Billboard : 11/23/1959

The Cecil Taylor Quartet has a six-track set that swings all the way. Taylor’s style is his own, and the interplay he achieves with vibra-harpist Earl Griffith on the original selections is excellent. Buell Neidlinger and Dennis Charles accompany on bass and drums, respectively. The style is defnitely hard and modern. Adventuresome jazz buyers will find this a rewarding item. Wallering and African Violets are good demo tracks.

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American Record Guide
Joe Goldberg : September, 1959
(Reviewing Contemporary M3562 and United Artists UA-4014)

Taylor is one of most controversial pianists in jazz today. He is also difficult, and there is no use in evading that point as Nat Hentoff does by saying that “Cecil is no more ‘difficult’ than Theodore Roethke in poetry or the plays of Samuel Beckett.” He is a complete individualist. He is possessed of a truly astounding technique, which he is musician enough never to use for its own sake, and he employs many devices not often found in jazz. His pianistic predecessors are Duke Ellington and Thelonious Monk, but there is much in his music that is not theirs. Many reject his music instantly as outbursts of neurotic energy; others analyze it to the point of dessication. Something of the nature of this unusual, extremely gifted talent can be ascertained in his two most recent releases.

The United Artists record places him in standard bop quintet, with Kenny Dorham, Chuck Israels, Louis Hayes, and John Coltrane (whose real name does not appear for contractual reasons). Taylor does not fit in. He strains at the group, pushing it beyond its bounds, even going beyond the work of Coltrane, the most difficult of saxophonists. When Coltrane plays with Monk, who leaves him wide spaces, he can be heard, but when he plays with as leaping a pianist as Taylor, there is almost too much music at once to be assimilated.

Taylor’s own quartet—Earl Griffith, vibraharp; Buell Neidlinger, bass; and Dennis Charles, drums—appears on the Contemporary record. This, as will undoubtedly be mentioned, is the same instrumentation as the Modern Jazz Quartet. There are similarities between the groups, but it is in no sense an imitative similarity.

The two groups are alike for the two best reasons: a collective improvisation which challenges the capacity of each musician to its limit, and an insistence on the specific tune being played, rather than using a piece as a mere hook for endless solos. A surface resemblance between Griffith and Milt Jackson ends the analogy. This is an astonishing album, and drummer Dennis Charles is particularly notable for his solos and his playing with Taylor. For Taylor can weave in, around, behind the beat, and suddenly come in for choruses of the hardest swinging you are likely to hear.

Taylor is very serious about his music, perhaps too serious. But a humor that has formerly been lacking is now present, and a frequent compulsion to play everything he knows in every song is now under control. He can cover the piano with an enormous range of sound, but has now learned the occasional value of sparseness and simple harmony. His is a talent that has needed control, and is now beginning to get it. If he continues to improve as he has done, he will be, in a very short time, one of our most important musicians.

To state it once again, this is not music that reveals itself on first, second, or even third listening. It is, however, worth all the time it takes.

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Audio Magazine
Charles A. Robertson : January, 1960
(Reviewing Contemporary M3562 and UA-4046)

About the best thing that can happen to a new Jazz artist is to have a great deal of controversy thunder over his head. It is louder and attracts more attention than paeans of praise. Notices of Cecil Taylor’s challenging piano explorations have ranged from an abrupt dismissal to such detailed analysis as to surprise even him. His third and fourth LP’s are in current release as a result, and it seems likely that each stage in his future development will be exposed on records. On Contemporary, he plays five originals, including one named for Fats Waller, and his own version of Ellington’s famed subway ride, now retitled Excursion On A Wobbly Rail. The trio becomes a quartet with the addition of Earl Griffith, a vibraharpist capable of complementing the leader’s style. Although lacking Taylor’s imagination, his one piece of writing, African Violets, is well worth hearing.

