can find oppressed people all over the world, therefore somewhere along the road you get the idea that it is certainly not about yourself. Any gift that you have is not about that at all. It's about a force that is about the ungiven, the uncreative. It is about the amorphous, and you are at best merely a vessel. And once you begin to understand that [laughs]--the wonderful thing about it is--I was thinking about it today--that the first time I heard Billie Holiday, I heard it in the room of a member of the family who was not very well thought of, and the other part of the family all liked Bing Crosby. And that was alright, but there is a qualitative difference. So in our small way what we attempt to do is to look and see and receive and become a sponge and attempt to make anything that exists as part of the palette to describe whatever it is we think we want to do. And what you want to do is to be as beautiful and as loving and as all-consuming as possible, so that the statement has many, many different implications, and it has many different levels. The only way to do that, seems to me, is to research. I think what my mother did give me unquestionably was that--maybe she didn't quite perceive it this way but--it is wonderful to be able to enjoy what it is I do now as opposed to the disciplinary aura that I had to grow up under. Now I do what I want to do because I love doing it, and it rewards me and I've been fortunate in that I've been told that other people have gotten something from what it is. It is possible to do what it is you decide you want to do with your life. For me that has been the thing that has cured whatever despondency, whatever anger, you know...well, that's that. Funkhouser: You couldn't have been very old when you wrote a poem about Pearl Harbor--so you've been writing from elementary school onward? Taylor: Well, actually, you know teachers--I ran into a lot of teachers where it was very clear to me that if you didn't do what they told you to do, they would try to stop you from doing anything at all. That's what that teachers do. When I went to the Conservatory, it was the same thing, and boy did I fight with those people up there. Actually, I can tell you when I started writing but that wouldn't be very interesting, cause that was all about romance. And of course that's what it is about, isn't it? But I really started writing in 1962 when I went to Europe for the first time. I was writing letters to this poet, who I was quite taken with at the time. That's when I started writing. Funkhouser: You were playing before that. Was there a point where the writing and playing began to coincide somehow? I know I've seen you perform and it's chanting, and all sorts of... Taylor: That's the wonderful thing about maybe never being allowed to get into the business--the music business-- because I was not a very well-behaved person according to the gangsters who control the business. I'm lucky to be alive, really. So what you had to do--and also the fact that what I was doing was considered not very viable. [Laughs] That's a cute word to mean it didn't make any money, or they didn't see how they could make any money. And they would tell you what you were supposed to do. That's the way they are. So, not being malleable that way, the resources that my mother and father gave me, since I didn't have any money--but my father would always give me money. When I wasn't working I always went to see plays on Broadway. Then years later, this woman that I was sort of involved with worked at the Living Theater. So I got a whole new concept, and a whole new thrust of beauty right there, you see. And actually I ran into Baraka around '57. So, what I mean is that one dedication leads to another, especially if it is very important for you to continue to grow, especially when they tell you that "We're not going to allow you to grow in this area." So what does that mean? Meant I had to practice at home. It also meant that I had to look around for other sources of beauty that could aid in what I was doing with the main thing. Then finally, you see, these things mesh, and it takes a while for it to happen. But then, you know, it does. And so therefore there is no possible way that I can have any regrets about not working, where these other people did. Cause I was always working. I just didn't make any money. [Laughter] Funkhouser: You said poetry saved your life . . . Taylor: Yes it did. I had one or two friends that helped. But the work always brought me back. For instance, this work that I'm working on now, which has a lot to do with my mother, actually, and my relationship to her as a property of hers. Unwanted property, it seemed to me, possibly. I mean I have to think of that as a certain reality because of her attempts to kill me at a certain point. Literally. However, the fantastic thing about all of this is that if you survive, then you understand that your parents had parents too. And that must have been a trip. The extraordinary anger that I began to see that was in my family, and resulted in, really, her death at the age of thirty-four, and the death of all people in the family who followed her conception of living, because she was very powerful and very persuasive. And there were at least three people in the family who died of cancer at the age of thirty-four. Given the fact that she had been in silent movies, and that she recited poetry, and that she'd walk into a room and the room would stop--but then she found father, and father was from North Carolina, and he was an agricultural person and she was his dream. She could speak French and German, she knew how to wear clothes, and all of that shit. And then she stopped because we had the only brick house--there were only two brick houses on the block--and pop owned one. She became the lady of the manor. And I became her--so I was tapdancing when I was six. I was entering contests for young virtuosos--I was never a young virtuoso--but she tried to make me--so I was playing Chopin when I was six and all this nonsense. And I was driven. There was no--I was telling someone the other night, I said, 'I've never--I could not be idle'--you had to be doing something. And so of course, she died when I was eleven, twelve--twelve, yeah--and I had a peptic ulcer when I was thirteen. It was just a glorious experience growing up in her house. However, she gave me certain things. She was the eldest of six children, after all; her mother was Cherokee. Her father was never mentioned. Father's father--he had a great deal of problems with him-- he was Kiowa. And all of this I had to discover, and this is the language of--the language of the word is now coming to deal with all of that.
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