Marty Krystall, reeds, with Calvin Keys, guitar, Jerry Peters, piano and Hammond organ, Buell Neidlinger, bass, and Peter Erskine, drums

K2B2 4269

www.k2b2.com

I’ve written elsewhere that, in my judgment, Marty Krystall is the very best of the post-Coltrane reed players. And for anyone still unfamiliar with this remarkable musician (he’s worked and recorded with people like Steve Lacy and Charlie Haden but has largely confined his activities to the Los Angeles area) I can think of no better entrée than the album at hand.

Krystall has said that he wants to surprise himself as well as the listener when he plays. “I want to compose in the moment, spontaneously, and to come up with different sounds. It’s about sounds for me—colors, textures—not licks or notes. I try to get the most juice I can in my tone. And I want to find things on the horns that I couldn’t get to before. I also want to utilize the full capacity of the instruments.”

That statement places Krystall solidly in the realm of the ultra-modernists. But Krystall is hardly a devotee of the arcane. He’s a musician who wants to use his prodigious virtuosity not to intellectually impress or intimidate his audience but to move and shake it. If he’s essentially an emotive player, however, he’s a strikingly disciplined one who never descends to empty pyrotechnics or solipsistic meanderings. Cogent and lucid, his solos can claim a consistently coherent structure and, as highly charged as they may get, are models of focus and compression. Certainly in this album, a celebration of his roots in rhythm and blues, Krystall makes music that is eminently accessible as well as viscerally stirring.

“What I wanted to do here,” Krystall explains, “is recreate a period in my life when I was very much into rhythm and blues, a time, around 1970, when I was in my late teens, and all but consumed by that music.

“It was a busy time for me,” he says, “and I rarely got more than three hours sleep a night. I was teaching woodwinds at a music store in the late afternoon, then making gigs in black R&B clubs in Hollywood and after-hours clubs in south-central L.A. until six in the morning. From 11AM to 3PM it was constant jazz jam sessions. I was living in Venice then, in a court where a lot of musicians lived. We would play in each others garages and musicians from all over Los Angeles County would show up. There was a Hammond organ in one of the garages and I developed my sound mainly by playing over guitars and the Hammond organ.

“By playing R&B,” he adds, “especially in clubs, I also learned how to relate to an audience and how to feed off of it. It was about getting the crowd yelling and screaming. If you could do that then you knew you’d succeeded. If you didn’t you had to figure out what you did wrong and correct it. You could say that I learned how to play performing for black audiences. And, maybe because I was the only Jewish kid on the block when I was growing up and knew a little bit about racism, it was always black music that I gravitated to. I wasn’t interested in West Coast Jazz. My main heroes in that period were John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy. But I was also very taken with people like King Curtis and Junior Walker. I wanted to play funkier and more soulfully and with the energy they had. I would practice before gigs to make sure I was hot.

Marty Krystall

“You have to have talent and the chops to pull it off, of course, but it’s really passion and drive that count. And I learned that from playing R&B and jazz seventeen hours a day for eighteen months.”

To assist him in recapturing what he describes as his “R&B side,” Krystall enlisted musicians who, for the most part, he first encountered in the early ‘70s. And it’s an illustrious bunch. Calvin Keys, guitar, Jerry Peters, piano and Hammond organ, Buell Neidlinger, bass, and Peter Erskine, drums are, each in his way, certified legends.

Calvin Keys, present on six of the tracks, is a consummate musician with the rare ability to straddle the full spectrum of styles from gospel to “free jazz.” Keys has worked with some of the great organ trios, including those led by Jimmy Smith, Jimmy McGriff, Jack McDuff and Groove Holmes. He’s also played with Ray Charles, Tony Bennett, Sonny Stitt, Ahmad Jamal and Pharoah Sanders, among others of comparable stature. Jerry Peters, whom Krystall calls “a genius with so much technique—he performs miracles at the keyboard,” is a Grammy award winner and a songwriter best known for the hit single, “Going in Circles” by the Friends of Distinction. Peters has played with some of the most noteworthy performers and groups of his time, including, Aretha Franklin, Earth, Wind & Fire, Marvin Gaye, Quincy Jones, The Emotions, The Jacksons, Diana Ross, Deniece Williams, Gladys Knight, Al Green and Lionel Ritchie. Peter Erskine, who was a member of Weather Report, is a first-to-call drummer when you’re in need of a brilliant time-keeper—just ask Diana Krall or Linda Ronstadt. And Buell Neidlinger! His résumé includes stints with virtually everybody from Little Esther, Bobby Blue Bland to Gil Evans, John Cage and Cecil Taylor. Is there any kind of music that this singular musician can’t play, or that isn’t enhanced by his playing of it?

Considering that some of these men hadn’t played with Krystall for several decades, the collaborative ensemble work in this set is nothing short of amazing. And so is what these players do as individuals.

Peters, for example, who contributed two terrific numbers to the session, “Round & Round” (with its compelling chords and syncopated beat) and the stunningly lovely, samba-inflected “Hannah’s Tune,” swings mightily throughout on both piano and organ—what a right hand! And, harmonically and melodically, Keys is superbly inventive in his solos, particularly on “Round & Round” and “Tenor Badness.”

But this is Krystall’s date and it’s his extraordinary musical gifts that shine the brightest.

I’m speaking of his capacity for relentlessly swinging, as in, most conspicuously, his flights on “Round & Round,” Thelonious Monk’s “Introspection” and “Beybluhor.” (The latter piece, taking its inspiration from vocal music—opera and R&B—and influenced by Krystall’s experience in a backup role for R&B singers, is based on Peters’s rearranged harmonies of “Beyond the Blue Horizon,” and it’s notable for the interpolation, by Krystall, of his arresting original melody.)

But that’s just for openers. I’m pointing as well to Krystall’s ability to sustain a creative line at breakneck speed, as he does in Monk’s “Skippy,” and to the poignant lyricism of which he’s capable, as evidenced on “Hannah’s Tune” and Billy Strayhorn’s haunting “Blood Count” (an homage to Johnny Hodges). I’m also referring to the depth of his connection to the blues that is manifested on the classic Benny Golson composition, “Stablemates,” on Neidlinger’s “Billy’s Blooze” and on the album’s title number, “Liquid Krystall Displayed” (a take on LCD for those too old to grasp the reference). Not least, I’m talking about the authority with which he embraces and commands the full resources of the tenor saxophone, as demonstrated on “Tenor Badness” (after Sonny Rollins’s Tenor Madness).

Talent. Chops. Passion and drive. These are skills and virtues that Krystall owns in abundance and which he exhibits to perfection in this album—an album that, as I’ve indicated, will afford the listener an excellent introduction to a genuinely outstanding jazz musician.

In this instance it was two Jehovah’s Witnesses.

At the time I bore no animus toward people who presented themselves as fervently religious. Though I deemed them delusional, I recognized both their right to their delusion and their need of it. The proselytizers I encountered were more likely to draw pity from me than to provoke my ire.

So if I had good reason to be put out by the inconvenience they’d caused me, an inconvenience compounded by the ungodly hour they’d picked to pay a call, my reaction to the elderly and finely attired black couple with soft Georgia accents who greeted me—he with a bible in one hand and a straw hat in the other; she wearing a hat bedecked with white and yellow flowers—wasn’t in the least bit hostile. In fact, while I made it clear that I had no use for the message they were delivering, I was as courteous as I could be. I didn’t want to tamper with their fantasy or hurt their feelings and when I closed the door on them it was very gently.

But that was a while back, before religion assumed the weight and influence that it has in our cultural and political affairs and before I understood just where the so-called “True Believers” are coming from.

We tend to allow that, unhinged as we may judge them to be, evangelicals, in their efforts to make converts or to bring “more religion” into the culture, are doing the work of a God they feel with genuine confidence to be real. Some of us might even imagine that they care about our salvation. But this isn’t what’s happening. Dealing with their fear of death, a fear exacerbated by 9/11 and the destruction of the myth of American invincibility, and wanting desperately for a God and the potential for eternal life implicit in the concept of God to exist, the real mission of these people isn’t to share a revelation but to validate beliefs they’re not sure of by securing the agreement of others. To prove the existence of God to themselves by achieving a universal consensus on the matter (the only way to achieve something like certainty about anything) is the true aspiration of the religious right.

And I resent the manifold ways in which their ambition to, for starters, make a formal theocracy of America—a more than adequate means of certifying their beliefs—is already poisoning the lives of the rest of us.

I’m speaking, of course, of their interference with a woman’s freedom to end a pregnancy and of homosexuals ability to marry one another. I’m also talking about the brakes they managed to apply to government sponsored stem-cell research and the role they played in obliging us to endure a George W. Bush for two terms (let alone what his presidency has left in its wake) because he professed to share their faith in Jesus Christ. And I’m referring as well to what turned out to be a politically pivotal quantity of Tea Party candidates that they were instrumental in electing to Congress.

And, again, none of this has been, at bottom, to the purpose of spreading a vision (which could maybe have claimed some level of legitimacy), but rather to, in their own minds, ratify by numbers, law or custom, the presence of a deity.

Since there remains a sufficient population of heathens to challenge their beliefs and to keep their uncertainty alive, reaching their unspoken goal will only become more urgent for the evangelicals. They will get louder and more insistent. And their successes will be more pernicious. Is a President Rick Santorum completely out of the question?

I should say that having a few issues of my own with the prospect of death, and quite capable myself of twisting and distorting reality in order to live in the world with a semblance of equilibrium, I can, even under the present conditions, experience some empathy for the Christian right’s agenda. (And I can also appreciate the necessity and durability of religion itself. I’m always taken aback when people whose minds I admire predict that human beings will one day “outgrow” the need for religion, as if it were merely a stage in our evolution. Like the biologists who are looking for a religion gene, they miss the point. For as long as death is a precondition of life, a need for some kind of invented deity, with a plan for mankind—and a collection of rules and practices which, if scrupulously followed, offer the promise of an afterlife—is going to prevail for a large percentage of humanity.)

