It’s a race against time, incidentally, because the dad has to rescue the girl before the episode is over, and Rod Serling comes back to encourage us to smoke the brand of cigarettes he smokes while churning out scripts. And this kind of TV advertising was itself a race against time, because celebrity tobacco pitchmen only have a few years before their looks go.
My forays into the fourth dimension of the avant-garde (20th century composers like Bartók, the noise of the Velvet Underground, the Sheffield surrealism of guitarist Derek Bailey, etc.) have always involved somebody holding onto my legs, also, like the dad in “Little Girl Lost.” Unlike some artistic explorers, who tell the physicist in pajamas to let go of their legs already, I’ve never wanted to leave my roots behind. I didn’t stop listening to Phil Spector just because my pop sensibility was recalibrated by “Pet Sounds,” and my interest in Brian Wilson didn’t go onto the high shelf in the closet just because I got interested in scabrous guitar noise. (Lou Reed’s didn’t either, a key reason why Reed has always been one of my favorite rock and roll artists.)
Likewise, I haven’t renounced my dedication to the music of Bob Wills or Louis Armstrong just because of my enthusiasm for Eric Dolphy.
My reluctance to choose sides has hurt my music career, I think. People in DC (and perhaps elsewhere too) like to be reassured that your music can be explained at bumper-sticker length, and mine can’t. I prefer that people discover my music accidentally, because they were just drinking or eating somewhere and suddenly this weird Karl Straub guy got on stage and started yammering. I prefer to not answer questions about my influences, because they include an ark of polarizing names and genres that instantly turn off the uninformed. I know how they feel; when I’m told that a get-together will include karaoke, or whitewater rafting, or clowns, it’s hard for me to retain an open mind in the aftermath of such revelations. (For the record, if you’re trying to convince me to go to a party, mention fondue.)
Over time, my catholic approach to culture has paid off. I speak metaphorically, of course, because financially speaking it would be more accurate to say that it’s paid out. But a few years back, when the serendipitous purchase of a crumbling “hot jazz” discography and the increasing availability of bootleg downloads of American roots music started me thinking about the educational possibilities of what I call “immersion listening,” by which I mean trawling through the complete catalogs of “race”and “hillbilly” 78 artists, as well as the much less cool but still fascinating world of white dance bands from the 1920s, I gradually started to realize that my dream of discovering some sort of key that linked Haydn, Webern, blues, country, jazz, hip hop, and Chuck Berry, as well as much of the avant garde, wasn’t just a fever dream. I was listening to New Orleans clarinetist Johnny Dodds, or someone in that vein, when it hit me that the rhythmic language I was hearing, the jazz musician’s way of breaking up time to create forward drive, was the key to jazz, and not the breaking up of the octave into melody and chords. If you’ve ever struggled to decode the confusing note choices of bebop slalomists like Charlie Parker, and given up in frustration, then you know the tortures of the damned that I endured in college. I now realize why even an accurately transcribed series of Bird’s notes, wrung from a recording with sweat equity and hours of drudgery, and crosschecked against some jazz explainer’s interpretation of the chord changes in one of the acres of books from my groaning shelves, didn’t get me any closer to being a jazz musician than I would have gotten by wishing on a star.
All of a sudden, listening to scratchy instrumental breaks on 78s felt a lot like listening to people like Ornette Coleman, and vice versa. Coleman’s name, incidentally, came up exactly once during the four years I was at Howard, and that was as the punchline of a joke. Wynton Marsalis and Art Blakey, more or less, were the lighthouses that guided young jazz improvisers there, and while I yield to no one in my respect and admiration for Blakey’s drumming, the brittle aesthetic and philosophy those two fellows foisted upon the world did jazz no favors. It raised a lot of money, I suspect, from the wealthy white folks who prefer their music dehydrated, but I’ve come to loathe the Marsalis approach to jazz education. This bifurcated method, on the one hand, shames players for not being bad-ass enough, and on the other, encourages potential fans to sneer piously at any improvisation that could be described as weird. This codification of jazz pedagogy, a system perhaps more suited to coaching athletes, pushed me away from jazz. But my obsessive listening pulled me back in, and I suspect I’m in for good now.
The thing that the Marsalises have never understood, and probably never will understand, is that improvised music— REAL improvised music, the kind still happening in seedy clubs— is fun. Cecil Taylor, a pianist whose music made Ornette Coleman’s sound conservative, was a highly educated and literate intellectual whose music was attacked so regularly that he lived much of his long life on the defensive. For this he was pilloried crassly by the Marsalises in the insufferable Ken Burns jazz documentary. In Marsalis world, a jazz musician is supposed to wear a shiny suit and not say things that would shock a pearl-clutching dowager. Cecil Taylor wore comfortable clothes, danced around and recited baffling poetry like a homeless schizophrenic, and built the pyramids of what has been called free jazz.
His performances collected in the set called “Nefertiti, the Beautiful One Has Come” were sort of like a Rosetta Stone for the development of my ear. Having heard that John Fahey, another iconoclastic American artist who combined obsessive study of older music with excitement about the possibilities of musical dissonance, had been a fan of this album, I bought it and drove around with it in my car for years. I never felt like I completely understood what was going on, or how it all worked, but the nutty and coloristic drumming of Sunny Murray, and the quicksilver Bird-influenced alto sax of Jimmy Lyons, and Cecil’s alchemistic virtuosity on the the keyboard, were never dull.
