Free Jazz Blog Interview With Phil Freeman

Phil Freeman

How did you get the assignment to interview Cecil Taylor for The Wire in 2016?

I was the only journalist granted an interview with Taylor during the run-up to his Whitney Museum show, Open Plan: Cecil Taylor, in February 2016. (The show ran for two weeks in late April of that year.) The whole thing was coordinated between the show’s curators, Jay Sanders and Lawrence Kumpf, and The Wire’s then-editor, Derek Walmsley. He emailed me one day and asked if I was interested in interviewing Taylor and I responded affirmatively in about two seconds.

I had previously done lengthy interviews with Ornette Coleman and Bill Dixon for the magazine (and attempted to interview Pharoah Sanders, but it didn’t come off), so obviously there was precedent for a piece like this, but it really turned into something I could never have anticipated.

How did you prepare for the interview? Did it go according to plan?

I prepared as I always do, by listening to as much of the artist’s music as possible and thinking about what I would like to ask them if it were just the two of us talking, without considering a reader. In Taylor’s case, I had been listening to his music for nearly 30 years by then, having first seen him perform at the Village Vanguard in August 1997.

Did meeting Cecil change at all how you listen to, interpret or appreciate his music?

No, but I greatly enjoyed our time together. He was a fun person to hang out with – he was a smart, witty man who was deeply engaged with the world far beyond music. We talked about politics, about food, about birds, about our respective family histories, and many other things.

Meeting him strengthened my appreciation for his music, because it caused me to read more deeply into it, looking up what the titles of his pieces might mean and in the process gaining insight into him as a person by charting the evolution of his interests. This came into play again when writing In The Brewing Luminous, as I was able to trace, for example, his interest in African history and religious traditions through the titles of pieces like “The Stele Stolen and Broken is Reclaimed” (from Fly! Fly! Fly! Fly! Fly!) or “B Ee Ba Nganga Ban’a Eee!” (from Olu Iwa ).

What was your first interaction with Cecil's music? Do you recall what it was? How did you feel when you heard it?

I don’t remember if I had heard any of his records before the Village Vanguard performance from August 1997 that I mentioned earlier. I went to that show because of a blurb Gary Giddins had written in the Village Voice ’s club listings, asserting that Taylor was a genius and that any NYC appearance was not to be missed. The music rolled over me like a tidal wave that night; it was a single long piece and far too much to take in unprepared. I walked back upstairs afterward, my head swimming. Not long after that, I bought Trance, a Black Lion CD that featured some (but not all) of the 1962 recordings from the Café Montmartre; when the Revenant label issued the complete Montmartre tapes as Nefertiti, the Beautiful One Has Come , I bought that, and over the next few years began picking up one title or another here and there. I specifically remember buying the CD of Dark to Themselves as research for my first book, New York Is Now!, which included a profile of David S. Ware. (Ware was in Taylor’s band on that album.)

I remember finding Taylor’s music overwhelming for a long time. Sometimes that was pleasurable, other times not. Listening to it was like trying to climb an icy cliff; it pushed me away. It wasn’t really until I got hold of some of his solo albums, especially Air Above Mountains and The Willisau Concert , that I was able to hear the romanticism and beauty at the heart of what he did. Once I was able to identify those qualities, I could go back and listen to the group records with new ears.

Do you have a "favorite" period of his music? A favorite album? If so, what and why?

My favorite period of his music is definitely the 1978 Unit with Jimmy Lyons, Raphé Malik, Ramsey Ameen, Sirone, and Ronald Shannon Jackson, which made the albums The Cecil Taylor Unit, 3 Phasis, Live in the Black Forest , and One Too Many Salty Swift and Not Goodbye. I wrote a long essay about their work for Burning Ambulance, parts of which made it into In The Brewing Luminous . But I love albums from every era of his career, including early works like Looking Ahead!, The World of Cecil Taylor and New York City R&B ; the solo albums Air Above Mountains, Fly! Fly! Fly! Fly! Fly! , the two volumes of Garden, and The Willisau Concert; the early ’80s Orchestra Of Two Continents, heard on Winged Serpent (Sliding Quadrants) and Music From Two Continents; his collaboration with the Italian Instabile Orchestra, The Owner of the River Bank; and the collaborative session with Dewey Redman and Elvin Jones, Momentum Space .

When did you decide you would write this book? What did you think the challenges would be? And were they? 