But while I’m not insensitive to the evangelicals’ cause that doesn’t make its increasing encroachment on the lives of the secular any more acceptable to me. I repeat: Is a President Rick Santorum out of the question? No. If there was once a time when we could indulge the folks of the Christian right at no substantial cost to ourselves, that’s not the case any longer. Their quest to conscript us into their immortality project has gotten too much out of hand and leaves no room for such generosity. At this point there’s little choice but to do battle with them; to fight their actions at every turn. The consequences for those of us who live for this life rather than the next one have become too dire to let them slide.

K2B2 4069

K2B2 Records
1748 Roosevelt Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90006-5219
k2b2.com

Marty Krystall is a genuine rarity—at once an accomplished and practicing studio musician, and a tenor saxophonist and bass clarinetist who Nat Hentoff could rightly call, “one of the most passionate, powerfully swinging, and just plain unselfconsciously original players in all of jazz.”

Anonymity goes with the studio musician’s territory. That not everybody knows what Hentoff knows about Krystall’s creative dimension is because, with exceptions like four European tours with the bassist Buell Neidlinger and a period in Japan where he journeyed as a soloist, Krystall has largely confined himself to playing in the Los Angeles area where he was born and raised. Were he living and playing in New York there’s no question that Krystall would be recognized as one of the very best of the post-Coltrane reed players. Maybe the best.

Indeed, dynamic and muscular, relentlessly propulsive and endlessly inventive, Krystall’s work, interspersed where called upon with a searing lyricism and always informed by an exceptional musical intelligence, is routinely astonishing. Go directly to the title track, the theme from “Gunsmoke” (which Krystall manages to transmute into a credible, even elevated, jazz tune) or Thelonious Monk’s haunting “Ask Me Now,” for exemplary demonstrations.

Krystall says of his approach that he wants to “surprise myself as well as the listener. I want to compose in the moment, spontaneously, and to come up with different sounds. It’s about sounds for me—colors, textures—not licks or notes. I try to get the most juice I can in my tone. And I want to find things on the tenor or bass clarinet that I couldn’t get to before. I also want to utilize the full capacity of the instruments.“

Artists frequently derive inspiration from what, to others, may seem unlikely sources. Much of Krystall’s inspiration (and this would apply to both of the hats he wears) comes from television shows that he watched growing up, especially “Have Gun, Will Travel,” “Gunsmoke” and “The Twilight Zone.”

“I remember, in 1960, being obsessed with those shows. They had a deep moral compass. Especially the character of Paladin in ‘Have Gun, Will Travel’. He would hire out, but never as an assassin, more like a problem solver. And sometimes he would forego his fee for the opportunity to do something good, like finding justice.

“Paladin was the classic anti-hero, exposing his client’s lunacy or greed. I struggled as a nine-year-old to understand these morality tales, but he was my hero because he was educated, worldly, dressed to the nines, usually accompanied by beautiful women and had his pistol custom made. To me he was like the ultimate studio ‘doubler’ [multi-instrumentalist]. Show up with the finest instruments and play anything that’s put in front of you perfectly. The first time!

“For me, it’s have horns, will travel.

”But it wasn’t just the stories and the characters that captivated Krystall. The musical scores, by composers like Morty Stevens, Bernard Hermann and Leonard Rosenman, seriously impressed him as well. “That same year my dad took me to my first hi-fi and stereo show where we heard the latest recordings of those scores on state-of-the-art audio equipment. Talk about ‘mind-expanding!’ And if that music was very romantic and expressive it was also scary and filled with tension, which appealed to me a lot and still does. Sounding much like what Gil Evans was writing, it had very hip modern chords and was heavily weighted with clarinet and bass clarinet solos. So when my Dad, an amateur pianist, asked me what instrument I wanted to play, it was the clarinet.

“Of course,” Krystall adds, “when I heard Eric Dolphy on the local jazz station, and then Art Blakey and John Coltrane, I realized that this was it for me musically. Tenor sax, bass clarinet and modern jazz, here I come! Yeah, I would listen, in those early days, to people like Trane, Dolphy, Sonny Rollins and Charlie Parker and write out their solos to see how it was done. Ben Webster, too. Buell Neidlinger turned me on to Ben Webster and also to Duke Ellington and Cecil Taylor.”

In addition to fronting groups of his own, Krystall went on to play with other bands, notably Krystall Klear and the Buells, Thelonious, the Word of Mouth Orchestra and the Liberation Orchestra, that included or were led by three outstanding and innovative bassists: Jaco Pastorius, Charlie Haden and Neidlinger. Playing and recording with Buell, Krystall acknowledges, was a major factor in his development as an improviser and composer.

“But I also wanted to make a living,” he unabashedly admits, “and to that purpose, I was determined to become a studio musician as well. When I was fifteen, I learned that to be successful in the field one had to play at least the clarinet, saxophone and flute. I studied the flute and later the oboe and, by the early ‘70s, started to break into the studio scene while earning a reputation for sight reading the most difficult music—like Frank Zappa and Anton Webern—and also as a legit clarinetist who could rock out on tenor. One gig led to another and I became fairly busy as a freelancer. Especially gratifying has been the chance to work with three world-class pianists, Peter Serkin, Brenton Banks and Jerry Peters.”

While continuing to do studio work Krystall has of late become increasingly focused on his own musical adventures, specifically his new band “Mojave”.

Krystall checked out any number of people before he encountered the drummer Sinclair Lott and the bassist J.P. Maramba and knew right away that he’d found the combination for the band that he wanted. It should be noted that Krystall deliberately chose to omit a piano. “Unless you have the absolutely right pianist the piano can inhibit harmonic freedom and get in the way.” In any case, Maramba and Lott are uncommonly skilled and intuitive musicians and it’s hard to imagine Krystall coming up with more suitable partners or a more complete and perfect unit. “We played together,” Krystall says, “and it just happened. They are amazing.”

J.P. Maramba, who takes a justifiable pride in his ability to adapt to any musical situation, has worked with Willie Nelson, Adam Rudolph, L’Esprit d’ Afrique Pan-African Performance Ensemble, Gilbert Castellanos, Bennie Maupin and Ingrid Jenson. Not unlike many musicians he regards the organization of sound from a spiritual perspective and he’s earnest in his belief that “the vibration in the air we call music is, in the most practical sense of the word, magical. Music not only has a way of unifying people and cultures, and all of their nuances, but it can also affect the physical chemistry of your body.”

Maramba contributed the sweet and rhythmically infectious “We’ve Heard It All Before,” to the set and he can be a fascinating soloist, as witness his work on Krystall’s “Trini’s Blues” and Herbie Nichols’ boppish and challenging “Terpsichore” in particular.

Sinclair Lott, whose father, Sinclair Sr., was principal horn of the L.A. Philharmonic has played and/or recorded with Freddie Hubbard, Curtis Fuller, Diane Reeves, Frank Zappa, Big Joe Turner, Dorothy Donegan, Otis Rusch, Tigran Hamasyan, Tierney Stafford, Billy Childs and Bob Sheppard. Lott sustains an extraordinary level of focus and concentration throughout the album and is especially mesmerizing on “Duo at Diablo,” on which Maramba lays out. The depth of his accord with Krystall on this number and the compelling results it yields might put you in mind of Cecil Taylor’s legendary duets with Max Roach, Elvin Jones and Tony Oxley.

And what exactly prompted Krystall to name this band “Mojave” instead of, say, “The Marty Krystall Trio”?

“Mojave is where my roots are. In the late 19th century, my grand uncle left what’s now Poland for America and, after meeting and consulting with the man who would become Barry Goldwater’s father, decided to open a general store (the first of its kind) in the southeastern California desert town of Mojave. My grandfather, the son of a rabbi, came here when he was thirteen. He stepped off the boat, ordered a ham sandwich and, journeying to California where he took a job at the store with my grand uncle, never looked back.

“That was, of course, when Mojave was still the ‘wild west’. And my grandfather would tell me about shootouts on the street and a Chinese cook that nobody messed with because of the hatchet strapped to a shoulder holster that he carried.

“Now if Mojave gives me the connotation of a hard blowing, desolate wind, and a harsh existence, it also reflects a pristine and spiritual beauty. And this is why I call the band ‘Mojave’. It’s to represent that and also to remind me of where I want to come from when I play—a windy plain where the air is clear and all of the stars come out at night.”

Whatever location Krystall may in his mind be coming from when he plays, he is also, as I’ve indicated, coming from a large musical gift. His capacity to stir and shake the emotions is unfailing. His facility on both the tenor saxophone and the bass clarinet is never on display for its own sake, but always dedicated to the service of his fertile imagination. Moreover, his statements are pithy and cogent—there’s no meandering or repetitiveness. He says what he has to say and then it’s on to the next tune. His performances on Ben Webster’s jaunty “Ben Addiction,” where his lines and tone implicitly acknowledge his debt to Webster, Jaki Byard’s “Mrs. Parker of KC,” on which, playing bass clarinet, he honors Eric Dolphy by both emulating and taking him to new places, “Blue Dunes” (“Blue Skies,” actually, but with a new melody that he came up with on the spot), and his own immediately seductive “Renovation Blues,” are, as is true of the aforementioned tunes, all revelatory of a talent that can claim an extraordinary force and singularity.

But Krystall’s brilliance and uniqueness notwithstanding, there’s another reason this group isn’t called “The Marty Krystall Trio”. Maramba and Lott function not as Krystall’s sidemen but as his collaborators. Their artistry and controlled intensity are every bit as prominent as his own—and due in large measure to a remarkable alchemy, the trio has a much bigger sound than its number would suggest. These qualities make for a single and powerful sonic entity and a set that’s loaded with heat, exquisite interplay and wonderful tensions.

Discover the marvelous with Mojave.