That even such prickly characters as Taylor are responsive to recognition is shown on his work for United Artists. Like a cactus flowering after rain descends on a desert garden, the pianist bursts into full bloom on three Cole Porter songs. With a new drummer, Rudy Collins, and Buell Neidlinger, his associate from the start on bass, he applies his magical formula to the title tune, Get Out of Town, and I Love Paris. Anyone who has yet to meet Taylor is advised to make his acquaintance here, with the warning that it may lead to an acquired taste and end in the purchase of his other LP’s. Blue Note intends to reissue his initial album from the Transition label. Ted Curson, trumpet, and tenor saxist Bill Barron are added on two Taylor originals. Both recordings were made at Nola Studios and the astringent sound is clearly defined.

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Cedar Rapids Gazette (Cedar Rapids, IA)
Les Zacheis : 08/30/1959

One of the most challenging, and at the same time what promises to be one of the most controversial artists (or should I say “performer”) makes his appearance on the Contemporary label. His name is Cecil Taylor and he plays piano and he records with vibes and bass and drums to make up a quartet. Taylor’s approach and his interpretations are so extremely unorthodox that it’s quite fascinating.

You can’t say offhand that you dig him, yet you have the feeling that here is something to be understood if you were just smart enough to locate the key. It is said that Taylor can’t hold a job in a bistro because his music is so far “out” that infuriated proprietors fire him on the spot.

It may be true, but before we pass hasty judgment let us remember that Kenton was once upon a time practically run out of a ballroom on a rail. The title of this provocative LP is Looking Ahead and I would say that it is very appropriately named.

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Clarion Ledger (Jackson, MI)
Carl McIntire : 08/02/1959

More jazz is provided by Looking Ahead! (Contemporary M3562) with the Cecil Taylor Quartet: Taylor on piano; Earl Griffith, vibra-harp; Buell Neidlinger, bass; and Dennis Charles, drums. It is a rare combo, because Cecil himself has been the object of a great deal of controversy. Some say his jazz isn’t even music, others say it’s the most, a key to the future. The album has only six numbers, half the usual ration for a long play record, so it can be said that the music (?) goes on and on. What’s more, five of the numbers are Taylor’s own creations and the other was composed by vibra-harpist Griffith. This is new music, newly done in a futuristic trend. Frankly, this reviewer doesn’t dig it, but he knows some jazz fans who do.

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The Gramophone
Charles Fox : October, 1960

It becomes more and more apparent that jazz has been developing, although at a much faster pace, on almost parallel lines to European concert music, and that, generally speaking, the harmonic status of jazz today is comparable to that of concert music at the start of this century, the period when the assault upon tonality began. So far I’ve only heard one genuinely atonal jazz performance (Lennie Tristano’s Intuition, Capitol BAP-1-491), and even that hardened, as if by gravity, into suggesting a key signature before reaching its conclusion. Lately, however, there has been a sudden determination on the part of the New York avant-garde to get away from improvisation that is tied to a conventional chord sequence. Miles Davis and Gil Evans, for instance, have used tone-rows, or modes, as a basis for the soloist (Miles Davis’ Kind Of Blue, Fontana mono TFL5072, stereo STFL 513, is an outstandingly good example of this technique). The alto saxophonist Ornette Coleman and the pianist Cecil Taylor, on the other hand, have embarked upon a form of implied atonalism. I say “implied”, for neither performer (on the recordings I’ve so far heard, at any rate) does much more than to distort—rather than to disrupt—a conventional tonal structure, while both soloists play above a rhythm section in which the bassist works his way through a normal chord sequence. (This rigidity within the rhythm section seems to be the main stumbling block in the path of those soloists who really want to cut loose and improvise atonally.) So far, we in this country have heard only one of Ornette Coleman’s LPs (Something Else, Vogue mono LAC12170), rather scathingly reviewed in the August, 1959 issue, while Cecil Taylor has been represented here until now only by half of an LP recorded at the 1957 Newport Jazz Festival (Columbia mono 33CX10102), reviewed in May, 1958.