The book didn’t start out as a biography of Taylor. Originally, I wanted to write a history of free jazz as a whole. That was far too unwieldy, though, and inevitably more people would be overlooked than covered. Then I thought about a book that would profile seven major avant-garde jazz figures: Anthony Braxton, Ornette Coleman, Bill Dixon, Roscoe Mitchell, Wadada Leo Smith, Taylor, and Henry Threadgill. (I considered including Julius Hemphill as well.) The point of that book would have been to discuss these men as major American composers, and bring so-called “free jazz” into the spotlight as, in fact, a deeply considered music full of theory and conceptual rigor. But then I realized that no one had written a full-length biography of Taylor. So I emailed Wolke Verlag in Germany, whose books on avant-garde jazz have been excellent, and pitched In the Brewing Luminous . I had the title and everything, and they went for it right away.

The biggest challenge was research. I was unable to physically visit places that I knew would be excellent sources of material, like the New York Public Library’s performing arts collection or the Rutgers Institute for Jazz Studies, because I had moved from New Jersey to Montana. But I was able to get a lot of scans of old magazine interviews from both US and European sources from Rutgers and the Darmstadt Jazzinstitut via email, and when word of the project began to spread, people reached out, offering theses they’d written, personal reminiscences and much more. Ultimately, the book took a little over a year to research and write, and its scope grew as I worked. The more I learned, the more there was to learn. I conducted new interviews with many musicians who worked with Taylor at various points in his and their careers, and dug up as many old interviews with musicians now dead as I could find. I also searched through the archives of the New York Times and the New Yorker, both of which covered Taylor extensively during his lifetime, which revealed to me that in New York at least, he was considered a major cultural figure worthy of serious critical assessment and regular “check-ins”.

I’m very proud of this book. A lot of the information I present has been available for decades, but it’s scattered in old newspaper and magazine articles, album liner notes, and other places, and it’s never been pulled together in this way. Whether you’re a longtime Cecil Taylor fan or a newcomer to his music, I think you’ll learn something by reading In The Brewing Luminous .

Switching themes a bit ...

Burning Ambulance Music has been active for a number of years now, in fact we did a Q&A with you about it (see here). So, simple question, how is the label going? What's new?

The label is going quite well; we have just released our ninth and tenth CDs.

Polarity 3 is the third collaboration between saxophonist Ivo Perelman and trumpeter Nate Wooley, and it’s as intimate and beautiful as its two predecessors. We’re offering a special package deal to people who want to buy all three discs together.

Irrational Thinking of the Subject is an album by Ukrainian musician Sergey Senchuk, aka Tungu; it consists of 15 collaborative pieces featuring notable avant-garde musicians from around the world: Noël Akchoté, John Bisset, Lawrence Casserley, Jacek Chmiel, Phil Durrant, Wayne Grim, Ayumi Ishito, Pak Yan Lau, Lucia Margorani, Phil Minton, Lara Suss, Kazuhisa Uchihashi, Gebhard Ullmann, Sabine Vogel, and Sylvia Wysocka.

You recently started offering the Leo Records catalog as downloads, how did this come about? How does it work and what are the future plans for it?

I saw an announcement from Leo Records that Leo Feigin, the label’s founder, was thinking about shutting the operation down. I thought that was a shame, as their catalog is stuffed with brilliant music by a vast array of musicians, some famous and some obscure, and I knew that Destination: Out! had done quite well with licensing the FMP catalog for digital reissue on Bandcamp. So I emailed Mr. Feigin and proposed uploading the Leo catalog to Bandcamp, and he agreed.

The arrangement is simple: Leo sends me the music and I upload the files and scan the cover art to make it look as good as possible. Because their catalog runs to around 800 titles, we’re doing things in waves. The first wave is focused on the work of American (and a few European) avant-garde jazz legends like Anthony Braxton, Amina Claudine Myers, Marilyn Crispell, Cecil Taylor, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Evan Parker, Reggie Workman, Joe and Mat Maneri, and others. The second wave will be dedicated to the work of Ivo Perelman, who has something like 70 releases on Leo, including many collaborations with Matthew Shipp. The third wave will deal with Leo’s deep catalog of Russian avant-garde jazz, and the fourth wave will be… everything else. 

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Read the Free Jazz Blog review of 'In the Brewing Luminous: The Life & Music of Cecil Taylor' here.