Buell Neidlinger Quartet Live at Ravenna Jazz ’87
with Special Guest Steve Lacy
K2B2 Records 3969

K2B2 Records
1748 Roosevelt Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90006-5219
k2b2.com

Buell Neidlinger

Recorded at the Ravenna, Italy jazz festival in 1987, and including some of Thelonious Monk’s classic compositions, this exemplary demonstration of post-bebop jazz presents five remarkable musicians at the very top of their game.

Leading the group is the legendary bassist Buell Neidlinger, a musician distinguished not only by the size of his talent—his extraordinary acuity, accuracy, intonation and tone—but also by what one writer called “the sheer, bewildering diversity of his resume.”

Possessed of an uncanny affinity for virtually every category of music, Neidlinger, as a bassist and cellist, and in clubs, concerts, on records and for TV and films, has worked in every imaginable musical context from polka bands to the Boston and Houston Symphony orchestras. The people with whom he’s played range from Lester Lanin to John Cage and they number among them such luminaries as Cecil Taylor, Ben Webster, Dick Wellstood, Tony Bennett, Herbie Nichols, Frank Sinatra, Barbra Streisand, Igor Stravinsky, Elvis Costello, Gunther Schuller, Billie Holiday, Lester Young and the Beach Boys.

Neidlinger takes a justifiable pride in his history and his ability to shine in any musical situation. But if he’s a monster soloist (go immediately to “Epistrophy” and “Reflections” for confirmation) and not without an ego, his first purpose—the specific use he wants to make of his astonishing virtuosity—has always been to “serve” the music he’s playing, whatever it is. And this attitude extends beyond his role as a sideman. It applies to bands that he fronts as well. He puts bands together, he says, to “play and promote other people’s music.” In this instance, Thelonious Monk’s music.

Neidlinger regards Monk, with Ellington and Herbie Nichols, as the “greatest” of American composers, and bemoaning the fact that, because of their idiosyncratic nature, Monk’s tunes—like those heard here: the riff-rollicking “Epistrophy,” the intensely melodic “Reflections” (among the most beautiful of Monk pieces), the witty and humorous “Little Rootie Tootie” and the compellingly built “Criss Cross”—are largely neglected by current jazz musicians, he wants to correct this circumstance. “Monk is on a level that very few got to,” Neidlinger says. “I mean in the sense that he created a sound and a concept. It was probably Monk who had the most to do with creating those tunes at Minton’s Playhouse—to confuse guys like Coleman Hawkins—and which became bebop. I want to keep the tunes of Monk alive.”

And the band that Neidlinger assembled to accomplish his objective is more than up to the assignment.

Marty Krystall

Nat Hentoff called the tenor saxophonist Marty Krystall, who’s played with Miles Davis and Freddie Hubbard, “one of the most passionate, powerfully swinging, and just plain unselfconsciously original players in all of jazz.” And Kirk Silsbee observed that “Krystall remains one of the strongest reed players in jazz. His mobility on the tenor and ability to retain a fullness in any register is formidable. He can slide effortlessly into the stratosphere and avoid the thinness that plagues so many overtone excursions. Just as quickly, he’ll drop down into a low explosive note for an accent and be up the ladder again.”

I would add that Krystall’s ability to stir the emotions is matched by his stunning inventiveness. (His work on “Epistrophy,” “Reflections” and “Criss Cross” offers especially salient examples of the breadth of his capabilities.) I always thought of John Gilmore as having been the best of the lesser known tenor players in jazz—until I heard Marty Krystall.

The late pianist Brenton Banks came from much the same musical background as Thelonious Monk, but as a gifted violinist as well as a pianist, he spent most of his career in Nashville where, as Concert Master and String Arranger for the likes of Patsy Cline, Chet Atkins and Elvis Presley, he attained something of a legendary stature of his own. In addition to his achievements in country music, Banks was an authentically creative and individuated jazz soloist (check out his right hand on “Epistrophy” and “Reflections”) and, in Neidlinger’s words, “a wonderful comper.” He was also a venerated teacher who could claim Jim Hall and Hank Crawford as his students.

Billy Osborne has a connection to Neidlinger that reaches back to the ‘50s, when they accompanied Chris Connor and Big Joe Turner together. Of Osborne, Neidlinger says: “He’s one of the greatest drummers I’ve played with—he’s right up there with Philly Joe Jones. Coltrane and Miles wanted him to play in their bands.” Osborne, who has worked with Ray Charles and Wes Montgomery among myriad others, is a bright and intuitive drummer, thoroughly versed in all genres of music from R&B to every species of traditional and modern jazz.

Steve Lacy

And Steve Lacy. If Neidlinger views this set as being more about Monk than about him, he also wants it to function as a reminder of the considerable artistry that was the late Steve Lacy’s. Invited to join in on the gig, Lacy, an expatriate since the early ‘70s, came down from his home in Paris to play it. And renewing a musical relationship with Buell that began in 1955, when they both worked with Cecil Taylor (and later with Gil Evans and Jimmy Giuffre), he acquitted himself brilliantly.

Lacy, who single-handedly brought the soprano saxophone into modern jazz and in whose hands the instrument seemed almost to be an organic extension of himself, was no stranger to Monk. On the contrary, a devoted disciple of Monk since the late ’50s (and a member of several of Monk’s bands), Monk compositions, notably in a group he co-led with Roswell Rudd, had long been at the center of Lacy’s repertoire. In fact, he had made of himself the leading interpreter of Monk tunes.

Recognizing, as he said once, that Monk’s “harmony comes from the melody,” Lacy’s expertly composed solos never fail to respect this essential aspect of Monk and they are, everywhere here, beautifully structured—by turns heated and jagged, soaring and lyrical.

So played by elevated musicians, all of whom fully comprehend the intricacies and complexities of Monk’s rhythmic, harmonic and melodic uniqueness, this is a ferociously exhilarating album that from the opening notes of the high-velocity “Skippy” (Monk’s satiric take on “Tea For Two”) crackles with energy and marvelous interplay.

Indeed, feeding, challenging and extending one another, these musicians make each of the tunes models of group interaction (listen to the astonishing unity and the wondrous exchanges on “Little Rootie Tootie” for a prime case in point), and they succeeded in producing a set that, in its entirety, yields new marvels with each hearing.

A master played by masters.

http://www.allaboutjazz.com/php/article.php?id=37025

L to R: Ira Gitler, unidentified, Red Rodney, Robert Levin, Ira Sullivan.

From a Red Rodney recording session for the Signal label at Rudy Van Gelder’s Hackensack, NJ studio. The photo is by Don Schlitten.

More or less officially unveiled with the first New York appearance of the Ornette Coleman Quartet at the Five Spot Café in the fall of 1959, free jazz (or new black music, space music, new thing, anti-jazz or abstract jazz as it would variously be labeled), gave new dimension to the perennial “where’s the melody?” complaint against jazz.

For most of the uninitiated, what the Coleman group presented on its opening night was in fact sheer cacophony.

Four musicians (a saxophonist, trumpeter, bassist and drummer) abruptly began to play—with an apoplectic intensity and at a bone-rattling volume—four simultaneous solos that had no perceptible shared references or point of departure. Even unto themselves the solos, to the extent that they could be isolated as such in the density of sound that was being produced, were without any fixed melodic or rhythmic structure. Consisting, by turns, of short, jagged bursts and long meandering lines unmindful of bar divisions and chorus measures they were, moreover, laced with squeaks, squeals, bleats and strident honks. A number ended and another began—or was it the same one again? How were you to tell? No. No way this madness could possibly have a method.

But umbilically connected to the emergent black cultural nationalism movement, the madness did indeed have a method. The avowed objective of the dramatic innovations that musicians like Ornette, Cecil Taylor—and, in their footsteps, Sunny Murray, Andrew Cyrille, Archie Shepp, Bill Dixon, Albert Ayler, Jimmy Lyons, Eric Dolphy and (the later period) John Coltrane, among hundreds of others—initiated and practiced from the late ‘50s into the early ‘70s, was to restore black music to its original identity as a medium of spiritual utility. When these men abandoned an adherence to chord progressions, the 32-bar song form, the fixed beat and the soloist/accompanist format, and began to employ, among other things, simultaneous improvisations, fragmented tempos and voice-like timbres, they were very deliberately replacing, with ancient black methodologies, those Western concepts and systems that had, by their lights, worked to subvert and reduce black music in America to either a pop music or (for many of them no less a corruption of what black music was supposed to be) an art form.

Alan Silva, a one-time bassist with Cecil Taylor and then the leader of his own thirteen-piece orchestra, made the point in an interview I did with him for Rolling Stone.

“I don’t want to make music that sounds nice,” Silva told me. “I want to make music that opens the possibility of real spiritual communion between people. There’s a flow coming from every individual, a continuous flow of energy coming from the subconscious level. The idea is to tap that energy through the medium of improvised sound. I do supply the band with notes, motifs and sounds to give it a lift-off point. I also direct the band, though not in any conventional way—like I might suddenly say ‘CHORD!’ But essentially I’m dealing with improvisation as the prime force, not the tune. The thing is, if you put thirteen musicians together and they all play at once, eventually a cohesion, an order, will be reached, and it will be on a transcendent plane.”

(I commented in the interview that “Silva says his band wants to commune with the spirit world and you aren’t sure that it doesn’t. With thirteen musicians soloing at the same time, at extraordinary decibel levels, astonishingly rapid speeds and with complete emotional abandon for more than an hour, the band arrives not only at moments of excruciating beauty, but at sounds that rising in ecstatic rushes and waves and becoming almost visible in the mesmerizing intensity, weight and force of their vibrations, do for sure seem to be flushing weird, spectral things from the walls, from the ceiling, from your head.”)

Of course not all of these musicians shared Silva’s position entirely. Some saw the music as an intimidating political weapon in the battle for civil rights and exploited it as such. Others, like Taylor, did and quite emphatically, regard themselves as artists. For Taylor, a pianist and composer who took what he needed not just from Ellington and Monk, but from Stravinsky, Ives and Bartók, it wasn’t about jettisoning Western influences on jazz, but about absorbing them into a specifically black esthetic.