I’ve come to realize that these performances were a watershed for Cecil as well. He’d apparently recently lost his parents, who’d introduced him to much that was alive and lively in high culture, but had also exiled him in the conservatory world, which taught him a lot about what chords and melody can do when let loose, while also claiming that rhythm and time shouldn’t be let loose in a similar manner. His parents, and their willing accomplices in academia, had good intentions, but they imposed upon Cecil a rigid and doctrinaire approach to music and life. Therapy helped him sort through all of this, and he emerged with very little lingering guilt about the Einsteinlike quantum leap he was about to drag jazz toward. Bartók and other European dissonance traffickers were important to him, but he also had picked up a percussive idea of the piano from Duke, Monk, and Horace Silver. He liked the dissonant language of 20th century composers, and as Stanley Crouch observed, if you listen to the piano music of French composer Oliver Messiaen, it reminds you of Cecil. But whereas, for the stuffed-shirt self-aggrandizer Crouch, this is a smoking gun proving that Cecil isn’t really as connected to jazz as he claims to be, it’s for me more along the lines of evidence that Cecil is absolutely a jazz artist, and not just a non-jazz improviser using the compositional language of effete academic dissonance.
Cecil didn’t like the piano’s sustain pedal. He didn’t like the way it blurred the musical line. This is significant; it distances him in a transformative way from the compositional practice of white Europeans. The sustain pedal is a gift to composers, because while the chords linger in the air, it allows the bestowers of grant money to put down their wine glasses and listen respectfully.
Cecil Taylor doesn’t have time for that shit!
He’s trying to conjure up some kind of magical African spirit energy, without leaving behind the percussive power that was nurtured by ragtime and stride pianists in New Orleans whorehouses and at Harlem rent parties a few years later. This is his real connection to the jazz of Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk, and Horace Silver. And he doesn’t swing, really. At least not after the Nefertiti breakthrough. (If you need some Cecil with a swinging rhythm section— and you do— you can find plenty of this on his earlier records. I love that stuff, and god knows I love swing, and I often seek it out like Diogenes looking for an honest man, but I think Cecil found it ultimately confining, and the more I listen to his work the more I think I know why.
Cecil tossed swing over the side, along with the sustain pedal, and for a similar reason. He was going into the fourth dimension, and once he stepped through the gateway, he couldn’t afford to slow down and wait for the stragglers to catch up. The Marsalis notion is that this is pretentious horse shit. But the Straub notion is that what seems like pretentious horse shit can often turn out to be the engaging house tour through another sound world, conducted by a man in love with beauty, who’s grown a chitinous crablike shell because he’s fucking tired of apologizing for his music all the time.
The other side of the Straubinical, or anti-Marsalis, philosophy, is please pick up your feet. Everything we encounter isn’t going to be safe, and it’s for damn sure not going to be cutesy, and I definitely want you to have fun, but we don’t have time to EXPLAIN everything. Just listen closely, and lean forward as we walk, and stop asking so many questions.
The other side of the Straubinical, or anti-Marsalis, philosophy, is please pick up your feet. Everything we encounter isn’t going to be safe, and it’s for damn sure not going to be cutesy, and I definitely want you to have fun, but we don’t have time to EXPLAIN everything. Just listen closely, and lean forward as we walk, and stop asking so many questions.
Cecil’s music is about architecture, but it’s also about dancing, and above everything else it’s about forward drive, and energy. It’s about zero tolerance for the rigor mortis that infests both the classical and jazz worlds these days, especially when their hoary and chaotic traditions are “taught” in a academic setting. This clueless way of thinking and talking about jazz has created a perverse America where “hipsters” who think they care about offbeat music more than they care about anything can accept and even propagate the fool notion that jazz is a pretty and dull bauble, suitable for hold music when you call your insurance company.
I like rock and roll, and love it, despite what I’ve said about it at times. But I need to make it clear, again and again, why I have mixed feelings about it. Just as Cecil saw the “swing” idea of time as a wonderful creation that nevertheless just wouldn’t fit in his suitcase, years ago I realized that rock and roll has more rules than school, at least for most of its adherents and apologists. And just as I don’t want to hear the fiction that our founding fathers were a bunch of saintly and benevolent stiffs (I’m pretty sure Ben Franklin drank as much as Keith Richards, and got laid almost as much as Bill Wyman, and you have to remember that Wyman had the advantage of living in the jet age), I don’t want to hear that rock and roll has to be wrapped in colorful plastic and leached of nutrients like Wonder Bread. And I don’t want to hear that classical composition has to be boring, and dead. And I also don’t want to hear that jazz has to be cutesy and gluten free, or that it has to follow instructions, as if an improvising musician is assembling a bike for his kid on Christmas.
So, I say to the Marsalises of the world, in the immortal words of my nephew, “No thank you for that.”
And I say to the dear and departed great American Cecil Taylor, thank you for teaching us about music the right way. It took a while for me to follow your train of thought, and some people may never get it, but what of it?
If someone tells you they are unmoved by the Grand Canyon, are you supposed to write a treacly children’s book about it and read it to them while they fall asleep? If you track that horse shit into my house, don’t be surprised when I react the way Cecil did, and get a little salty.
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