talking Cecil Taylor would require a month apart. However, we can literally bring us through this story by Cesar Aira (1949), called "A Tale of Cecil Taylor", appeared in 1987 in the book "End of the Century" and, of course, is far less famous "The Tracker" by Cortazar.
Dawn in Manhattan. At first light, very uncertain, the last street crossing a black prostitute who returns to his room after a night's work. Disheveled haggard, cold when transfigured her into a stupid drunken clarity, a shabby apartment in the world. Has not your usual neighborhood, so you do not have a long way to go. The pace is slow, it could be back, any distraction could dissolve over time in space. Although actually want to sleep, at this point not even remember. There are very few people outside, the few that come to that time (or those who have no where to go) the known and therefore do not see their towering shoes, purple, her skirt with her long narrow slit, and eyes that would not look any other way, glassy and soft. It is a narrow street, any number of streets with old houses. Después vienen dos cuadras de construcciones algo más modernas, pero en peores condiciones; comercios, vagos condominios de los que se desploma una escalera de incendios, una cornisa sucia. Pasando una esquina está el edificio donde duerme hasta la tarde, en una habitación alquilada que comparte con dos niños, sus hermanos. Pero antes, sucede algo: se ha formado un grupo de trasnochados; una media docena de hombres reunidos en la mitad de este callejón miran una vidriera. Siente curiosidad por estas turbias estatuas. Nada se mueve en ellos, ni siquiera el humo de un cigarrillo. A ella no le quedan cigarrillos. Avanza mirándolos, y como si fueran el punto que necesitaba para enganchar el hilo del cual sostenerse, su paso se vuelve algo lighter, suspended. When she arrives, the men do not look at her. Need a moment to understand what it is. Facing an abandoned business. Behind the dirty glass is a gloom, and in them dusty boxes and debris. But there is a cat, and before him, back glass, a rat. Both animals look without moving, the game has ended, and the victim has no escape. The tense cat with sublime parsimony every nerve. Viewers have become creatures of stone, and no statues: planets, the cold of the universe ... The prostitute hit the window with the portfolio, the cat is distracted for a split second and that was enough to escape the rat. The Men wake of contemplation, looking with disgust at the black accomplice, a drunken spat, two follow it ... before the end of the darkness fade occurs any act of violence.
After a story is another. Vertigo. Dizziness retrospective. It would take any term of the series to make her the next endless. Vertigo causes distress. Anxiety paralyzes us ... and avoids the danger that would justify the vertigo, approach the edge, for example, a deep fault that separates a term of another. Paralysis is the art of the artist, you see events unfold. The night is over, the day does the same: there is something embarrassing at work in progress. The opposite twilight falling like cards in a slot of ice. Permanently closed eyes, always and everywhere. Peace. Yet there is, and more visible than we might wish, uncontrolled movement, which causes distress in others and provides the model of distress can not own. Also called art. Art is a multiplication: styles, libraries, metaphors, complaints, frame and his critic, the novel and its times ... We must accept the existence of insects. There is debris everywhere. But life, you know, "is one." Of what is the biography of an artist is impossible there are ways to prove that he is, these modes merge into the possibility of the biography, which literature is born again, and the unbearable situation in thinking is installed, the operator is concerned and I do not see the succession of scruples, but a proliferation of models difficult to implement. Biography as a literary genre of hagiography drift, but they are saints, they were, just by giving up the benefits biographical, just pick up the remains disposable. On the other hand, the hagiographies are never alone, always part of a kind of library. Biography tend to the contrary, although the result is exactly the same. Who would boast of knowing what a rest, and able to differentiate it from the opposite? No one to enter, at least. Take
biographies of artists. Ideally come to the case. Children read the lives of famous musicians, musicians who were always children, then it is a success story, the story of a triumph, with its spectacular or secret strategy, your vengeance, transparency of dinosaur tears. They are subtle mechanisms within its essential idiocy, do not remain long in the memory (except for some details) but that does not deform under: big slides grafted him iridescent, forming a picturesque scene as the victim create a Proust, the which in itself is a nice false success in life. Impossible no distrust of those books, especially if they are the main food source of our childish past and to come. "Before" was a successful future, "after" their rewards were delicious, the more delicious for being punctual object prophecies. The bad omens are the pearl of perfection, and the good, the world raise their hands and offer it to the stars. The Queen of the Night, in a word, sings in the daytime.