For the most part, however, disparities among the younger musicians of the period amounted to dialects of the same language. All of them shared the “new black consciousness”—a new pride in being black—and their reconstruction of jazz, their purging of its Western elements, or their assertion of black authority over those elements, was, to one degree or another, intended to revive and reinstate the music’s first purpose.

Silva saw broad extra-musical ramifications in his procedures. He believed that by rejecting all externally imposed constraints the inherent goodness in men would surface and enable them to function in absolute harmony with both nature and each other. “Man,” he said to me once, coming off an especially electrifying set. “In another ten years we won’t even need traffic lights we’re gonna be so spiritually tuned to one another.”

And I have to say that I agreed with him.

This was, after all, a period in history when “restrictions” of every conceivable kind, from binding social and sexual mores to (with the moon shot) the very law of gravity, were successfully being challenged. And if you were regularly visiting Timothy Leary’s “atomic” level of consciousness, and if you could call a girl you’d been set up with on a blind date and she might say, “Let’s ‘ball’ first and then I’ll see if I want to have dinner with you,” you could be forgiven your certainty that nothing short of a sea change in human nature itself was taking place.

And some of us who regarded Western values as both the cause of all ill (had they not brought us to the brink of annihilation with the hydrogen bomb?), and the principle impediment to such a transformation, saw the new black music as leading the way, as the veritable embodiment of what Herbert Marcuse called “the revolution of unrepression.”

In so heady a time, earnest unself-conscious debates about the relative revolutionary merits of free jazz and rock—the other musical phenomenon of the period—were not uncommon.

I remember a conversation I had with John Sinclair, the Michigan activist, poet and author of Guitar Army (and the co-author, with me, of Music & Politics).

John took the position that rock was the true “music of the revolution.”

No, I argued, rock did stand against the technocratic, Faustian western sensibility. It did, and unabashedly, celebrate the sensual and the mystical. But in these respects it only caught up to where jazz had always been. In contrast to what some of the younger black musicians were up to—the purging of white elements African music had picked up in America—rock was simply the first hip white popular music.

Rock, it was my point, never got beyond expressing the sentiment of revolution while free jazz, by breaking with formal Western disciplines—by going “outside,” as the musicians termed it, of Western procedures and methods and letting the music find its own natural order and form—got to an actualization of what true revolution would be. Rock’s lyrics, I said, promoted, in many instances, the idea of a spiritual revolution, but musically rock remained bound to the very traditions and conventions that its lyrics railed against and the audience never got a demonstration or the experience of authentic spiritual communion. Rock’s lyrics were undermined and attenuated in the very act of their expression by the system used to express them. The new jazz, on the other hand, achieved freedom not just from the purely formal structures of western musical systems, but, implicitly, from the emotional and social ethos in which those structures originated.

As I say, it was a heady time.

Now, of course, free jazz, in anything resembling a pristine form just barely exists, and obviously it has ceased to exist altogether as a revolutionary movement. Like other emblematic movements of the epoch with which it shared the faith that a new kind of human being would surface once all structure and authority that wasn’t internal in origin was rejected, free jazz was ultimately ambushed by its naiveté.

But on purely musical terms free jazz has not been without an ongoing impact. If it never achieved what Alan Silva expected it to, it did (however contrary to its original ambition), expand the vocabulary and the field of options available to mainstream jazz musicians. And while they function today in what are essentially universes of their own, Taylor, Coleman, Murray, Cyrille, Shepp and Dixon are still very much around and continuing to discover the marvelous.

Indeed, stripped though they may be of their mystique as harbingers of an imminent utopia, these extraordinary musicians continue to produce musical miracles as a matter of course. For an always compelling demonstration, try to catch Cecil in one of his live performances—what he would call “exchanges of energy”—with drummers like Tony Oxley.

In a bad time in every department of the culture, a time of rampant—often willful—mediocrity, I could name no better tonic.

Edited remarks on the ‘60s from the interview that followed.

It’s admittedly facile to cast it this way, but you could say that what we mean by the “‘60s” began with the Cuban Missile Crisis and ended with the moon shot—the moon shot and the Yippies failed attempt to levitate the Pentagon and shake out the “demons” that inhabited it.

At bottom the ‘60s were a reaction to the prospect of total annihilation posed by the invention of the hydrogen bomb and they were rooted in the belief that what was wrong, what had brought us to this place, was the denial and suppression of our true selves, of the human beings we were intended to be.

This belief—variously shaped, nourished and focused by a conflation of psychedelic drugs, birth control pills, the popularization of Freudian psychology and Eastern philosophies, glaring racial and gender inequities and a clearly unjustified war in Vietnam—opened virtually every tradition and institution, every custom and convention and every embodiment and instrument of authority, order and structure, to attack. On one level or another everything from the anti-war, civil rights and woman’s rights movements, to the anti-materialism and sexual abandon of the period, to spontaneous prose, rock and free jazz, stemmed from the conviction that somewhere in antiquity humanity had taken the wrong path and that the course could be corrected.

The enemy was the superego, the cultural, social and psychological restraints we’d inflicted on ourselves. Destroying the superego would yield the good human beings we were supposed to be. It was, again as Marcuse described it, a “revolution of unrepression.” We wanted to abolish the apparently arbitrary and misbegotten rules that artificially limited us and led to deluded thinking and behavior. We wanted, ultimately, to abolish the constricting forces of guilt and shame themselves. Guilt and shame were invented by authority, they were trips governments and parents laid on you to keep you in line. We wanted to take an unfettered pride and joy in our bodies. We wanted to be free of the guilt and shame that had crippled and disfigured us.

This is where Jerry Rubin was coming from when he exhorted us to kill our parents.

Of course I’m talking about what the ‘60s were in their deepest aspirations. The vanguard figures—like Timothy Leary, Alan Watts, Norman Brown, Allen Ginsberg, Marcuse—envisioned a kind of benign anarchy, a society with no need for governments or police; a society ordered by natural needs, appetites and rhythms and made up of men free of neurosis and in perfect harmony with both nature and other men.

And fueled as it was by the sheer number of people involved (and in what seemed every corner of the culture) I don’t think the sense of utopian possibility we were feeling could possibly be exaggerated. Certainly the intensity of the psychic fevers we were experiencing in the East Village (which to me was the epicenter) can’t be overstated. In the East Village, and in addition to all manner of radical political activity, there was an amazing pullulation of iconoclastic art in every category—dance, music, theater, poetry, painting. People like Ginsberg, Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Roi Jones (Amiri Baraka), Kate Millet, Yvonne Ranier, Meredith Monk, Ed Sanders and the Fugs (I’m forgetting a couple of dozen other major players) were all living and working within a one-mile radius and feeding, challenging, validating and energizing one another.

But upheavals like this were hardly limited to New York. They were occurring everywhere—San Francisco, Paris, on every college campus and in the smallest towns. And, Jesus, we were going to the fucking moon—successfully breaking the very law of fucking gravity!

So those of us who were sucked into the vortex of the ‘60s can maybe be forgiven the fact that we were failing to recognize something very basic—that we were challenging a reality that was beyond our capacity to fundamentally change. There was, after all, only so far we could go without entering into a void. We could tinker with social, cultural, economic and political systems—make reforms, expand our horizons, achieve more justice—but essentially society already reflected the best we could do.

I mean we didn’t recognize (and I’m standing behind Ernest Becker here) that the very problems we were attempting to overcome—the constraining social and sexual codes, the emotional hang-ups and the destructive tendencies we wanted to jettison—were actually working solutions to our worst and deepest problem, the problem of mortality. (We also didn’t appreciate that guilt and shame weren’t created by society, but were built into our essence, that they were a natural consequence of living under a death sentence.)

We didn’t understand the legitimacy and necessity of repression and delusion. We didn’t understand (I’ve said all this elsewhere, but I think it bears repeating) that as debilitating as repression and delusion were they enabled us to deny and distort certain untenable truths of existence and to make an otherwise intolerable condition somewhat manageable. We didn’t realize that we had no choice, that what made us crazy, stupid and destructive (what, for an obvious example in the current world—and to the objective of transcending death in heaven—has spawned all these suicide bombers and Christian Fundamentalists) was our profound and abiding need to mitigate the terror that the fact of death causes us. We didn’t see that the reality of the human condition required us to be constricted and insane.

Off-the-wall as it sounds, you could say that the hydrogen bomb was invented in order to create, for its inventors at least, a controllable and therefore relatively comforting death locus.

But in our millennial zeal we were oblivious to such things and I think that at the Pentagon and with the Apollo landing, we were secretly expecting some kind of palpable divine ratification, expecting God to show His face and prove us right. That didn’t happen, of course. Our acid visions turned out to have no physical application at the Pentagon. And the moon was only a barren rock—no Kubrickian monolith buried there to give blessing to the project. It was disappointments like these, disappointments equal in their size to the size of our ambition, that took the heart out of the ‘60s.

It wasn’t long afterwards, remember, that mind-expanding drugs began to be replaced—and necessarily—by mood-elevating stimulants like cocaine.

Beyond the moon shot it was just the motor revolving down after it’s been shut off. I mean the ‘60s are commonly judged to have ended when we finally withdrew from Vietnam. But they’d already expired at the foot of the Pentagon and in the deserts of the moon.

Cecil Taylor

In the summer of 1962, Cecil lands a three-month, four-night-a-week gig at The Take 3 coffee house on Bleecker Street. A large, nondescript room with a stage at the back end and a couple of dozen tables of various shapes and sizes, The Take 3 is right next door to The Bitter End where Woody Allen had performed just weeks before. (Allen was second on the bill and I’d thrown him a quick couple of lines in the Village Voice column—something about how this new comic exploited his appearance to good advantage.)

For Cecil, 33 now, The Take 3 experience will be important for the opportunity its extraordinary duration affords him to develop new ideas and achieve deeper levels of interaction with the two musicians he brings with him, Jimmy Lyons, alto saxophone, and Sunny Murray, drums. (The trio will be joined on occasion by either Buell Neidlinger or Henry Grimes on bass, but most of the time there’s no bass player.)