In Ornette Coleman’s work there seems (quite apart from the fact that he uses a plastic alto saxophone) to be a barrier between what the musician is seeking to express and what his technique allows him to accomplish. With Cecil Taylor, however, one is in the presence of a really skilled performer. The principal influences upon his work seem to be the compositions of Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Bartók, etc., and the piano playing of Thelonious Monk. Taylor’s solos certainly reflect very strongly Monk’s capricious technique, and his insistence upon creating a total shape, a sequence possessing an organic shape, an inner logic. At times Taylor’s playing slips into banality, when he sounds rather like a parody of, say, Poulenc, but throughout quite a large section of the LP I found his quirky, dissonant improvising extremely fascinating. He is accompanied by Earl Griffith (vibes), Buell Neidlinger (bass) and Dennis Charles (drums), a group which performs a difficult task pretty well; the deficiencies that do exist within the ensemble (there is, for instance, this basic conflict between the rhythm section and the front-line) must be blamed upon the leader himself. Such atonalism as there is occurs only during improvised piano passages: the themes themselves are fairly normal in structure, two of the tracks—Of What and Excursion On A Wobbly Rail—even using familiar chord sequences, Of What being based on What Is This Thing Called Love and Excursion on Take The “A” Train.

It would be easy either to boost this LP too wildly or to belittle it too rudely. Let me just say that I consider Cecil Taylor to be an enterprising pianist whose playing often possesses an explosive quality that compensates for the bland patches which mar other parts of this record. At his best Taylor can be very exciting; in the complex interweaving of melodic lines that goes on in Of What, for instance, where he sounds rather like an atonal Art Tatum. At any rate this LP lives up to its title and gives some indication of the path that jazz is likely to follow during the next decade or so. The next break-through will probably come in the field of tonality, just as in concert music it may lie in the utilizing of more complex rhythms (the kind of rhythms found in Indian classical music, for instance). Any day now I expect to hear the first jazz “serialist” blowing his way through a twelve-tone blues!

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Jazz Journal
Gerald Lascelles : July, 1960

Whilst I approve of many of the reasons put forward by Cecil Taylor for his line of approach, I do not in any way like the results which come out in the record. It is brave of Mr. Hentoff to refer to Benny Green‘s remark, that he doubted whether it was music at all, let alone jazz. I am furious, because Benny has got in before me, and I can only endorse his opinion! The music is precious in thought, wildly affected in execution, and uncomfortably derivative of the Modern Jazz Quartet, via John Lewis, in style.

Cecil Taylor should forget that he ever heard Debussy, or scratched around the writings of Schoenberg and Bartok in school. Once past these musical bunkers, he would have a lot of fun, not always at the expense of the listener. To help him onto the putting green where I suspect his objective may lie, he should stealthily acquire copies of everything Hines and Tatum put on record. Then he should creep around the clubs and festivals, surreptitiously hearing Monk, Bryant, Silver and co. in passing. Following a short course in brainwashing he ought to be ready for his debut. Until then, Mr. Taylor, please keep away from jazz, or the piano, or both….? 

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Lafayette Journal and Courier (Lafayette, IN)
Frank Arganbright : 08/22/1959

For a different sound in jazz, give a spin to Looking Ahead, new LP album on the Contemporary label. Artist is Cecil Taylor, who authored five of the six selections his quartet performs on this disc. Taylor, relatively new to the recording field, is somewhat controversial in the world of jazz. From a musical family, he was influenced greatly by Duke Ellington and Fats Waller.

He plays a “way out” type jazz—noisy, jampacked with feeling and improvisation. His quartet featuring Taylor on piano, Earl Griffith on vibra-harp, Buell Neidlinger on bass and Dennis Charles on drums—achieves some really different, almost eerie at times, effects. Two of the best are Luyah! The Glorious Step, and Excursion on a Wobbly Rail. And outstanding are Toll and African Violets, written, by the way, by Griffith, who plays a mighty mean vibra-harp (reminiscent of Lionel Hampton’s vibes, and good).