closer look at a case. Of a great musician of our time, any of them (so many). Cecil Taylor. It could be said of him that is the greatest musician of the century. Engendered in body and soul in music such popular, jazz, from the beginning its force in the renewal did so universal, perhaps the only genius who could go beyond Debussy: that she was able to twist the music and sexual material, the atomistic fluid every way and nonsense that constitute the game of thought in the world. And no longer the best representative of the city of jazz, in fact it is New York, the overlay of the profile of the great buildings in the image of the pianist concentrated, with music as a link. What else is realism? A time when some people have experienced. Jazz, an eternal breeze. The miniature city in a diamond. It is Egypt, but also a small tribe lurking. Our civilization produces anthropological (or can produce a proper art of the narrative) stories in which, say, two naked black wage war in a jungle, pursued with more subtle signs, chance, pure mobility. And jazz. An action of dreams situations. It is all situations, romantic ecstasy (no concept). According to legend, Cecil made the first atonal jazz recording in 1956, two weeks before he did whatever Sun Ra. (Or was it vice versa?) Did not know each other or knew of Ornette Coleman, who worked in the same across the country. Of course, history records times without giving a value per se, since all of them (and Eric Dolphy, Albert Ayler, Coltrane, who knows how many others) demonstrated his genius so reliable over the decades that followed.
Anyway, History is important, because we can stop the time. In fact, what the procedure is interrupted are the series, more precisely, the infinite series, the latter attribute that overrides any importance could be interrupt. The frivolous returns, redundant, light, like a little cough at a funeral. At this point, get the second break, and what was nothing more than thought suddenly turns unexpectedly showing a face: the need rises, patent, sovereign, inalienable, and yet microscopic, fickle, stupid, neutral. The interruption is necessary, but it is the need for a time. Expanded what is necessary is born the "atmosphere", she did key in the specific weight of a story. Never more expensive enough the importance of atmosphere in literature. It is the idea that forces us to work with free, without features, with movements in a space that finally stops being this or that, a space that manages to destroy the institutions of the writer and the written word, multiple big tunnel full sun ... Well, the atmosphere is three-dimensional condition of regionalism, and through music. Music does not interrupt the time. Quite the contrary.
1956. Let's start again. At that time Cecil Taylor, a brilliant black musician of little more than thirty years, a prodigious pianist and subtle scholar of avant-garde music of the century, had established his style, is his invention. Except a few jazzmen near their work, no one could be the slightest idea what he was doing. How can it have done? His originality was in the transmutation of the piano, which became an instrument in his hands a free compositional method, instantaneous. The so-called "tone clusters" with the unfolding momentary writing had been used previously by musician, Henry Cowell, but Cecil was the procedure to a point at which, for harmonic complications, and especially for the systematization of the current flow-tonal atonal sound, could not be compared with anything existing. Suppose we lived (the type of data that provide us with the biographies) in a dilapidated apartment on Manhattan's East End. Mice, of those who love the Americans, an indefinite number of cockroaches constant, the promiscuity of a dull old house with narrow stairs, are the original picture. The atmosphere. Unnecessary. In his room was a piano that was not always able to tune due to lack of fourteen dollars needed, and was a cabinet almost posthumously. I slept there in the morning and part of the afternoon, and left at dusk. Lavacopas worked in a bar. He had already recorded an album (In transition) and expected some temporary work in piano bars.
Of course I knew that it was necessary to rule out the idea of \u200b\u200ba sudden recognition, and even a gradual triumph, in the manner of concentric circles, was not so naive. But they expected, and had every right to do so, sooner or later their talents would be held. (Here's a truth and error: it is true that today it is seen worldwide, and those who have heard his albums over the years with love and boundless admiration would be the last to doubt it, but there is also a mistake, an error of logical type, and this story will try to show, without emphasis, ownership of the error. Of course nothing confirms the need for this story, which is nothing more than a literary fad. It happens once imagined, it becomes somewhat necessary. The story of the prostitute that startled the rat is not necessary either, which does not mean that the vast virtual series of stories is unnecessary as a whole, and yet it is. The Cecil Taylor is an old story: you should be the mode of application. The atmosphere is not necessary ... But how to hear the music out of an atmosphere?)