For me, 23, and never happier than when I’m in a jazz club and in the company of musicians I admire, it’s a chance to hang in my element on a semi-regular basis. But it’s something else as well. This is 1962. An increasing number of us live with the conviction that a seismic change in human consciousness is both possible and imminent. We also share a belief that the New Jazz, in its break with established forms and procedures, and with its resurrection of ancient black methodologies, is showing the way. “Man,” the bassist Alan Silva (coming off an hour-long, 13-piece collective improvisation one night at another venue) can say to me, “in ten years we won’t even need traffic lights we’re gonna be so spiritually tuned to one another.”

At The Take 3, I’ll feel myself to be at the very center of the universe.

I mention Cecil’s engagement in the column a few days before he opens and maybe six people a night show up in the first week. The following week, impervious to criticism that I’m functioning as Cecil’s unofficial publicist, I write what amounts to a paean to him. I also discuss a simultaneous Monk date at the Five Spot. (Monk, of course, is one of Cecil’s principle influences.) The Voice titles this column “The Monk and the Taylor” and gives it a banner front page headline. The next night I arrive at The Take 3 and see that the proprietors have hung a large sign over the entrance:

“CECIL TAYLOR! ‘STARTS WHERE MONK LEAVES OFF!’—VILLAGE VOICE”

Not exactly the way I had put it, but so what? The column and the sign serve their purpose. From this point on the room is sometimes filled to capacity.

Among the musicians who come on a night that I’m there (and who would have come without the hype) are John Coltrane and Eric Dolphy. When the last set ends they sit at a table with Cecil, Anne (my girlfriend then) and me, and a love fest breaks out. John says to Cecil that he’s “awestruck” by him. Eric calls Cecil “the spaceman—the astronaut!” After Cecil tells Eric that Eric is “about to become great,” I raise my hand and say, “So what about me?” Everybody laughs except Eric. I can see him thinking: Wait a minute. Should I know…? Does Bob play an instrument?

John and Cecil had recorded together in 1958 and a word on the album they made, and their musical relationship in general, is in order here. The album, Hard Driving Jazz, was originally a Cecil date and later reissued under Coltrane’s name as Coltrane Time. It was certainly an interesting album but it turned out to be less than terrific.

John Coltrane

Tom Wilson, an early champion of Cecil’s and the producer of his first record, Jazz Advance, produced this one as well. He also chose the sidemen, all of whom— trumpeter Kenny Dorham, bassist Chuck Israels, drummer Louis Hayes and tenor saxophonist Coltrane, too—were serious beboppers and, with the exception of Coltrane, very much set in their ways.

Tom believed that he was putting something seminal together, something that would foreshadow where, following Cecil’s lead, bebop might go from here. But surrounding Cecil with a group composed largely of intransigent beboppers was counterproductive to say the least. While Coltrane acquitted himself decently, Dorham (a splendid bebop trumpet player) was incensed by Cecil’s “eccentric” comping and he made no effort to conceal his feelings. For their parts, Israels and Hayes could only struggle with the rhythmic challenges Cecil posed.

But the album would still have failed to predict bebop’s future even if these men had been more flexible. Although it wasn’t entirely clear at the time, Cecil was in the process of creating a discrete system of his own; if anything, he was shedding bebop. (It would be Coltrane who’d deliver bebop to its outer limits.) Given this circumstance, what a Cecil Taylor record needed was musicians inclined and prepared to take his journey with him. Cecil had been opposed to Dorham’s inclusion on the date—he’d wanted Ted Curson, a younger trumpet player who was very much in sync with him. And he hadn’t been so sure about using Coltrane either. That John would be more capable than the others of taking Cecil on wasn’t enough. (Jimmy Lyons, whom he didn’t encounter until 1960, became Cecil’s most congenial supporting player. Jimmy survived for years on odd jobs in order to be available if Cecil had work, and when Jimmy needed a new saxophone Cecil rewarded his loyalty by buying him one. “It had to be a Selmer, so that’s what he got,” Cecil told me. When Jimmy died in 1986, it was months before Cecil could bring himself to go near a piano again.)

Probably the closest thing to a successful number from the Hard Driving Jazz recording sessions, Mel Tormé’s “Christmas Song”— “For the Noël market,” Cecil said—was left out of the album.

By 1962, of course, Coltrane was all but possessed by the Free Jazz players. He was both their patron (he gave them money and employed many of them in his band) and their student. “He loved us,” Archie Shepp would say. But as far as Cecil’s approach was concerned, there was only so much that John could use. “That’s too complicated,” he remarked about it once, and he derived a lot more from Archie, Eric, Ornette Coleman and Albert Ayler, among others.

But Coltrane was always prepared to honor Cecil. I’m thinking of a night at Birdland a year or so later. John is about to go on as Cecil and a small group of us come in. We walk past the bar where Pee Wee Marquette, the club’s midget and famously nasty emcee, is saying to the bartender—and just loud enough for us to hear—“How much more of this ‘Greenwich Village’ jazz am I supposed to take?” John sees Cecil and says something to McCoy Tyner who’s already playing an intro. Tyner abruptly quits the number he’s started and they open the set instead with “Out of This World.”

.

Another musician who comes to The Take 3 doesn’t stay very long.

It’s between sets and the band is backstage when I hear something going on at the door. I turn to look and see Coleman Hawkins standing there. Coleman Hawkins! The “Bean” himself!

I can’t make out what Hawkins is saying, but I hear the girl who collects the admission charge say: “Everybody pays a dollar, Sir.”

I see what’s happening and I want to rise from my chair and drop a dollar onto the girl’s table, but I can’t do anything. I’m frozen. Coleman Hawkins!

And it’s over too fast. Hawkins glares at the girl, then turns and splits.

“Maybe ‘Bean’ didn’t have a bean,” Cecil says when I tell him about it.

.

So what about me?

On the same night as Hawkins’s abortive visit, Cecil and I leave The Take 3 together. In the years ahead I’ll grow up a little and how I relate to Cecil, who I met in 1956 and who quickly assumed the role of an older brother, will change.  But as I’ve made evident elsewhere, in this period of my life I’m not someone you’d describe as perfectly centered and no serious time spent in Cecil’s company can pass for me without a certain issue erupting. I refer to my unrealized and maybe never to be realized, creative writing aspirations and to the envy and resentment that will unfailingly be triggered in me at one point or another.  Cecil is a genuine artist. The real thing. I’m chronically “blocked” and without any clear sense of what I want to say or how to proceed. (If a part of me is counting on osmosis with him, it isn’t working.) In Cecil’s words, spoken without malice—to be straightforward about such matters, at whatever the cost, is central to the stance he’s taken in the world—I’m a “person of artistic persuasion.” It’s a phrase that he’s used more than once and it embarrasses and infuriates me. But anything that makes me too conscious of the contrasts between us can set me off. When that happens my pattern is to become aggrieved and petulant and then, in a paroxysm of indignation and vainglorious self-assertion, to withdraw from him, sometimes for months. In this particular instance, however, a separation at least is forestalled by Cecil in a way I could not have anticipated.

With the completion of an evening’s last set, Cecil’s usually eager to check out what’s going on in clubs that are still open. But on this night, a sultry night in late August, he’s not feeling well and he wants to go home. I need to get home as well—to finish an overdue Blue Note liner. “You’re killing me, Robert,” Frank Wolff had said to me earlier on the phone. “Frank,” I told him, “I’m suicidal myself. This is the fourth Jimmy Smith album you’ve assigned me. Didn’t you get that I had nothing to say about him the first time? Why doesn’t Joe Goldberg have to do these?”

I plan to accompany Cecil as far as Second Avenue.

“What’s the matter with you?” I say once we’re outside. “You don’t have the clap again? I warned you not to sit on public piano stools.”

Cecil, who’s looking a little gray, grimaces. “Ulcer attack,” he says. “I have something to take at the apartment.”

The stomach ulcer has been a persistent concern for Cecil (he’s convinced it will soon become something lethal) and waiting for traffic to pass on the corner of LaGuardia Place, I’m about to ask him if he’s seen his doctor recently when this guy I’d noticed standing outside The Take 3 approaches us. “Excuse me, Mr. Taylor,” he says—and to me, “Excuse me, Sir.” He’s black and around my age.

“Mr. Taylor,” he says, “I just wanted to tell you how amazing I think you are and how much I love your music. No one can play the piano like you do.”

Cecil smiles. “Thank you,” he says.

“I wish I could be a musician,” the guy goes on. “I’ve taken lessons, but I’m no good at it. I just don’t have the aptitude for it, I guess.”

Cecil looks at him and says gently, “Then be a good listener.”

Not a bad answer, I think, and I’m instantly rankled by it.

“What empty shit,” I say after the guy—nodding earnestly, then smiling broadly and vigorously shaking my hand as well as Cecil’s—backs off. “‘Be a good listener.’ Was that the best you could do?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Cecil says as we resume walking. I see that his countenance has brightened considerably. Cecil responds well to adulation.

“I mean that’s not what he wanted to hear,” I say.

“He seemed satisfied to me, Bob,” Cecil says. “But then you may be right. Since when do I give people what they want to hear?”

“He wanted you to tell him the secret,” I say. “When he digests what you said he’s going to sink into a profound depression.”

Cecil gives me a sidelong glance. “Are you talking about him, Bob? You’re not starting some shit here, are you?”

I ignore this. I’m remembering something I’d all but buried, but which is suddenly of great importance to me, and I say: “Come to think of it, since when do you really give much of anything, even when you say you will?”

Cecil stares at me. He obviously has no idea what I’m talking about.

“Cecil,” I say. “What the fuck happened to ‘Bobt’?”

“What the fuck happened to who?” He says.

“To ‘Bobt’, I say. “ Shit, man. Not ‘who’. What! ‘Bobt’!”

“Bob,” he says laughing at me.  “Listen to you. Are you’re having a fit of some sort? Should I take you to an emergency room?”