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New Yorker
Whitney Balliett : 11/28/1959
(Reviewing Contemporary M3562, UA-4014, and UA-4046)

Taylor, a brilliant, classically trained pianist, is possibly the most stubborn, original, and rewarding modern-jazz soloist around. His solo style revolves ceaselessly about harsh, dissonant, and even atonal chords, planted here, there, and everywhere on the keyboard (his intervals sometimes stretch three or four octaves); long and totally unexpected single-note lines that are abruptly opened and dosed by rapidly changing rhythms; passages in which he pits these chords and single-note figures mercilessly against each other; a strict but often implied rhythmic foundation that suggests a metronome ticking at a great distance; and an extraordinary intensity. Until recently, however, Taylor’s work has had an overwhelming density. In these recordings, made during the past year and a half, Taylor appears to have begun the self-editing process essential to any first-rank improviser. (Miles Davis occasionally comes dangerously close to editing himself out of existence, which is exactly what one of his models, the pianist Ahmad Jamal, has already done.) His solos have more breathing spaces, and now and then even approach a Basielike porousness, with the result that his several textures, which always seem at war with one another, have more room to grapple in. The most satisfactory of the three records is the first, largely because of its drummer, Dennis Charles (also on hand are Earl Griffith, vibraphone, and Buell Neidlinger, bass), who is uncanny at keeping up with Taylor, to say nothing of anticipating what he is going to do next. With the exception of Taylor, who plays with less conviction and fury, the second record is a conventional small-band exercise, much of it taken up by Kenny Dorham on trumpet and John Coltrane, whose tone remains as compelling as haggis. The first half of the third record involves three long Taylor solos (he is accompanied by bass and drums) in which he examines, from every conceivable facet, three Cole Porter tunes. On the second side, Taylor is joined by a trumpeter and tenor saxophonist who sound, both in the ensembles and in solos, as if their springs had given out. Taylor is unperturbed.

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Morning Union (Springfield, MA)
Gerald M. Healy : 08/30/1959

Gather ’round you real cool cats, you lovers of impressionistic jazz and also you of the improvisation school. That man Cecil Taylor has gone way out, in fact he’s Looking Ahead. Why that’s the title of his mighty fine Contemporary LP.

That Cecil Taylor Quartet—Taylor, piano; Earl Griffith, vibraharp; Buell Neidlinger, bass; and Dennis Charles, drums—have produced six selections which might prove a wee bit controversial among the lovers of jazz. Personally we feel his arrangements are a combination of Dave Brubeck and Dizzy Gillespie. Charles beats the drums like Joe Morello and adds a few Gene Krupa rolls for good measure.

One thing about Taylor & Co., they play like they want. They feel their music. Guaranteed—you have to hear Looking Ahead a couple of times to appreciate the quartet. With the exception of African Violets by vibraharpist Griffith, the other five selections are Taylor works. They are: Luyah! The Glorious Step, What The Water Told Me, and Excursion on a Wobbly Rail.

Why not give a listen and then let us hear your opinion?

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Oakland Tribune
Russ Wilson : 07/26/1959

Another prod to the long dormant development of jazz is given by the Cecil Taylor Quartet in Looking Ahead (Contemporary). This definitely is not for lazy listeners, or those who refuse to open their ears to new sounds. Pianist Taylor, whose relatively few appearances since he came on the jazz scene have made him a highly controversial figure, employs jarring harmonies that will prove highly unpopular with a good many listeners. Others will find the music fascinating. The freedom of improvisation and its collective use, the exploitation of timbres, the use of tone colors, and the surging emotion contained in the six originals making up the album are tremendously effective. And, as bassist Buell Neidlinger (who with vibist Earl Griffith and drummer Dennis Charles comprises the combo) observes, Taylor “makes you play you as forceful and individual as he himself is.” Serious students of jazz should hear this record; it may well turn out to be a beacon along the path to the future.

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San Francisco Examiner (San Francisco, CA)
C.H. Garrigues : 11/08/1959
Cecil Taylor’s Far Out Compositions May Be The Most Important Music of the Fifties

Cecil Taylor is the farthest “out” jazzman I have ever heard; beside him, Thelonious Monk sounds like Teddy Wilson and Moon Dog sounds like Errol Garner. Taylor sounds as far out to me now as Charlie Parker sounded when I first heard him about 1947—and, man, that was out, then.

I’m not sure that Taylor hasn’t gone beyond the boundaries of jazz (which, of course, was said about Parker and his followers in the ’40s). His chief concern seems to be with the relationships of dissonance (as in the case of certain modern “classical” composers) rather than with the relationships of swinging. One feels that he uses jazz instrumentation, rather than classical, only by the accident of birth—and not because they essentially belong to his music.