The piano bar proved to be a local issue that came musicians and drug addicts. The artist is predisposed to a host fluctuating between indifference and interest, discounted the scandal, in that environment. Are predisposed to indifference outside the plane, and the interest point: the plane could cover the world as a sheet of paper, the real interest was timely and as a "good morning" between fish. Prepared for the inconsistency inherent in large geometries. The randomness of the competition could provide a glimmer of attention: no one knows what grows at night (he will pick up after noon the next day actually), and what you do never goes completely unnoticed. But this time it happened. To his surprise, the opportunity is revealed precisely "never." Scorn liquefied invisible inaudible giggles. Thus passed the evening, and canceled the second performance standard for the next night, although it was not paid. Of course, Cecil did not discuss with him his music. He did not see the utility. He simply return to the mice.
Two months later, his absent-minded work routine (lavacopas but was no longer employed in a service station) was enhanced again by an oral agreement to act in a bar one night this time, and half of the week . The bar looked like before, although it might be something worse, and competition no different, even it was possible that some who were present that night are repeated here. That came to think, very naïve. His music rang in his ears and half a dozen musicians, drug addicts and alcoholics, perhaps even in fine black ears, with golden blossom of a woman dressed in satin, one maintained by heroin. There was no applause, someone laughed heavily (about something else, surely) and the bar owner did not even bother to say good night, why should he? There are moments, in which the music is without comment. Promised, without cause, come on another occasion the bar (it ever attended as a listener) to imagine ease the position of human beings to music: the accomplished pianist, a succession of old tunes, slow and infrequent. Never did, believing that it was not worth. It was considered a person devoid of imagination. After a week, the representation of this failure was merged with the former, and that it was some surprise. Would it be a repeat? There was no reason to believe, and yet the reality showed that simple.
One day he met on the street with a former classmate of the Advanced School of Music in Boston, a neoclassical. Cecil secretly mocked Stravinsky? All blacks despise the Russians, that's a fact?. A couple of sentences and the other was vaguely impressed by the oracular tone of voice of his acquaintance, a whisper, the wool cap. (If instead of being a nullity, the former classmate had come to something, he would have noted the fact in his autobiography, many years later.).
Three months later, a late night conversation in a Village Vanguard table resulted in an offer to appear there one night, in addition to a renowned group. He left his job in the service station and worked ten hours a day on his piano (he had moved to a room in a pimps old house on Bleeker Street) during the week that separated him from his presentation. By VV attended the cream of the jazz scene. He was convinced that at that time formed the first circle, and was small as a point, from which radiate the understanding of his musical activity, and therefore the activity itself.
came the night in question, entered the stage where the piano was when I called, and attacked ... No more than a condescending applause: "at least sweat." This puzzled him. In the back of the stage were some musicians who looked away with a smile of monkeys. He went and sat at the table where his acquaintances, who spoke of nothing else. One took his elbow and leaned towards him slowly shook his head to the right and left. With a big laugh, someone broke into an "After all, you are done." The most prominent jazz critic of the time was sitting a few tables away. The man who had shaken his head was a conversation with him and returned with this message: "Sinhué-so called critic among them, made a clear syllogism as a cloudless sky: jazz is a form of music, so it is a part of the music. As does our good Cecil is not music, it can not aspire to jazz category. According to him, as far as I understand it, I'm an autodidact, you can not move toward jazz from the funnel, but usually have no special words that can be related by analogy with jazz.
not attempt any rebuttal. Obviously that idiot did not know anything about music, it could not surprise him. He, meanwhile, did not understand a word of his reasons, or rather from the conviction that supported their reasons. Waited bewildered that some of the musicians he saw around him know something. But it was not. In fact, it could not be sure that there was no musician who thought he saw, he was very myopic and wore dark spectacles with the dim light of the room clouded recognition. But when he came to think of the situation in the coming days, he realized that no one should expect less explicit recognition of their colleagues. "He would be forced to listen to music infinitely alien to recognize a note, a small friendly notation, a" Hi "as they passed when returning from the bathroom after a dose? Had not done anything in his life, and loved jazz.