“You said you were composing a tune for me and that you were calling it ‘Bobt,’” I say. “That was a year ago. I’ve waited long enough, don’t you think? Where is it? I want it.”

“You want it?” Cecil says.  “Have you collapsed into an infantile state, man? Do I need to remind you of the vicissitudes of the creative process?”

“In other words you never wrote it,” I say.

“‘In other words, please be kind’,” Cecil sings. “ ‘In other words…’”

“You were bullshitting me,” I say. “Will you cut the crap and give me a straight…”

“It was absorbed by something else.” Cecil nods to himself after he hears what he said. He bought a moment with the musical interlude and he’s pleased with the answer he’s come up with.

“‘Absorbed by something else’?” I say. “That’s beautiful. Well you know what, Cecil? I’m going to write a poem for you—a poem I’m going to finish—and I’m going to call it…”

“‘The Magnificent One’?” He says. “‘The Immortal…’?”

“I’m going to call it ‘The Insufferable Self-Centered Prick’,” I say.

“Bob,” he says, his hand on his chest, “Are you saying that I’m self-centered? Me? The amazing Cecil?”

“I’ll tell you what I’m saying,” I say. “I don’t need this shit—that’s what I’m saying. The one thing I do get back from knowing and touting the ‘amazing Cecil’ is reflected glory, and it definitely has some practical benefits—I can point to two occasions when it’s actually gotten me laid. [For some reason, Cecil finds this little joke hilarious.] But is it worth the indignities I have to suffer? Will it make me immortal, too? No, you can shove reflected glory, man. I don’t have to settle for it anyway. I’m making some moves. I’m going to be my own Cecil Taylor.”

Cecil feigns a horrified expression “You…you…” he blusters. “You would dare take my name, the name of Cecil?”

I stifle a laugh. “And I’m not exactly beginning at zero either…”

“Listen,” he says, “there’s something I haven’t told…”

“…Maybe it isn’t really ‘writing’,” I continue, “but…”

“…The column?” He says. “You’re talking about the column? I appreciate what you’ve done with it but no, you know it isn’t ‘writing’.”

Ready, in the wake of this remark, to take permanent leave of him, to never even listen to a record of his again, I say: “I just conceded as much. But fuck you, Cecil. No one’s ever told me their three-year-old daughter could do it.”

Cecil stops walking and grabs my shoulder. “Robert,” he says, “I haven’t mentioned this.”

“What?” I snarl, pushing his hand off me.

“Awhile back,” he says, “that poem you wrote…the one you gave me …”

“That poem?” I say. “That poem sucked. It was awful.”

He shakes his head. “Something about that poem…it made me want to write poems myself. I started writing poetry the next day.”

“I didn’t know you were writing poetry,” I say. “How fucking dare you.”

He laughs. “I haven’t been able to stop. Not since I read that poem. No one’s seen any of it yet. I guess I’ll have to show it to you now.”

I take this in. I’m still only a “person of artistic persuasion”—at best I’m destined to be a footnote in his biography. But I’m also something more than Cecil’s flack now. I’ve managed to have an impact in a way that really matters to me. “Bobt”? Who needs “Bobt”? I regard what Cecil’s imparted as a gift beyond measure.

“I’m glad to see that you’re feeling better,” I say a moment later when we arrive at Second Avenue. “So Coleman Hawkins came to check you out. Too bad he didn’t want to pay for the privilege.”

Cecil shrugs. “We could have used his dollar,” he says. Then he says: “I’m thinking about going to Slug’s. Come with me.”

“Sure. Yeah.” I say.

If Frank Wolff dies I’ll find a way to live with the guilt.

.

[Following a trip to Scandinavia in the fall of 1962, Cecil, Sunny and Jimmy played The Take 3 again in 1963. It was during the second engagement that Albert Ayler made an impromptu appearance. Since, at this point in time, I tend to recall both gigs as one, I’m taking the liberty of reporting on the event here.]

On a night I’d have regretted missing, a heavy presence causes me to turn my head in the middle of a set and I see this dude with an odd patch of white on his goatee and wearing a green leather suit. He’s holding a gleaming tenor saxophone. (Sunny will tell me that he polishes it every day.) I know who he is. Sunny and Jimmy had both spoken about Albert Ayler, the “new bitch on tenor” they’d met and played with in Copenhagen on the recent tour. Before they left Denmark, Cecil had invited him to “say hello” when he returned to the States.

But Albert isn’t wasting time with any formalities. The cap is already off his mouthpiece and he’s edging his way between the tables toward the bandstand. Sunny says to Cecil, “Albert’s here,” and though Cecil barely raises his head that’s enough for Albert to mount the stage.

I write this half a century after the fact, but the first sounds Albert makes remain as vivid and immediate to me as if I’d heard them only moments ago.

Albert Ayler

It’s his vibrato. The breadth, the amplitude, of his vibrato is astonishing. (It will redefine the scope of the tenor saxophone and Coltrane will admit to having dreams about trying to duplicate it.) If it succeeds in chasing a portion of the room into the street, the rest of us are riveted by it. And we are no less transfixed by what follows. Coming from an obvious rhythm and blues matrix, and reminiscent of the shouters and honkers of the ‘40s and ‘50s, what Albert proceeds to play—with suddenly shifting meters and no regard for tonal centers—isn’t a sequence of notes so much as an amalgam of sounds. Primal sounds. Ecstatic sounds. Achingly mournful sounds. Grotesque and funny sounds.

Albert’s intention, he’ll explain to me, is to reassert black music’s original function, to “conjure up holy spirits.” I can’t vouch for his success in that regard, but I can say that for me what he’s doing is equal in its emotional impact to the first time I heard Cecil.

And Cecil. When Albert begins to play, Cecil laughs and his posture changes noticeably. He’s recalibrating to accommodate Albert. Sunny and Jimmy respond in the same fashion. They embrace Albert and unite with him. Half an hour passes before the number he cut in on is completed.

Of the many gifted musicians who belonged to the New Thing’s second wave, Albert, an astronaut and an archeologist all at once, was the monster. The full range of his unique vision wasn’t revealed the night he sat in with Cecil, of course. But later, in bands of his own and with the pre-Louis Armstrong-through-Ornette Coleman spectrum of material he would utilize, Albert created a fascinating body of innovative work. Many of us took for granted that he’d be the next major force in the music.

In 1964, when I’d be living with “Pretty,” Albert came to the apartment several times to hang out and also to do an interview. The tape of that interview (and a tape of an interview with Betty Carter) was inside the Wollensak case when I was burglarized. I never got the chance to transcribe it.

Albert would die in 1970, apparently by his own hand. A year after that, in the process of moving to the West Village with Carolyn, I discovered a leather tie on the floor of the bedroom closet. It was caked in plaster dust, but I was able to make out the letters “AA” written in ink on the label. My first thought was, how the hell did this get here? Had Albert removed his tie while we talked and forgotten about it? Had “Pretty” found it and, for safekeeping, hung it in the closet where, forgotten by her as well, it had eventually been jostled from its hook? After a moment I realized that the circumstances behind the tie’s appearance in my closet were probably not so innocent—and I could smile about it now. When I met her, “Pretty” had already “balled” every living entry in the Encyclopedia of Jazz and cohabiting with me had in no way discouraged her from moving on to the supplementary volume. Why not Albert?

Speaking of girl singers, I should note that in the course of Cecil’s run a couple of remarkable vocalists, Jeanne Lee and Sheila Jordan, work opposite him from time to time. Another performer who turns up (making his debut, as I remember it) is Tiny Tim. “What the fuck is this?” two people at separate tables exclaim in unison when he launches into “Tiptoe Through the Tulips.”

I should also add that someone who doesn’t show is Ornette. Eventually Ornette and Cecil will be acknowledged as the dual progenitors of the New Music, but they’ve been competing for sole ownership of this distinction from the start and, declarations of mutual respect aside, they aren’t especially supportive of one another. Ornette, who’s the better known of the two, clearly wants to protect his advantage. A few days after the “Monk and Taylor” column I’m walking on 8th Street, head down against a driving rain, when my path is suddenly blocked. I look up and it’s Ornette.

“You must make a lot of money writing for that paper,” he says and brushes past me.

So much for the parties at Ornette’s loft.

(There’d been talk about Ornette and Cecil recording together since the late ‘50s, but nothing ever materialized. Around 2003, preparations for an album by them were actually underway when Ornette decided not to go ahead with the project.)

.

Just days before the gig will come to its conclusion, and determined to savor every last moment, I’m seated at a table right near the stage. The band has been “exchanging energies” for forty minutes. Each time the torrent of sound begins to ebb and you think, that’s it, they’re spent, they can’t possibly have anything left, an apparently tossed-off phrase, a single note, reignites the process and the music builds to even greater levels of intensity than it had reached before. (Buell Neidlinger, who’s here tonight, isn’t going along at this point. He’s stopped playing and he looks to be exhausted—or worse. Eyes closed, his glasses askew, his head is hanging over his bass at an alarmingly strange angle. Has he broken his neck?)

I’m facing straight ahead and totally absorbed in what’s taking place, when Jack Kerouac bounds onto the bandstand in front of me. Appearing to be in a…well…beatified condition, he twice, and very slowly, makes a circle around the entire group. Then he walks between and around each of the individual players. Finally he bends down and slides under the piano where, lying on his back, he folds his arms across his chest. At the end of the piece (some twenty minutes later), he emerges from beneath the piano and extends his hand to Cecil.

“I’m Jack Kerouac,” he says, “and I’m the greatest writer in the world.” A startled Cecil (who at first isn’t sure who this cat is and who’d apparently been unaware of his presence) recovers quickly. Accepting Kerouac’s hand he says: “I’m Cecil Taylor and I’m the greatest pianist in the world.”