Nevertheless, this is more than merely “interesting.” There is a lurking suspicion that it may, indeed, prove the most important music of the ’50s, as was Parker’s the most important of the ’40s. And not merely upon jazz: Upon, rather, that rapidly developing area of serious music which could not have come into existence except for both jazz and the classics.

Taylor knows what he is doing. But I think it will take a lot of listening to discover it.

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Down Beat : 09/17/1959
Unknown : 3 stars

Just as our going-to-be astronauts are probing the fringe of space, so in jazz is constant exploration going on. Such an explorer is young New Yorker Taylor. To describe him as an avant gardist in jazz is to put it mildly; his musical ideas are about as far out as currently possible, which accounts for his difficulty in getting steady club work playing his own music.

Taylor’s piano work here is raw, angular, seemingly disjointed, and impressionistic. The teamwork within the trio is of very high caliber, with Neidlinger’s bass lines attuned to the pianist’s ideas and Charles’ drumming carrying the basic metre with confidence and considerable strength.

Much is colloquy between vibist Griffith and Taylor. Griffith reveals a vibratoless, rather brittle tone quite in keeping with the uncompromising character of the music as conceived by Taylor. Together they weave some remarkable contrapuntal lines above the steady pulse of the rhythm team.

Taylor is but one of many current explorers of new ways to jazz expression. Because his way is as highly personal as, say, Lennie Tristano’s, it may never attract a wide following. But it makes for some very interesting—if frequently disconcerting—listening. Lend an ear.

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Liner Notes by Nat Hentoff

Cecil Taylor has so far made few recordings and his appearances at clubs and concerts have also been exceedingly intermittent. When he does play, however, the reactions are seldom neutral. Positively or negatively, critics and audiences react to Cecil with nearly as much explosive energy as he catapults into his music.

One English critic, Benny Green, questioned whether his work was music at all, let alone jazz. In the American Record Guide, however, Martin Williams wrote of Taylor: “His way may very well be the way of the future, it will surely be part of it.”

When Cecil played at the Great South Bay Jazz festival in the summer of 1958, part of the audience, as Whitney Balliett reported *fidgeted, whispered, and wandered nervously in and out of the tent, as if the ground beneath had suddenly become unbearably hot.” But a nucleus of intensely attentive listeners remained as if bewitched, and several ran — I mean, ran — to the stand after his performance to find our whether any of his records were available.

The same violent dichotomy exists among some musicians. At one jam session a few years ago, the drummer — now an expatriate, and his name is not Kenny Clarke — stood up and abruptly left the stand when Cecil began to play. His voluntary replacement, by the way, was Elvin Jones, one of the first times Elvin was heard in New York. There are other musicians — not many, but they’re increasing — who look on playing with Cecil as an exceptionally exhilarating challenge. Buell Neidlinger emphasizes: “You have to open yourself when you play with him. He makes you play you, as forceful and individual as he himself is.”

Cecil, meanwhile, is less intrigued by being a focus of controversy than he is frustrated at the lack of opportunity to play regularly. Since what he is doing — and trying to do — is quite clear to him, he does not understand the small cloud that seems to appear when his name comes up in conversations with club owners. He’s supposed to be “difficult” to absorb, and yet, if a listener is able to open himself to emotion first and worry about how it was done afterwards, Cecil is no more “difficult” than Theodore Roethke in poetry or the plays of Samuel Beckett. But many people cling to the familiar like a child to his security blanket. “We played a club a few years ago,” Buell recalls, “and after about eight bars of Cecil’s piano, the owner came running up and told him to get out of the club. He wouldn’t even let us finish one song.”

Cecil was born in New York City. His mother played violin and piano, his father sings, and his uncle performed on piano, drums and violin. Cecil asked for and received piano lessons when he was about six. His first writing was when he was about eight or nine. “It was a piece for two pianos. Although I was studying European music at the time, I knew this piece was different in tone and feeling, but I didn’t know what the idiom was yet.” Cecil also played drums, “but never worked up to a professional level.”