Several weeks passed. He worked as a cleaner in a bank, serene in an office building and parking lot. One night I had someone who took his address by the most trivial of reasons: Mrs. Vanderbilt hired pianists to their teas. Indeed, it was called a few days: apparently credentials study had been vetted and approved. It was six o'clock in the afternoon at the Long Island mansion and had a cup of coffee with the servants, who apparently made a strange idea of \u200b\u200btheir work. A valet came to announce that it could begin its interpretation. It is perfectly located in front of Steinway ajar in a room where an elegant number of people of both sexes drank and talked. His performance lasted barely twenty seconds for Mrs. Vanderbilt in person, a trait that the experts rated of snob, approached (the snob of the matter was that sent the valet not to) and all slowly closed the lid over the keys. Cecil had hands.-section apart from her company, "he said jingling beads. It is not as difficult as you think, make guests applauded perlas.Los tinkling glory.-I should have guessed that something would happen like this, "Cecil told his mistress that night?. But I must also assume that the strangeness itself, instead crossing the shell of ignorance of the people, serve as a jelly to the impenetrability of the shell will rotate on itself and it became useless. My music has many aspects, and I only know the music. Life is full of surprises.
In the spring had a new contract, this time for a whole week in a bar whose most visible characteristics were no significant gusts that he gave the music playing on it. Old black former slaves, had to play there at dawn, their pianos moth-eaten. The owner was occupied exclusively by the heroin trade, and it was a boy that bespeak the pianists. Cecil would play at midnight for two hours. People came and went, could not be trusted no one, including a purchase and sale, or between the acquisition and use, the mood had cleared enough to appreciate a genuinely new music. With the composition of place sat at the piano.
would have been two or three minutes of execution when he was approached from behind the bar owner, shaking the hand that held the cigarrillo. not "Shh, shh," he said when he was at his side. Prefer not to continue, hijo.Cecil retired hands from the keyboard. Some parishioners applauded laughing. Rose, a black woman who started playing Body & Soul. The owner handed him a ten dollar bill to haggard musician, but when he was going to take withdrew his hand: - You have not wanted to pull our legs? It was a dangerous individual. Weigh ninety kilos, that is fifty more than Cecil, who left without waiting for a scolding.
Cecil was a kind of magic, elegant despite their misery, always in velvet and white leather shoes point, as befitted his small little body, muscular. He could stand to lose two kilos for an evening of improvisation in his old piano. Extremely distracted, light, volatile, as she sat and crossed her legs (trousers, shirt spotless, vest tissue) was redundant as a bibelot, the same when he lit a cigarette, or almost all the time. The smoke was the forest where this fairy it lived in the shadow of a wet web. Tonight
walked the streets of the deep south of the island, thinking. There was something curious: the attitude of Irish diffuse selling heroin did not differ much from which he had shown shortly before Mrs. Vanderbilt. But both characters do not look anything. Except this. Would they pass by there, the act of interrupting, the common denominator of the human species? Moreover, in the last words of the subject was something else, now reconstructed in the memory of all his wretched performances. I always wondered if it was in jest or not. Clear that Mrs. Vanderbilt, for example, had been reduced to ask, but in general had assumed the existence of the question, indeed, it would appear that their indignation was due not only to the insolence of him, wearing an attitude of utter, express or implied, just ask a black. She had said "do not know, nor do I care." But in some ways had shown that mattered. Cecil wondered why it was possible to ask him, and the same question was not relevant to the rest. For example, he never would have asked Mrs. V. if he did what he did (not that it was) seriously or in jest. The same is the owner of the bar tonight. There was something inherent in their work that resulted in the questioning.
Mrs. Vanderbilt, on the other hand, participated in a famous anecdote, citing almost all psychology books written in recent years. I once had wanted to liven up a dinner with violin music. Asked who was the best violinist in the world, what could at least pay it? Fritz Kreisler, they said. I phoned. I do not give private concerts, he said: my fees are too high. No problem, replied the lady: how much? Ten thousand dollars. Okay, I hope tonight. But there is one more thing, sir Kreisler: you dine in the kitchen with the servants, and should not socialize with my guests. In that case, he said, my fees are different. No problem, how much? Two thousand dollars, "said the violinist.
Behaviorists loved that story, and I would love all his life, by telling each other and transcribing tirelessly in his books and articles ... But the story of him, Cecil, do you love someone, tell someone? Did not they also success stories that, for the repeat someone?