Me, I’m thinking, Jesus, this is too much—it’s way past too much. And though it occurs to me to say to them: “I’m Robert Levin and I’m the greatest ‘person of artistic persuasion’ in the world,” that’s just a reflex. I’ve got, right now, no need to say anything—certainly nothing bitter. No. If reflected glory turns out to be the best kind I’ll get I’ll take it. Right now my simple proximity to this is enough to make me feel like I’ll live forever.

To anyone still questioning the validity of the systems and methods at which Cecil Taylor and Ornette Coleman arrived, I would first of all recommend that he listen more attentively to the work of those men. But I’d also suggest that he make it a point to hear the strong and very exciting musics of an emergent collection of musicians from Chicago who constitute what is already a third generation of New Music players (Ayler, Shepp, Dolphy, etc., representing the second), and whose very existence serves to certify the innovations which Taylor and Coleman forged.

Anthony Braxton

Anthony Braxton, Maurice McIntyre, Joseph Jarman, Lester Bowie, Roscoe Mitchell, Malachi Favors, LeRoy Jenkins, Leo Smith, Steve McCall and Henry Threadgill are just some of the gifted and mostly very young musicians involved in the Chicago movement. These men have not only embraced the new aesthetic, they are adding remarkable dimensions to it. In addition to the utilization of extraordinary instruments like harmonicas, accordions, sirens, Chinese gongs, Hawaiian tipples, whistles, etc., the Chicago players are into using objects like garbage can covers, chairs and beads to make sounds with. They are also incorporating theatrical effects with provocative results.

Although I’d heard most of the Delmark albums (the Chicago label that’s recorded many of these players), my first live exposure to what these guys are doing came on an evening last May when a five-man cooperative group calling itself the Creative Construction Company of Chicago played its first New York concert at the Peace Church in Greenwich Village.

The music which Anthony Braxton, LeRoy Jenkins, Leo Smith, Richard Abrams, Steve McCall and Richard Davis made that evening was lifting and invigorating, full of movement, wit, adventure and surprise. It reminded me in its spirit as well as its setting of the loft and coffee house gigs that Archie Shepp, Bill Dixon, Albert Ayler, Marion Brown, Don Cherry, Pharaoh Sanders, et al used to play seven or eight years ago. The music was as new and as fresh, and the same kind of joy exuded from the musicians, as though each sound they made represented a new discovery about music and themselves, and each discovery surely had an extraordinary significance.

Especially impressed by Anthony Braxton, I introduced myself to him at the completion of the concert and invited him to be interviewed. We got together to talk several days later.

Braxton was born on Chicago’s Southside and turned twenty-five this past year. He is classically trained – he studied for a few years with private teachers and at the Chicago School of Music – and has composed orchestral pieces and piano music. Although the alto saxophone is his chief instrument, he plays all the reeds, woodwinds, some brass and various other conventional and unconventional instruments.

The first jazz group Braxton remembers hearing was the Dave Brubeck Quartet. “That was at a very early age. I didn’t dig Brubeck that much, but I was attracted to Paul Desmond. Actually, it was after listening to Desmond, whom I heard before Charlie Parker, that I decided to play woodwinds. He was very important to me and he’s still one of my favorite musicians.”

In 1961, Braxton heard Ornette Coleman’s <i>The Shape of Jazz to Come</i>. “I had gone by a friend of mine’s house, his father listened to jazz, and he said, ‘Listen to this, because this is what’s going to be happening. This is where the music will be going.’ When I heard Ornette I was immediately affected by him. I was afraid of him, because he was so different in relation to what I’d been hearing. I was very conscious of the fact that something was happening with this music – it drew me very strongly, and I knew that someday I would have to deal with it.”

Braxton continued to play with his “Desmond sound” for several more years, during which time he was also listening to Duke Ellington, Miles Davis and Charlie Parker, as well as to Lee Konitz – “whom I still love. I have every record Lee Konitz and Warne Marsh ever made. Konitz, even by today’s standards, was into some far out things – ‘Marshmallow,’ ‘Ice Cream Konitz…” Later Braxton encountered Roscoe Mitchell and Joseph Jarman. “Those guys really turned my head around. They were so advanced even then it was incredible. I thought I had some knowledge of music, but I found I didn’t know anything.”

In 1963, Braxton went into the army, spending most of his hitch in Korea. When he was discharged, in 1966, he met again with Jarman and Mitchell who were by then involved with the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, the cooperative of some thirty or forty musicians that is nearly four years old now. He began then to really get into Ornette, and Eric Dolphy and John Coltrane, and to “stop playing like Paul Desmond.” He also, during this period, got seriously turned on to ‘classical’ music.

“One day I happened to put an Arnold Schoenberg record on by accident, and I almost passed out. So there was something else for me to check out. I was very much affected by Schoenberg, and he led me to other people like Berg and Webern and Stockhausen, and finally to John Cage.”

Braxton was playing concerts with other AACM musicians by this time, and he also recorded two albums for Delmark – 3 Compositions of New Jazz and a two-record set of alto solos, which was scheduled for release in late 1970. He also played on Richard Abram’s <i>Levels and Degrees of Light</i>.

In 1969 Braxton went to Europe with LeRoy Jenkins, Leo Smith and Steve McCall. He spent nearly a year there, working all over and recording two albums for BYG and Polydor. He also participated in an album of Alan Silva’s on BYG, <i>Luna Surface</i>. While in Paris, Braxton met Ornette Coleman, who heard him play and invited him to come to New York. Braxton responded to the invitation and, with LeRoy Jenkins, got here early this spring and stayed with Ornette until he was able to get his own place. Of Ornette, Braxton says, “I’ve always loved him, loved and respected his music. And after getting a chance to meet and to know him, I’m thoroughly in awe of him, of the kind of person he is. He’s been such a good friend. He has my deepest respect, musically and personally.”

Despite Ornette’s hospitality, the aforementioned concert, a gig with Chick Corea and record dates with Corea and Marion Brown, Braxton hasn’t had that easy a time of it in New York, though it’s been no worse for him than for most New York musicians. He had, he told me, been looking for a day job, but without success.

We talked about the dismal economic realities of the scene and then Braxton began to discuss his music and what was happening with the Chicago players.

“When I got out of the army I joined the AACM and found everybody deep into exploring different avenues. Roscoe Mitchell talked of colors. Steve McCall was into shadings – he knows more about shadings, I think, than any other percussionist. Joseph Jarman, at the time, was into theater and getting politically involved; he was very concerned about the social aspects of what was happening in this country. Henry Threadgill was talking about healing through his music, and he was learning about different sounds and how these sounds affected people – like the relationship of one note to a particular illness. Richard Abrams was concerned with the spiritual aspects of music. So many different things were, and are, happening. If you talked to Leo Smith, he would talk to you about composition and about theater. LeRoy Jenkins, a master string musician, he’s concerned with opening up avenues for the violin and arriving at different approaches. He wants to utilize the whole instrument without having someone call him a ‘classical’ violinist.

“I myself was into mathematics and philosophy, seeing music from a mathematical perspective and working with mathematical systems. I wanted to make up my own vocabulary because I didn’t want to follow anybody else. I wanted to find my own avenues. Now my music is a combination of all I learned in the AACM plus what I was working with in mathematics in terms of sound relationships, densities, textures, different forms – what I call ‘conceptual grafting,’ which is about mixing different elements. I’m moving now toward trying to free the music in other ways, like playing in the streets and bringing carpenters and automobile mechanics into the music. I’m starting to see the music, and to me the notion behind the music is just as important as the music itself. I can see how in the next ten years or so everybody will be able to bring something into the music from whatever their occupation is. Like, you bake cookies? You make ice cream? Well, we’ll find a way we can create with that.

“I’ve just finished a piece for one hundred tubas. I’d like to go to all the high schools and get all the tuba players and have a parade and go down to City Hall playing this piece. I want to make music that is socially usable and from which there can be direct results. Like, I dig watching shoemakers, watchmakers, ceramicists, work. I wish my art could be as useful as theirs is – I wish somebody could put tea or coffee in my music, or put their feet in it.

“But there are so many different types of music happening in the AACM. Chicago is a new center of the New Music. The atmosphere there seems to be more conducive to real creativity than New York’s. Nobody’s famous there and nobody’s working, so if you’re in music it’s only because you love it.

“Each person is realizing the different things he can do – his capacity for creating in different areas. This is something that’s just beginning – we’ve been practicing and working for three years now, but it’s still just beginning. What’s happening now is really just a stepping stone and a way of people getting their minds together. The music has just begun. That’s why the AACM is so important, because it’s given us the opportunity to study exactly what’s been opened up by people like Cecil Taylor, Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane, and ‘classical’ composers like John Cage – to find out what will be the disciplines that we have to learn and what new avenues are available for the young musicians to explore.”

I asked Braxton to elaborate on the ‘classical’ influences in his music.

“I want to be able to make use of everything that’s in the air,” he said. “I want to arrive at a world art that takes in everything. Nobody can tell me that John Cage, or David Tudor playing Stockhausen (which I just heard the other day, and which knocked me out), is not my music. There are a lot of people contributing in ‘classical’ music who I’m attracted to. I listen to ‘classical’ music an awful lot and I’m very involved with it. Like, for me, John Cage is one of the two most important composers in the country today – the other is Duke Ellington. Cage’s knowledge and use of so many different concepts, textures and properties have been a major contribution to music, and anybody who’s in contemporary art has to know about them. Cage has done so much in terms of materials he’s worked with and notions he’s gone through – even the unsuccessful notions. And the fact that he’s always trying to assimilate new concepts into the music, I find that very attractive.

“Of course there are a lot of things Cage hasn’t come to terms with. His music is almost all intellectual, all conceptual. He’s so conceptual that the only way you can really deal with him is through some kind of intellectual system. That’s true of Stockhausen, too. Stockhausen (who is just the end of Webern) and Cage are like at the opposite polls of the same thing – Stockhausen with his empirical intellectualism, Cage with his metaphysical intellectualism. I met Cage once and we talked about this. I was telling him that when you look in this life you see trees and rocks, but you also see people – people exist, egos exist (in the sense that each person is coming from his own head), and if that’s true then his music isn’t reflecting nature as much as he thinks it is, because people are just as much a part of nature as rocks and trees.