There ways always music in the house, and Ellington was practically one of the lares. Cecil resisted Ellington at first, but gradually became influenced. “In a sense,” he explains, “I’ve never thought ‘pianistically,’ because I think of the piano as an orchestra. For a long time, I didn’t particularly dig what they called pianists, because they weren’t utilizing the piano fully. Then I began to really hear Ellington and Fats Waller.” He also, around the age of twelve, became much intrigued with boogie-woogie. He hopes eventually to return to the form.

In recent years, Cecil has realized that he was influenced by other sounds at home. Blues singing, for one. “I like to hear my father sing; and he, in fact, sings shouts and things that go back farther than the blues. The way I play blues now shows where I’ve been listening; older musicians hear it right away.” There were also the syncopations and chordal concepts of Negro church music. “I was exposed to different kinds of churches, but even when we were going to a middle class one, the one around the corner was sanctified.”

After high school, Cecil studied piano, composition and harmony at the New York College of Music; and for the next four years, he attended the New England Conservatory in Boston. He did some playing outside of school, but was at first convinced he couldn’t play any jazz solos although he did derive great enjoyment from accompaniment. “It was Andrew McGhee, a saxophonist now working with Lionel Hampton, who first encouraged me to believe I could improvise. I didn’t understand the nature of improvisations then. It’s certainly not taught in the schools. Only organists had classes in improvisation at the Conservatory.” Cecil was at school because, although he knew at least some of his future was going to be in jazz, he had to find out more about all of music. He had also been much impressed by a statement attributed to Ellington in the Forties that the jazz musicians of the future would have to have a conservatory background.

“Everything I’ve lived, I am,” he says of how his music is created. “I am not afraid of European influences. The point is to use them — as Ellington did — as part of my life as an American Negro. Some people say Im atonal. It depends, for one thing, on your definition of the term. In any case, I have not yer been atonal on records, including this one, but have been on occasion in live performances. It depends on the musicians I come up with. Basically. it’s not important whether a certain chord happens to fit some student’s definition of atonality. A man like Monk, for example, is concerned with growing and enriching his musical conception, and what he does comes as a living idea our of his life’s experience, not from a theory. It may or may not turn out to be atonal. Similarly, as Miles Davis’ European technical facility becomes sparser, his comment from the Negro folk tradition becomes more incisive. He’s been an important innovator in form in jazz, but again, not out of theory, but out of what he hears and lives.”

When Cecil came back to New York, he knew there was only a certain amount he could learn in school. He now had to go out into the street. He began to gig uptown, working days in factories or in white collar jobs. A help was trumpeter Johnny Capers, a man in the Roy Eldridge vein, who demanded much of his men and who used no bassist. “He helped me develop a strength and confidence.” There were five days with Johnny Hodges’ small combo in Chester, Pennsylvania, around 1954 or 1955. “It was the greatest thing that ever happened to me; the next best thing to sitting in the Ellington band. I was petrified, and didn’t really start playing until I got my notice. That relaxed me.”

In 1955, “I began to consolidate my own musical thinking in terms of my own techniques. I mean things began to fit into place.” Although he practices regularly, he has had few chances to work our his ideas fully over a period of time in a club. His best run was six weeks at the Five Spot toward the end of 1956. He appeared at the 1957 Newport Festival and at a Cooper Union concert in early 1958 with the usual dances and rock and roll gigs as a sideman in between. “I occasionally take part in jam sessions, but what’s happening in our society reflects itself there too. There’s competitiveness, unwillingness to exchange ideas. There’s no more a group feeling, but rather a context for star building.”

Of his associates, vibist Earl Griffith was born in Brooklyn, May 1, 1926. He played violin from the time he was eighe to about twelve, can also play clarinet and saxophone; and picked up the vibes in 1952. He’s worked with Benny Harris and African drummer Guy Warren. Dennis Charles, drums, was born in Saint Croix, Virgin Islands, December 4, 1933. He came to America in 1945 and is self-taught. His primary influence has been Art Blakey. Charles has played professionally for some three years, mostly in calypso and mambo bands, although recently he has begun rehearsing with Gil Evans. Dennis tries “to play like a horn with my left hand while the right keeps time.”