That summer he was invited, along with a legion of musicians, to participate in the Newport festival, which devote a couple of days, in the afternoon, to present new artists. Cecil thought: his music, essentially new, it would be a challenge in this context. For the first time you would hear at a concert, not distracted by the unpleasant atmosphere in bars (although all the great jazz musicians had succeeded in bars). Well, eventually, the presentation took place in a climate of greater coolness. There was applause, and the few critics present retreated into the corridor to smoke a cigarette waiting for the next number. In a few reviews mentioned it, but only as an extravagance. "There is music," they said, laconic connoisseurs. While others wondered if it would have been a joke. The Down Beat columnist suggested the issue (under light irony, of course) as a paradox: if you randomly hit the keyboard of a piano ... In short, a replay of the call paradox "of Crete." Music, Cecil thought, is not paradoxical, but what happens to me in some ways a paradox. But there are paradoxes of style, can not any. That is the paradox for me.
During the months following appeared in a half-dozen bars, always different because the result was identical in all cases and there were two invitations: to a university first, then a series of avant-garde artists in the Copper Union. In the first case Cecil was hoping that was wasted fluctuating (the room was empty a few minutes into the action and the teacher who had invited him to make a difficult balancing act to be justified, and hated it since), but least served to check another little detail. A select audience is an audience snob. Snobbery is a secret that is quiet. The public university had no reason to "understand" the music, not to mention "appreciate" because it did not concern them. But in turn acted pressure (they were the same pressure) who do understand. The lie was a difficult ideal atmosphere, the misunderstanding could stay and live forever in these classrooms. A small percentage of a lie, however small, could bolster the indisputable truth of reality. Who assures us, after all, we're really dressed in the sense that matters, the pants and shirts and ties are not obscene? However, his performance was not anything like that. So there was no snobbery? If so, the whole building accessory mental Cecil collapsed. No longer could never understand the world.
In the Cooper Union was less rewarding experience yet. The avant-garde musicians who had works with him were in the best position to determine what was music and what not, since they themselves were just at the inner edge of music, in its systematic expansion area. But here too, the ideal position led to the trial proper. The work of black jazzman could only say two things: that by the time I was not listening (ie, that it would not ever) and that they occur by chance the question whether it would be at a joke. Cecil
left one of their regular jobs and some money saved spent the winter studying and composing. In the spring came a contract for a few days in a bar de Brooklin, donde se repitió lo de siempre, lo de aquella primera noche. Cuando volvía a su casa en el tren, el movimiento, el paso de las estaciones inmóviles produjo en él un estado propicio al pensamiento. Entonces advirtió que la lógica de todo el asunto era perfectamente clara, y se preguntó por qué no lo había visto antes: en efecto, en todas las historias con que Hollywood le había lavado el cerebro siempre hay un músico al que al principio no aprecian y al final sí. Ahí estaba el error: en el paso del fracaso al triunfo, como si fueran el punto A y el punto B que une una línea. En realidad el fracaso es infinito, porque es infinitamente divisible, cosa que no sucede con el éxito.
Suppose, it was said Cecil in the empty car at three in the morning, to become recognized must perform before an audience whose sensitivity and intelligence ratio has exceeded a threshold X. Well, if I start acting, say, to an audience whose coefficient is one-hundredth of X, then I will have to "pass" by a public whose coefficient is one-fiftieth of X, followed by one of a twenty-fifth X ... and so on ad infinitum.
"So long as you continue the series, always to fail, because the public will never have the minimum required quality. It's so obvious! "Six months later
was hired to play in a slum who attended French tourists.
was filed shortly before midnight. Sitting on the stool, stretched his hands towards the keys, attacked with a series of chords ... Some laughter rang without emphasis. The maitre beckoned him to come down, with a look cheerful. Had they already decided that was a joke? No, they were reasonably upset. Rose immediately, to cover the wrong time, a black pianist in his forties. Cecil nobody spoke to him, but still waited to pay him part of his promise (always did) and was watching and listening to the pianist. Recognized the style, some Monk, some of Bud Powell. I was excited about the music. A conventional pianist, he thought, was always trying to music in its most general. Indeed, they gave him twenty dollars, with the condition that work will never ask again.
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