“I’m also aware that Cage has put down black art. But that’s something I overlook because that’s something he has to deal with, not me, and I devote my attention to the positive things he’s contributed. Actually, I think Cage, in regard to jazz, is starting to listen now and going through a period of change. He’s been a victim of the scene, like everybody else; his inability to really expose himself to black art, to really be open to it and acknowledge it, has led him to a lot of wrong conclusions. But now I think he’s becoming aware of the importance of black musicians, aware that he can learn from Cecil Taylor and Ornette Coleman. It’s basically about improvisation. Nobody who walks into the next twenty years and calls himself a contemporary musician will be able to do it without having some understanding of what improvisation is all about in terms of the emotions behind it. Improvisation has been a property of world art – with the exception of Western art – for as long as this planet’s been here. Most contemporary ‘classical’ musicians have now come to the juncture where they’re starting to understand that they’re going to have to know about Duke and Miles. If you don’t know about them, you’re missing some essential knowledge, because they’ve been through it gloriously.

“But I’m saying that in spite of themselves and their emotional deficiencies, people like Cage and Stockhausen have done so much. One thing for sure, the next stage of creativity will employ the gains that Cage has made, as well as the gains that black art has made. That much is undeniable.

“Getting back to the music in the AACM,” Braxton went on, “what’s happening is that we’re coming to realize that we have to bring all the different arts, all the different avenues, together. Music, painting, sculpting – they’re all, in themselves, very limiting. We’re working on getting to a wider spectrum with a label like ‘art’ or ‘activity’ or ‘environment,’ rather that ‘music’ or painting.’ We want to incorporate as many different approaches and avenues as possible. We’re working together in different kinds of groups with different kinds of approaches. We have pieces where each musician plays ten balloons. I have a piece in which I conduct four chairs and four shovels; another piece where an audience comes, the musicians play three blocks away, then someone comes to tell you the concert is over. Leo Smith wrote a lot of plays that we perform. All these different avenues are being covered.

“I mean we can all play on changes, and most of us could read music in a symphony orchestra. But we’re really not concerned with that anymore. Sometimes I do it because I like that kind of music. But it’s not about proving anything anymore.

“What’s happening now can be seen as a logical reaction to the lies this country was built on. But this is not so much a revolution as it is a final curtain being drawn on a particular scene, and while the final curtain is being drawn, a curtain is opening on the next scene.”

Although he was determined to stay in New York, to “meet musicians, hear music, go to art galleries and get into new avenues of expression,” Braxton said that he’d found the scene here in many ways “depressing.”

“The musician’s here are so divided economically, because people who control things divide them that way. But they’re also divided from a lot of other standpoints, and the music in relation to the people is not as strong as it could be. There’s so much dissension here. I feel like what’s needed here is some kind of organizing by the artists along the lines of the AACM. In New York musicians are so separated. It would be nice if we could get together some kind of orchestra and take it to different neighborhoods. I mean there are so many remarkable people walking around now creating music, whose music could reach out to all the people. But those in control won’t let it get through to the public.

“There’s been a conscious, plotted attempt to suppress and wipe out creative music in this country. I think you realize the significance of art in a culture and what the new art represents and who it threatens if people are able to hear it. It becomes a threat to existing values because it can expand things and stimulate people to change the existing state of things. This is dangerous to people for whom change is not an advantage, so it becomes very…interesting.

“Let me tell you how deep this thing is. When our first record came out on Delmark, it was put down immediately. Immediately. And what was strange, the jazz cats said it wasn’t jazz and the ‘classical’ cats said it wasn’t ‘classical’ music. The critics said it wasn’t even music. One way they’d put it down, they’d use comparison to try to destroy the morale within the group – compare me to Roscoe, compare LeRoy to someone – and they would say, well, the conclusion is that this cat’s better than that cat. That’s a very good way to destroy unity, and that is what was done. Everybody in the group knew it, but we were not in a position to do anything about it. Like certain individuals – they know who they are – consciously exploited what we did and used it for something else.”

Braxton was ready to split. “You know,” he paused to say, “here I’ve been talking all this time about art and artists, but actually I’ve never really wanted to fully identify with the idea of being an ‘artist,’ or with the idea of playing music for a living. I’m afraid of being a ‘musician’ in the sense that society defines it – that is, of separating art from life, or of being in the music business. Art gets to be so manipulated. Like everybody’s a potential artist – butchers, bakers…I think the whole idea of art is something that Western culture has introduced so that it can be used on evil trips. Like, Western music was originally just a toy for rich people, something for the king to talk shit about. I feel that potentially we all are the music, our lives are art in the purest sense. So I don’t want to sell my music anymore than I want to sell my hands. It’s very evident, just checking out the scene, that if you tamper with the music and turn it into a synthetic, then in fact you turn yourself into a synthetic. It’s very hard to participate and not have that happen.

“Of course, I can see how right now we need ‘artists,’ as such, to help show people that they’re artists, too; to show them what’s meaningful. Consciousness is the most valuable thing that can be communicated right now – making people aware of themselves and their environment – and there has to be somebody holding the line and pointing out the options and the different avenues to learn about. In this country right now the people who are artists in the truest sense of the word are participating in an activity which will bring this consciousness about. And then maybe we will be able to stop categorizing ourselves.

“Actually, some of the most creative people I’ve met are not involved in music. They’re simply living what the music is about.”

To take the latter issue first: how often in this past season could it be said of Yankee fans that they were truly into the game? Can we count how many times they sat and watched while a Yankee made a final out, or failed to snatch a ball from the grasp of an opposing outfielder and bring it into the seats when New York needed a dinger? (I’m sorry, but over the course of eighty-one home games, one fan taking the field to keep an inning alive, and one fan deftly lengthening the reach of a warning track fly ball, hardly qualifies as the model of hustle you’d want to see Little League fans emulating.)

Unfortunately, given the contemptible chicken-heartedness of the current crop of so-called ”Yankee supporters” from The Bronx, there are no quick remedies for this grievous situation—none that I can see, anyway. A solution will likely have to wait until Mr. Steinbrenner relocates the team to New Jersey where it will attract fans of proven mettle. (A demonstrably fearless people, New Jerseyans have astonished everyone with their remarkable ability to survive in a cruel and hostile environment the rest of us had written off as unfit for habitation. Although their faculties have been severely compromised they still manage to sort of function. Folks like these won’t be intimidated by the prospect of security personnel bouncing their heads around.)

The other problem, however, could be disposed of as quickly as next season if we can get our leaders to re-think their position, bend a little, and allow Steve Howe to do cocaine again. I mean Howe performing at his best was crucial to a Yankee success this year and, his ERA up something like four runs since he quit using, you don’t have to be a Starfleet Academy graduate to recognize that letting him keep his blow was the way to maintain his effectiveness.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not unmindful of the potential risk involved in granting Howe such a dispensation. There is, indeed, an argument to be made against it. Permitting him to go back on coke could very well subject his friends to yet more rounds of earnest, inane and exasperatingly discursive all-night monologues, and force his lovers to endure more three-hour bouts of limp and grossly sweaty sex with never a climax. But think about it. Isn’t winning a pennant worth the price, especially when you consider that Howe would frequently demonstrate an amazingly generous spirit and an exceptional capacity for affection?

Look. We’re all going to get very sick, really seriously ill, and then we’re going to die. And life, I’m sure you’ll agree, is no bowl of Jack Daniels even before this happens. When a chance to become forgetful of our circumstances and to feel superior to our fate presents itself, don’t we owe it to ourselves to take full advantage of it? And to these ends, how many things, besides winning a Superbowl, are equal to winning a pennant? Blowing the head off a rabbit at fifty yards? Meeting Chuck Norris? (Make your own list, but I’ll bet it’s just as short.) No, winning a pennant is something very special.

I’m reasonably sure that I haven’t had one of those nasty flashbacks since 1975. So why am I the only one who remembers the exchange between Phil Rizzuto and Bobby Murcer that took place during a lightning storm delay in Milwaukee a few years ago and which, the weird static and mesmerizing visual interference notwithstanding, illuminated far better than I ever could, the size of the reward a pennant offers.

”Accomplishing a league championship,” Rizzuto said, ”is to solve a fundamental existential dilemma. Have you ever thought, Murcer, about the euphoria that one observes on such occasions, when big, fiercely perspiring, tobacco spitting and flatulent men pile upon one another in the infield, and with utter indifference to the incredible effluvium that permeates their lungs? Is the matrix of this phenomenon not the sensation, albeit fleeting, of having triumphed over the ephemerality and vileness of the body, of having won a victory over mortality itself?”

”Scooter, I couldn’t agree with you more.” Murcer responded. ”And this elation that we witness is hardly limited to the actual participants, but is, in fact, shared by those who follow them; people whose lives— bereft of heroic possibilities—oblige them to identify with the transcendent achievements of others, and whose joy can actually turn night into day when, in the immediate aftermath of victory, they will sometimes set their stores and automobiles on fire. I would go so far as to say that man invented competitive athletics, and the sportsplex with the skyboxes, that he might create for himself an opportunity to win and, in the winning, experience his apotheosis.”

What could I add to that to make my point? When you consider what we gave up to protect his friends and intimates from a little self-indulgence and hyper-activity, it becomes quite clear that a reassessment of the Howe issue is very much in order. I don’t mean to minimize the gravity of the concerns or to appear insensitive, but listen: I don’t have any friends or intimates. How many might he have? Three? Five! In a year when we could certainly have used a championship, a year of biblical floods, a terrorist bombing in New York City and Billy Ray Cyrus (and in which, let me tell you, I had more than my share of personal and emotional problems), our chance to get one was sacrificed to the convenience of what can’t amount to more than a handful of people.

Are we going to repeat this mistake next year when who knows what fresh horrors nature, the Third World and the music industry have in store for us, and when many of us are also due for a checkup?