Bassist Buell Neidlinger was born in Westport, Connecticut, March 2, 1936. He’s studied piano, trumpet and cello: picked up bass by himself in high school where he had his own little band; spent a year at Yale in 1953 where he was going to major in music. He left when he was offered work in a jazz combo which didn’t materialize; worked as a disc jockey for a time; and married. When his wife died, he came to New York, gigged with Vic Dickenson, Zoot Sims, Tony Scott, Coleman Hawkins; was with Tony Bennett for some six months; and currently is free-lancing.

Of Luyah, Cecil notes: “A minor happens to be one of my favorite minor keys. Certain feelings I get playing in this key relate to a boogie-woogie in the same key I composed and liked very much as a kid. This is a blues, and the Aeolian scale was its starting point. I feel any jazz artist who is important must be able to play the blues well, no matter what style he plays it.”

African Violets is by Earl Griffith, who has strong and tender feelings about Africa, describes it as “a short statement about a beautiful place.” Cecil points out Dennis Charles’ unusual sensitivity to timbres in this number — and all others on the album. “He does beautiful things with a cymbal,” says Cecil. “Like the great drummers, he can touch the top of a table with his finger and make music.”

Of What is “sort of introspective… it might be fun to let the listener, by the way, work out what tune it’s based on. In it, everybody in the trio had to utilize their instruments to the very
fullest extent of their imaginative powers, and the resulting textures may help explain the title. It’s a 32-bar tune with interesting things happening in it.”

Wallering is named for Fats Waller. “It’s an attempt to organize sounds in a typical jazz way, building on two improvised figures that are simultaneous. Waller was a giant piano player; he could push a group no end; and when he played the piano, it sang.” Words like “power,” “energy,” “strength” course through all of Cecil’s talk about music and the key emotional characteristic of his own work is constant thrust, a drive that can build to fierce excitement.

Toll was writen for a concert at Cooper Union, New York, in February, 1958, at which time only half of it was played. Cooper Union, by the way, represented Cecil’s first concert hall appearance. “It’s a three-part piece. The first part is written; the second improvised; and the third written. I had parts written for the different instruments, but on the date, I thought l’d let them respond to the piano parts as written, and so the other instruments had no written parts.”

Cecil’s Excursion On a Wobbly Rail, is a performance of galvanic power. “The original piece meant much to me as an Ellington admirer and as a New Yorker. In provided me here with a base for what I wanted to go on and do. For one thing, I took the chance to use some of the things I’ve learned about Eastern music — India and Bali — in terms of exploiting the colors of the group.”

Cecil is usually reluctant to discuss the specifics of his evolving style, preferring that the music be heard and reacted to on what it says emotionally. But his comments about others often reveal in part what he is working at and he is occasionally explicit about his own approach. The importance of exploiting timbres, for instance. “One of the things I learned from Ellington and others is that you can make the group you play with sing if you realize that each instrument has a distinctive personality, and you can bring our the singing aspect of that personality if you use the right timbre for the instrument.”

About rhythm: “Monk knows how to place his chords in relation to the bass and drums, especially the bass, the steady element. He subdivides very subtly, more subtly than the eighth notes of the boogie-woogie pianists and the eighth note strings of some contemporary players. As a result, he also jars you harmonically. A horn player with Monk must think faster, must think instantly. And Monk also does not overblow.

“Miles Davis’ conception of time has also led to greater rhythmic freedom. His feeling, for another thing, is so intense that he catapults the drummer, bassist and pianist together, forcing them to play at the top of their technical ability and forcing them with his own emotional strength to be as emotional as possible. Miles’ concept of syncopation in general is larger than that of many musicians and leads to greater variety of musical expression.”

Cecil also tries to fuse his own groups into uninhibited collective improvisation. “He puts himself into the music,” says Earl Griffith, “with such a beautiful drive and so fully that he makes me get that way.”

Cecil hasn’t worked out all of his style yet, but what he has already done is important and makes him, in one sense, “in the avant garde of everybody,” as Martin Williams puts it. Most important is his emotional message. Much of the musical history of the Negro in America is in his work, but not as an anthology. He’s a new user of that basic language with his own additions to make.